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Audio&Games

Death March ‘89

“Because of all this, projects always turned into awful death marches with lots of late nights and weekends in the weeks leading up to the release date. Burnout was high. But few people quit over it because we thought it was just how it had to be. There weren’t many other software companies to defect to anyway, and the ones that existed had death marches too.”

https://dev.jimgrey.net/2022/07/05/working-in-the-software-industry-circa-1989/

It’s so fascinating how deaf the game, special effects, 3D industries are to what seems to be the basic situation when it comes down to producing software, no matter what the software does.

It is and most likely will just be a death march. Always has been, basically.

“The software industry was a far less diverse place then. Every last software engineer at ACD was a white man, most of them younger than 35.”

Sir I went to GDC in 2017, and this was exactly the demographics; 98% of it. I guess that’s better than 100%, but it’s not that great of a change, is it? 30 years, man. Sad face emoji.

“Finally, software subscriptions were not a thing yet. Companies paid for software entirely up front and got to use the release they bought forever.”

We need that now. Win10/11 updating constantly, breaking every single time things I set up for myself, on my computer, is the worst shit I have ever witnessed on my Personal Computer. And why I believe Win8 is still the best (aggressive hardware timings, no forced updates, stable as a rock).

Subscriptions are definitely great for software developers, but that’s it. It’s not a good deal for anyone else.

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