worried about paradox's direction...

[Hargelid]

Don't worry =)
But as other people here point out, a lot of games are developed by great partners like Obsidian, Colossal Order, Eugen Systems (just to mention a few). And they are not included in the 200, so we're a bigger family than it looks. This also enables us to focus more on the games, and less on organizational growth and issues. With that said, we are still growing, and it has its challenges.

Currently we have almost 30 positions open, many of them on the programming and development side, so help us spread the word, and I can assure we'll keep deliver games that are worth playing for 100s of hours.

All open positions can be found at: https://career.paradoxplaza.com/jobs

 

[Johan]

The US would be a fantastic place for them to consider outsourcing to. There are plenty of other productive nations to pick from however.

Amount of hours spent != amount of productivity gained.

 

[Chaingun]

You outsource development and the quality suffers. The foundations in these games need to be built on for years. You outsource it to some low wage country and you get what you pay for as well as a management nightmare. You don't just throw more manpower at development either that's not how it works.

Also the work hours make sense. Have you ever sat at a desk and coded for 16 hours ? You don't want devs doing that trust me.

Pretty much, bug rate shoots through roof when tired. A few days you can actually do 14 h, particularly if you have no commute, but on some other days you should really do less than 8... Anyway if you want a decent shot at reaching old age, it's best to stick with not exceeding 8 h/day too often... I have fairly personal reasons to give this advice.

On outsourcing this type of software: GLHF, unless we're talking building and maintaining the entire game at a different location.

That depends on where you outsource to. I'm not saying go to India or other super-low wage countries (especially for coding). I'm saying outsource to more PRODUCTIVE nations. Places which allow workers to work longer hours, take less vacations, etc. In many cases (I don't know what the game industry unions negotiated for a minimum wage (to use as a comparative model only) in Sweden, but they generally are around $10-$11 an hour from what I've heard - someone correct me if I am wrong) they can get lower costs for better quality workers as well - but that's just icing on the cake when they are already getting significantly more work hours.

For testing.... they have a much broader range of areas they could take that work to.

And yes - I have sat and coded for 16 hours a day- used to be my job once upon a time. But that's not what i'm asking for - 50 hours a week is not asking a lot- especially for high wage employees.

Gameplay programmer must talk to QA non-stop. Gameplay programmer does more than coding despite the name. Someone that blindly translates high level game design to code with too little thought effort (e.g. a tired person) is going to take the time of one additional more competent person to check and fix their shit.

I very much doubt anyone works at PDS for the salary. Might want to read public quarterly reports. Yeah, it's probably very high compared to random low wage country, but go lower and you wouldn't be doing this in Sweden. While I guess that's your point, it conflicts with this being a very successful country in the game industry.

 

[Chaingun]

Followed by worms in the stomach no doubt!

 

[Trin Tragula]

@Strager
The average work week may be 36 hours (I don't know what goes into that calculation) but full time work in Sweden is 40 hours per week. Anyone working less is either paid a reduced salary or working in a special job with collective agreement that changes the work week as given in law (most noticeably health care does this to compensate for night shifts and much longer work days).

 

[Groogy]

I for one enjoy to work long hours at the office but still want to have my own hours at home so I got enough time to cuddle with my baby hedgehog :3
Also saying that for some reason that working 50 hours a week is somehow going to make us produce more... In the real world what would happen is that we would start to lose talent as people would move to companies that offer better conditions. The workforce market work like any other market in the capitalistic society we live in today.

Not even Henry Ford had 50 hours work weeks, for one it became recognized as bad for the economy if the workers was constantly working as they were also the primary consumers. If they work all of their wake hours they have no hours left to consume. The normal work weeks are 40 hours after Henry Ford enacted it, not out of kindness but out of capitalistic goals. If you work more than that for no apparent reason and no compensation you are just being used and screwed over and for some reason you are okay with that.

Being a game company we do work over a lot, things happen and crunch mode gets set in but at least we get compensated for it by having 5 extra vacation days we can take out. Just fyi, I am not a slave existing to just produce games for your sake, neither is any other potential employee in another "more productive nation". People being okay with worse conditions in another place doesn't make it suddenly "better".

Also you really don't want to compare "Who can work the most overtime" with people who works with games.....


Join the revolution comrades!

 

[Katzura]

That said I don't think a lot of QA is done in Sweden, comparatively. But on the other hand QA for a AAA title must be a very different beast from a grand strategy game.

Almost all of our QA is in Sweden

 

[Groogy]

That's pretty off-topic, you should probably have read the OP and not only the title....

 

[Groogy]

What makes you say that our patches are of worse quality? I'm curious, on what do you measure that? And with what baseline do you measure that with? Old CK2 patches/expansions? EU3 patches/expansions?

 

[Groogy]

Stellaris? (1.7.2 was a real disaster....) Most of the game seems half baked. I personally think EU4 and CK2 are fine.

Not saying we are perfect, bad things happen sometimes
We've had those kind of patch releases on EU4 and CK2 but usually we are really fast to respond to it and I believe the Stellaris team was as well.

But I am super curious on why people say we are "degrading" in our quality. I've seen it here, Reddit etc and I would really want to know what exactly is it that makes people think/feel/experience that the general quality is actually degrading so I could potentially try and counter that.