I saw a GameLoft discussion turn into something pretty controversial before, and I don’t so much want to do that. I’d prefer to avoid any discussion of the quality of gameloft’s work. I don’t have any hate towards GameLoft. I’m actually personally kind of impressed by GameLoft. They seem to me to be one of the single most succesfull mobile game companies that use the unity engine. Even if they do just clone popular games, what does it matter? They appear now to be making some games that aren’t just direct and obvious clones, they even got some nice contracts to make actual mobile versions of big games, like they did assassins creed for android. If I could secure myself a mobile game company by starting out making clones of popular games, I personally sure as hell would. It’s a good business strategy.
One thing that I found somewhat odd about gameloft though. I went to their careers page and looked at their job offerings. They have offices all over the world, in like a dozen different countries. I looked through all these looking for game programmer, artist or whatever. I noticed only in the phillipines do they hire game programmers or artists. Every other country they are just hiring people for marketing.
Clearly GameLoft is a big outsourcing outfit. They seem to do all the work in the phillipines, then just hire people in other places to translate games and deal with the marketing in that region. Good business plan, No? It seems to be working for them, and with the rate at which they produce games, I imagine they must have a ton of money flowing through them.
This just makes me wonder, is there any mobile company more succesfull than gameloft? I don’t see any other single company produce as many games, and get as many games onto the top charts, so I assume gameloft is probably the most succesful. This started to make me think, is it even possible to get enough cash flow through a mobile game company without some massly organized outsourcing and translating/marketing system set up like Gameloft? This made me wonder if, in this age of outsourcing, what if all jobs dealing with game development go to places with cheaper costs of living? Especially in mobile. Is there a future for an hourly rate unity mobile developer in the states, or more specifically high cost areas like san francisco? If gameloft is a model company of how to make unity highly profitable in the mobile sector, I can only assume more things will pop up like it and we will see mobile unity dev shops set up in obscure cities all over the world.
You’ll be sh!t out of luck for work if the studio doesn’t need you in-house for coding or art assets, unless you’re exceptionally talented.
Smaller studios and indie developers rely heavily on outsourcing. I recently worked for a company developing ps2/wii shovelware and they had 1000 outsourced artists (India/Eastern Europe) on their books.
Might be good for profits, but the local workforce suffers. UK games industry has shrunk 10% in the last couple of years, and I know a lot of talented artists struggling to find any work.
I worked as a game programmer for Gameloft Montreal on various mobiles projects and few PS3 titles. I can tell you that half (or provably 3/4) of your assuptions are wrong. Gameloft is a very huge set of studios and their best and most productive ones are in Canada and France.
In 2009, I left Gameloft to fund my own company (Psychoz Interactive).
Btw, i still have contact with all my ex-coworkers of Gameloft and some of them ask me for help with Unity few times a week. ^^
Working in Gameloft is like working everywhere, we all know how the game industry work/is. ^^
Cheers,
GameLoft is the biggest mobile compagny (back up by Ubisoft).
EA may also be big now (They bough PopCap Games).
Outsourcing is good for every area that don’t need creativity, because for creativity you need a cultur that push your individuality (not china), and are used to do thing that please western country people (not phillipines).
This is going to changed, but that’s still not the case now.
For that, Gameloft still need to “import” people to thoose country
Ousourcing will end in the near futur.
Why? Because wages are rising like a roket in typical outsourcing country (+20% every year), and going down in western country.
With all the extra cost, it will be soon as expensif to hire a man next to your door than a man several thousand miles away.
Gameloft have grown really fast, but it still make an average profit, and have an average CA.
Three AAA games on 360/PS3 use more money than Gamelof and its hundred games.
Most Gameloft studio in France has been closed (and replace by studio in china).
Maybe Gameloft Montreal is still there because of all governement financial Help for the video game industry.
And you have deduced this from where?
As far as i know Gameloft have a big studio in Romania, ages ago before Unity hit the windows market and involve in iPhone and they were selling games for every type of phone. I will be surprised to see they do outsourcing the same way small game studios do. Maybe they subcontract another companies, but hiring individuals i doubt.
Are you afraid of competition? Whats wrong with people all over the world using unity and making a living out of it? And for the obscure cities, you my friend ignore the fact that the world is no longer what it was. Having access to internet shrink it to the dimensions of a village where distance have no relevance.
Why? If game development is a generally profitable enterprise, why should the taxpayer subsidise it?
The problem isn’t that the UK doesn’t offer tax breaks. It’s that other countries do. This runs counter to WTO agreements and is therefore considered wrong. In that sense at least, the British government did the right thing.
The pot of government money is finite and there are far better things to spend it on that subsidising an industry that hasn’t had much difficulty making billions.
