During the GDC, several developers spoke about the difficulty of the job. For one of the veterans who gave birth to Dragon Age, everything is going wrong in the industry and it must stop.
About a week ago the Game Developers Conference took place, a trade show that brings together several studios and developers. The event allows prizes to be awarded to several games that marked the year, but also serves to host conferences. For this edition for example, Baldur's Gate 3 stood out as one of the best games of the year. The CEO of Larian Studios at the same time announced two bad news concerning the DLC and Baldur's Gate 4. In the process, other developers shared their professional experience and the difficulty of the job. A Dragon Age veteran would even rather see the industry die.
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The industry is in bad shape, a Dragon Age veteran is furious
The video game industry is in bad shape and several developers continued to point this out during the GDC. The year 2023 was marked by layoffs, project cancellations and several denunciations of “crunch”. This term is used to designate periods when the workload is too great to remain healthy, and where the pressure exerted by the employer becomes unbearable. Although it is regularly denounced, this practice remains very widespread.
Former Dragon Age lead writer David Gaider is fed up: “There is this fear, which exists: if everyone doesn't work overtime and if we don't create AAA games with a budget of 200 million dollars. If the emphasis is on photorealistic graphics and 1,000 hour playtimes, we need to make sure we fit all of that in, even if it means making everyone work 'till they die' to get there.”. He then explained that he would rather see the industry die than continue like this.
However, for Gaider, another model exists: his own. “You just need to set a realistic schedule that doesn't lie to people […] you create a game that makes the most of the time you have and the results are that you have employees who love what they do and don't feel like they are just a resource to be exploited. » It seems that this strategy worked, since the Summerfall studio managed to develop a musical RPG called Stray Godscritically acclaimed.
Bioware paid the price
If David Gaider is so severe towards these practices, it is because he knows them well. The man known for his work on the Dragon Age license, worked for BioWare, often accused of crunch. Several employees regularly denounce the lies of “BioWare magic”. “It’s a f***ing process. The studio says: “don't worry, don't panic, we know that at a later date everything will go faster and everything will be fine.” But the reality is, that’s where the crunch comes from. This is where the postponed games come from” had castigated the former producer of Bioware, Mark Darrah.
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Since then, the group has announced that it wants to rebuild its reputation. However, Dragon Age 4 has been in very complicated development for more than 10 years. Its release date continues to be pushed back and the project has been restarted several times. The last we heard in August, the group laid off more than 50 people.