How Game Devs Are Coping with Working from Home? | Unchained Report

so let's kind of start this off in the right way it's been about a month since we talked about we're actually caught up all right so it's been another month of covid i kind of want to hear your thoughts and updates within your own network uh you know personally professionally everything just give people out there a little preview of what your life is all about right now you know it's the same as it's been since we started right so i'm just working from home uh i'm in my office like pretty much all all day you know from anywhere from six six in the morning or seven in the morning until five or six a night um you know take a couple breaks for lunch and whatnot but that's that's it you know and then on the weekends uh staying home although i go out sometimes you know to go get things if i need them but otherwise you know it's it's the same it's the same it's been yeah how are you hearing from uh companies

i mean we know all know you're you're very connected right we were kind of laughing at the horror show that most companies are going through kind of well i mean the poor i.t departments being crossed with wire essentially would love to kind of hear your thoughts uh has things uh have things kind of plateau gotten better yeah for what i'm hearing people are are working they have some sort of setups going on you know of course for some people is that ideal but it's it's uh it's you know yeah it feels like everybody was scrambling in the beginning and now people are actually working right but it's still i think um people are more being more impacted by having like kids at home and and having the balance you know managing their children and working from home and that that's been a struggle for people for sure this is certainly in strange time for the entire world and especially for the game development industry while

with quarantines there are more people playing games it's had a really negative impact on people who are pre-launched particularly people who are looking for funding and networking connections gdc and e3 are really important events for game developers especially those who are currently looking for publishers or funding and that puts them in a really hard financial place to not be able to go to those conferences and make those connections in person additionally many developers who are indie or just getting the start in their careers invested a lot of finances in attempting to attend gdc with gdc's postponement unfortunately there's many non-refundable tickets and hotel reservations which is negatively impacting those developers who invested that financial um amount into those into attending gdc and now see that as a

loss and they might not have the finances to attend another event or to make up for it it's been a change for sure but i think the world never played that many video games as today so all our customers are all these in these games it's a bit complex to organize now that everybody is working from home but the number of players grew um and also extensions like vr headsets have never sold that well and so people have time for video games people have time to try new things also very good times for the video gaming industry i would say even if it's complex to organize it's a good movement for the industry

what's your view on it jeremy how are things over there on this development side i mean yeah i think for for us it's been uh it's been an adjustment as well and i think we're um i think the way we work is is it's somewhat similar to against you we're still even though we're in a big company we're a small part of the big company and we have small teams and all working from home so um it's been it's been a challenge but after the first couple of weeks um everything feels like the new normal and um and things are going on smoothly but yeah it's definitely a change yeah i mean it's uh you know i'm sure it's no different than what a lot of folks are dealing with for me personally it's not a whole lot different uh i work on a remote location anyways i live in new hampshire and our you know corporate offices in minneapolis and we you know development sites are in alameda california and uh wilkingham uh uk etc we have a number of different sites so if i'm not on the road visiting customers or going to gdc things like that i'm typically working

from home so for me personally the routine is pretty pretty normal for the company it's definitely been a change you know all of our teams all you know finance marketing development everybody's uh made the shift to work and remote and we've handled it really well i mean i think we kind of got ahead of it a little bit we kind of anticipated it so we made sure our infrastructure was ready and um you know so the teams you know our development teams are i think they're actually going faster than before i think people you know they tend to when they're home you almost tend to work more i think the traditional uh negative connotation of people working from home is that they're not going to work as much they're going to hang out with their family and friends they're going to goof off whatever but i think the reality is i'd like to get your opinion based on what you're hearing is that people almost tend to work harder they tend to work longer because work never really there's no break point so work never really stops nights weekends etc um so it's actually on our minds in the management team of how do we

keep people from burning out right uh how do we make sure they're taking the break of you know work versus life yeah well the the government told us to stay inside pretty much but people are ignoring it for some parts so when i i'm living on a big street and when i look outside of the window i see groups of people gathering and stuff like that i stay inside for the most part and play video games i have no project right now i'm on vacation and um next week i will enter home office again i think yes perfect so i i'm just working from home [Music] the the job i do is a part-time job so i work three days in four days i work on my own stuff but right now i don't have any personal project or anything in the pipeline i just finished a

commercial job a local animation for a video game um yeah but other than that i just play online games we've got work for home for people who've been there for a while um but it's like super uh like if you absolutely need it it's not like a every week thing and it's definitely not uh something that most people do it's kind of like if you want to sneak in some overtime hours or if you're not feeling too well but you can still work from home um that's been the case for most of the time there but since the kobit 19 thing broke out um we went full remote so the whole studio had to get ramped up in like two or three days so i t and like all of our programmers and stuff and the producers everybody's trying to get everybody organized and get anything people needed like there's people that we work with that like didn't even have like personal computers that could run unreal engine and stuff um so they had to like build personal kits for people to take home in some cases and then make sure

everybody's uh you know hard drives and stuff were clear um and good enough to run like all of our stuff so they had to get all that stuff ramped up like super fast dude it was crazy um but and then not only that we had a stagger when people would come pick things up because of the social distancing thing so like yeah so it's are pretty much on the front lines like doctors right now touching everybody yeah exactly dude for sure man yeah it's one of those crazier thoughts so it took you guys a few a couple weeks is everyone pretty much set up right now did you guys have enough rigs to kind of hand out to everyone or do you guys have to order stuff like you said just to supply people with things uh most people were able to get set up at home um we're a studio full of nerdo's so most nerdo's have good like computers at the house you know yeah um so most people it's just a matter of like vpning in which is like a lot easier to set up um but there was like a few cases where

people like only had mac or something like that um and didn't have like a windows partition so uh in those cases you know i i don't even know what the percentage is maybe like two or three percent of the studio needed rigs or something um but yeah not too bad not too painful all right i mean uh just talking to your friends i know you've been in the industry for a while you probably have a lot that you're speaking to especially in this time where we're like um talking to more people usual that's the funny thing right during work hours we're talking to more people now because of the social distancing stuff uh what are the situations you don't have to name any studios uh how how are they faring are they doing just as well or uh worse i've been really surprised man like i said like i worked in um in visual effects in the past and stuff i worked at like a frame store and moving picture company and uh double negative or sorry not double legged frame store um and digital domain and

like i've been following them on social media a little bit and seeing how they've been handling it because a lot of their stuff is like a lot more it's all client based so like having clients trusting employees to work on their stuff from home is like something that's never been a thing um so it's pretty cool seeing like how as these different industries are handling it um there's been like a lot more trust in the artists and people doing stuff and like being trusted to do the right thing at home and hopefully this will kind of set a precedent for the future right like it'd be sick if a lot of these industries you can start moving towards that right