I am Thomas Altenburger, game director and co-founder of Flying Oak Games (FOG) with my associate Florian Hurtaut. We are mostly known for the games NeuroVoider and ScourgeBringer, which each sold more than 100k units and reached about 1 million players counting bundles and all. We’ve been making games for more than 10 years now!
Game workers are young. They’re mostly under 30, it’s rare to see people above 35, and past 40 you’re likely to have retired from the industry or to be an anomaly.
Guess what? I’m 39 and on the precipice of quitting.
When I started working on games, I was already aware of that “gamedev fatigue” but I wasn’t expecting to experience it myself. I was confident and well aware of it to tell myself that I have the keys to navigate through that and to stay in an industry that I love, forever.
But here we are, despite having met successes, I am questioning my presence within something I still profoundly love doing. It’s like knowing that eating your favorite dish is going to make you very sick.
When we think about the factors that may induce this fatigue, we very likely think about the crunch culture and the overall workload, but that’s not exactly that. From an indie perspective it’s not even close to that. I’m lucky enough to have never crunched. I very rarely did overtimes, and I overall consider my work balance as very sane. And yet every bits of my soul feels crushed.
So what’s the deal?
We’re all here because of our passion for making games. Our society is built around the belief that the best things in life are earned from dedication and hard work. We’re also glorifying games to a point that having our name in the credits of one of them is considered a life achievement worth putting our health at risk.
We’re glorifying artists and their dedication, and we are considering that no great thing has ever been achieved without some degree of self-sacrifice. It’s a romanticized vision of the act of creation and entrepreneurship. We love this kind of narratives, we crave for it, because this is what makes up dreams and makes you feel like your own dreams are achievable through your will alone (it’s also an allegory of the free market, but that’s another story).
The industry is well aware of that and the crunch culture is a perfect exemple of systemic replication of what we are taught by the society, weaponized by management.
And I mean, I’ve been that person. I’ve been a big dreamer (and still am) with a burning passion for creating games. I thought that if I was doing things as perfect as I can, I couldn’t fail. Or more like that I could fail, but knowing that I did it with my 200% dedication, the failure couldn’t be on me.
It turned out that this lead me to something else than success: depression.
When you start creating something that you really wish to make a living out of it, you want it to work. You need it to work. It becomes an obsession, an everyday anxiety. You start learning everything to make sure it works: marketing, communication, distribution, community management… everything that may have an impact on the “making a living out of it” part. You start thinking that you can’t trust other people, you can’t trust publishers, you can do it better by yourself. So you start doing everything yourself, even if you have a publisher or other people with you (like doing your own PR in the back of the publisher’s PR team). You don’t want a failure to be because of you (and certainly not because of other), and you want to believe that your hard work will be rewarded.
Then your first game is getting released. And then you crash. Hard.
You did everything right, and it didn’t work. So you start blaming others, like publishers, or the market for being saturated. And then you start blaming yourself for working too hard.
Your beliefs start being shattered: hard workship is a myth, and no matter what, luck takes a bigger part than what you thought. Worst: luck exists.
Luck is something we don’t like, because that’s the one factor that we have absolutely no control over. And having no control over something can be a big source of anxiety. That’s why we’re hardworking in the first place: we need control over our destiny (and capitalism loves that shit). Luck is also something that you can inherit or lack, but that’s a whole another topic.