Telltale Tell-All: How Toxic Work Culture Drives Away Best Devs

Description: "Telltale Games Will Remember That"

Writing for The Verge, Megan Farokhmanesh, does a deep dive into the arduous working condition in the video game industry in general, and one award winning studio in particular. As she explains:

These conditions almost always hit one group the hardest: developers, or the people who actually make the games. Layoffs are a pervasive fact of life, even at successful studios where developers are often hired en masse to help hit tight deadlines and then fired to cut costs after the game ships or is canceled. With the next deadline, the cycle begins anew. Overwork, job insecurity, and profound burnout are omnipresent concerns; more than three-quarters of developers report working under “crunch” conditions, which can mean working up to 20 hours a day and more than 100 hours a week. These practices can have a significant and debilitating cost to employees, one that often feels baked into video game development culture.

And how does Telltale Games, the studio that done everything from The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones to Batman and Sam and Max episodic games factor into this? Farokhmanesh elaborates:

The story of Telltale — its rise, decline, and potential reformation — is not just the story of the missteps of one studio. It’s a shocking window into the $36 billion video game industry (which is now so large and lucrative that it rivals the film industry), and how its worst practices can grind down and burn out even the most devoted and valuable employees.

The entire article is important for anyone interested in the human cost of the video games they enjoy, and what is currently being done, and can be done about working conditions in the future.Read the whole thing.

Flash Memory: Preserving Web Games For The Future

Description: A tombstone with a tuft of grass with the
symbol for the program Adobe Flash wedged in it at an angle.

Last year, Adobe announced that it was slowly phasing out support for its Flash player plugin, with support ending in 2 years. Most modern browsers are phrasing out support of Flash before then.

That also means that over 20 years of game and interactive animation history could vanish with it. Enter the Archive Team. Ben Latimore writes about the project in a Medium piece, saying:

"... Flash is arguably the largest treasure trove of unpreserved gaming history today... Spanning literal[ly] tens of thousands of games over a period of twenty years, the library of Flash games, breadth and depth, outlives any other game console on the market. 

When your browser no longer has the plugin to run those games, what happens to them?"

The answer the Archive Project has advanced is BlueMaxima’s Flashpoint, which serves as the connection for preservation of Flash game collections. Latimore runs a discord server for the project here where you can download the current archive, make requests and discuss the project itself.

His Medium post about his effort to prevent thousands of games from disappearing is worth a read, so check out the whole article here.