Valve head honcho and game director extraordinaire Gabe Newell has spoken out about his concern for the families and welfare of game developers, who tend to come under unreasonable amounts of stress during the development of a videogame.
"You can't ruin people's home lives in order to benefit your business," said Newell during a conference call with Tippecanoe Valley High School. "I think the people who work here have a good time in terms of enjoying their work and not being stressed out."
"One thing I'm worried about is the amount of stress that we put on some of the families. When you're running a business for the long-run, sooner or later that's gonna bite you. You can't ruin people's home lives in order to benefit your business or it blows up in the long run," he stressed.
"Right now we seem to be a little out of balance in some people's lives in terms of, we're not telling them to work on weekends but people are working on the weekends, and we need to figure out how to communicate that."
Newell explained that his company takes all of his employees' families on an outing every year in order to better connect with them.
"One of the things we do that helps buffer that is we take all of the families on a trip each year, and it gives everybody a chance to connect with other people at the company and feel a part of it, and yell at me, and that's coming up pretty soon.
"I'm sure I'll have lots of opportunities to talk to people with their families to get a better handle on how that's working. Those really are the things that we worry about."
Newell's speech comes at a time when many studios are facing heat for forcing abnormal working hours on beleaguered employees and impacting their families' lives.
via gamerzines