The present government wasn’t elected though, was it? That’s the point. You appear to have forgotten one rather crucial fact: party election promises are made subject to the implicit condition that said party wins the election!
The Tories didn’t win. Neither did the LibDems. Neither did Labour. NOBODY won. So that implicit contract is torn up and thrown away. It was up to the electorate to get the Tories (or whoever) into power. They failed. They don’t get to take home the promised prize.
What you have now is a coalition. Coalition means compromises. Lots of them.
Given the state of the UK’s finances, I’m in agreement with the move: there really are far better things to spend limited taxpayer money on than subsidising a profitable industry. The more elegant solution is to insist on a level playing field for all, which means cutting off the subsidies in those other countries who are flagrantly violating WTO regulations. If it’s wrong to subsidise Boeing or Airbus, why is it any less wrong to subsidise giants like EA or Ubisoft?
For the simple fact its an investment. If you’ve been paying attention to the UK games development industry you’d have realised that 40% of our game dev business moved to australia and canada. That loss of business is WAY WAY WAY more than the tax breaks would have provided.
No tax breaks? everyone here loses. Game devs win because they move on, england loses. Stupid policy.
Our little outfit is moving too. I am not loyal to england. Why should I be. Business is business. Their loss.
I don’t do compromises and so I’ll be moving on. Even amsterdam offers far better opportunities for game developers, and whats more, I can get high after work.
A few people are happy to suck it up, I’m not one that will. England desparately needs businesses investing but now businesses are leaving. So much for the coalition.
Random note; I know some of the Gameloft programmers in the Philippines. They’re mostly doing DS and iOS ports / titles. The pay is ok I guess for the area, but from what I hear the hours they keep are horrible. I heard of one guy who went home Monday morning after being there all of Sunday.
That’s not really news, it’s endemic of the whole industry and there have been numerous attempts to clean it up, most notably EA.
I remember at one company, we were sub-contracted to work on 3 tracks for Toca2, so we spent a full days work 9-5 at Codemasters offices, then went back to our own offices to work on our game for the rest of the night. 80-100 hours is pretty common, and more if you include weekends.
It’s not illegal if you read the small print in the average contract.
A contract is not a magic paper that makes everything legal. Countries have clear regulations, and even if your contract says that the boss can fuck your girlfriend, is illegal. The same for the working hours.
This year is really no good year for the game industry and its working mentality. First the stuff at Rockstar where even the devs wifes went out for a riot with a public letter, then the L.A.Noire illegal credits measures and work conditions in relation to Team Bondy and now this …
The field really tries to ensure that no new talented staff is entering the field as you need to be insane to work in cyber-slavery. Not even a yearly salary of $150k+++ would be worth that (and aside of that, staff with a good life quality and healthy life work balance is 10 times more productive)
lol, if you want to succeed as an indie you do exactly that. I do 16-18 hours a day, every single day. It’s the only way I am going to bring the product to market at the level of quality I need to compete with the big boys. I know several indie game devs who work as hard as he did.
I realise I’m ruining my health but the job needs to be done and so its a calculated risk on my part. I am pretty used to burning for a long period now. I would never recommend it to people here, but its what some people choose to do in order to go for being successful.
Once you are financially stable you should be able to pull off 9 to 5 fairly well as an indie, but if there’s massive bills to pay and no backup income, what can you do?
My point is if they suck you might as well work for yourself.
UK has regulations for a maximum of 48 hrs per week (averaged over 17 weeks), so it would be illegal to even advertise a job with normal hours above that. The contracts you sign, are using a voluntary opt-out which may be worded “may be required to work extra hours at critical stages to meet deadlines” The problem is these are far too common in the development cycle to be called a rare occurrence.
Why couldn’t your Boss come up with a contract like that, if it was counter-signed by your girlfriend and it wasn’t illegal (she’s underage, etc). What’s a marriage certificate other than a legally binding contract that’s null and void if you sleep with someone else?
Whats wrong about thinking that competition through slavery style payment countries is a bad thing thats neither going to help us nor them, backed up by govs that suck at preventing it cause they want their own billion inhabitant country to shine at working for little to now cash, having barely an existance (i’ve seen tv shows on what they call student living places, a fucking container is 20 times larger) and that don’t fight copyright, trademark and patent inf reasonably cause their industry is backed upon stealing just to shine independent at what price? (china)
I’ve nothing against fair competition, but against shovel quality at low prices that impact myself as customer again cause the majority that comes from teams in such countries does not exactly shine, only stink and I feel that boycotting such stuff is a good first step to spread understanding that we pay our western prices for stuff for quality, not for shit.
