Shipping Kills Studios: A Study of Indie Team Dynamics 

Worked in China with a number of software companies. It's disgusting at how normalized crunch time is. In fact they pretty much do crunchtime from the day the project starts. That gives the higher-ups a false idea of what can be accomplished in a timeframea (and push it). They just head in a downwards spiral until nothing is delivered on time and nobody has freetime. resulting in someone loosing their jobs. Either from downsizing or bankruptcy. The employees are always the losers. The higher-ups gets to walk away unscathed pondering their next exploit.

That any of this is a surprise to games teams tells you everything you need to know about games. Everything they are describing is standard practice in any enterprise product. It's why I don't think kids should bounce straight out of uni into a games studio. Go work in everyday software, large enterprise is a good place. See what it takes to take complicated, difficult, often boring software out to deployment and maintain that software. Once you are familiar with how everyone else has to work and how testing is a way of life, because failures cost money and sometime lives if you work on really critical systems, then you'll have the resilience and skills many games veterans still don't have. Take those, with a love of games, back into games industry and make it more sustainable than it is now.

Man, I wish this existed when I did my first ship, as well as my attempts at shipping. This is fantastic, thanks for posting!

I've been a part of many of these scenarios but it's nice to actually have some words for them. I hope I'll be better a realising what situations my teams are in when they happen so we can better deal with it. Great talk!

very useful, the whole thing

Wish I knew this before i threw myself into game dev. Supporting a game is a real drag. I wish I could do something else with my time.

what was the talk next door he mentioned?

Cherubs. The pineapples come from cherubs.

kuddos for dresden codak cookie, i use that alot too :P

Love Desktop Dungeons!

Very awkward, but really helpful information!

08:25 I can sell you some XP boosts, are you scam artists interested in them?

36 hours of travel? Geez. Just watch it one youtube.

10:00 You just mark your game as DLC and steam don't need to do refunds! Yaaaaaaaaay! That's how successful scam business works. Hurraaaaay society!