Jason Schreier

It's full of lots of interesting stories, most of them well cited but I found 4 fact checking errors in the witcher 3 chapter. Nothing too serious but the research into the game and the studio did not meet the quality bar that the other chapters hit. Sometimes incredibly simple things are overexplained in footnotes, things that anyone who has ever thought about video games would understand. That could be seen as a positive for those who aren't so into the hobby, but they wouldn't have much of a reason to read this book, would they? The big reason to give it a read is getting to see behind the curtain about how publishers interact with developers and about individual games that either didn't end up coming together or came together in the last moment in a crazy hail mary. Especially interesting was the meddling from George Lucas on Star Wars 1313.… (mehr)

This is an easy book to like. Schreier is a good writer and his access to key figures in the industry is exciting for a behind the scenes on big moments in gaming. Indeed, the first couple chapters he covers are interesting as broad surveys into the perils of game development such as scope creep, marketing and the crunch.

But the longer you go on, the more you get the sense that his attempts to cover the crunch and similar dysfunctions of project and business management in the industry are more an apologia for insiders with survivor bias than a critique of toxic work environments.

In that respect, I found myself getting more irritated as the case studies went on, since every developer's inevitable deadline push and 100hr work week just felt banal and awful rather than a triumph of creative passion. I'm not in game development (thank goodness!) and it's largely because the norms that go relatively unchallenged in this book work really well for select game devs with credibility and power, whereas the common employee is treated like garbage and told that this is for the great good. I doubt this was Schreier's intent, but the sum total of the book reads more like an attempt to spin complete management dysfunction as normal operating parameters.… (mehr)