UK games developers are exploited to the point where they hate the industry according to Paul Wedgwood, the founder of Brink studio Splash Damage.
"If there's one thing we suffer from in the UK, it has been this continuous exploitation of game developer talent until we drive them into the ground and they become cynical and burned out and hate the industry," he told GI.biz.
Not the case at Splash Damage, apparently, which has found the key to a happy workforce:
"I think that at Splash Damage we've always believed in paying people more than the industry in general, giving proper benefits and being respectful of work/life balance," says Wedgwood.
"We suffer from the same challenges that every studio does, we crunch 6 day, 7 day weeks sometimes: it can be really, really challenging.
"But to be honest with you, when the studio isn't in crunch we still have people working 6 or 7 days a week because they like what they're doing.
"If you're at the office and you're having fun, then you're on the right track whether you're working out of hours or not."
Wedgwood also said he's no longer the "tyrannical dictator" he was on previous Splash Damage games.
"I learned much more to trust the talent, the people that had great ideas, let them go and iterate on them, and ultimately their execution was so much more important than that silly idea that I had at the beginning."
So what's Wedgwood's one tip to all the UK studios out there?
"The thing I learned, the one thing I urge any other British developer to do if their bag is the triple-A blockbuster stuff that really gets attention and they want to sell millions of copies and really good review scores and everything else, is to recruit the best talent that they can, and pay them properly."
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/ar ... ?id=271019
