Faint

Not only should 'you', the Giant Bomb reader care because you love video games, but also because the community on Giant Bomb consists of developers who this affects directly. Being a game developer of any sort is a hard pathway to choose just like any entertainment medium because it is extremely competitive and there are more people trying to do it than there are positions available, and as this article discusses, the working conditions and expectations absolutely suck, for many reasons.

While I was studying, I distinctly remember one of my lecturers recalling a day he spent in a studio where someone wanted to leave to go pick up their children from school and they were told 'What makes you think you're any more important than anyone else here?'. The internal pressure is immense and you could argue that the workforce is partly responsible - such as a situation where you might not get a respectable wage or freelance payment because there are people willing to work for pennies. So I guess you could say it is a multi-tier problem. There is no union for game developers for example, which can be seen as a significant issue. I guess this is where the indie dream comes into play, where your idea makes it big and you never have to worry about working stupid hours for someone else for less money and recognition than you deserve, but that's not a realistic scenario for everyone. Let's say there was a union for game developers and they got paid more and worked less - then we would probably see less games coming out and more games sticking content that they should launch with into paid downloadable content. How do we find a happy medium that can reasonably satisfy everyone?