Games developed by porn stars

Zubon, who after a big success with pants humor is considering to turn the Kill Ten Rats blog into a comedy show, compares game developers to porn stars. The problem is a well-known one: There are lots of young people who dream of working in the games industry. So the games industry reacts in true capitalist fashion, exploits them to the max, and throws them away to be replaced by the next batch after the project is finished. Gevlon would approve. Lum doesn't.

But if we put aside the discussion of the ethics of exploitation, there is another serious question to be looked at: Is this system even likely to produce good games? Would you take a bunch of young engineers fresh from school, work them 60+ hours per week in permanent crunch mode, and have them design and build a bridge? Would you *drive* over that bridge once its done, or would you rather take the money and flee to South America?

I'm sure these game developers are all brilliant people, full of youth and enthusiasm. But they are lacking experience, and in most game companies there is a lack of culture of attention to detail. Games, even more so than other software, are quite often full of bugs, and even frequent crashes. So knowing how for example EA is often accused of exploiting young game developers, am I really surprised that my Empire: Total War is still unplayable due to constant crashes to desktop from the campaign map? If other products we bought were as defective as games, we wouldn't let the producers get away with it. But with games we not only let them get away with bugs, we also let them get away with systems that prevent us from getting our money back. If I charged back my credit card for my Empire: Total War purchase on Steam, Steam would disable my account and make not only Empire, but every other game I bought from them unplayable.

And MMORPGs are some of the worst offenders when it comes to bugs and being unplayable. When did you see the last MMORPG launch at which there were no launch problems, and where the game wasn't full of bugs at the start? And if a bug isn't serious enough to cause a crash, it might not be fixed for months, if not years! I think this is a direct result of working conditions in the industry.