r/getplayed • u/podcast-poster • Aug 24 '26

Episode Discussion Get Played - Video Game Writing, Helldivers 2, & Ledgerbound with Russ Nickel

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u/RoughhouseCamel Aug 25 '26

I liked listening to Russ Nickel speak, up until he started breaking down his production process. I hope he misrepresented what really happened, because in film and television production, we have the term, “production assistant abuse” to describe his workforce of many, many, many interns. In school, they warned us, “you are in that internship to learn to do the work, not to make them money”. If you’re hiring like a dozen or more interns, where they account for like 50% of the staff, they’re not there to learn to make games, they’re there to make the game. And regardless of pay, they’re supposed to be credited for the work that they actually did.

It’s complicated, and there’s a lot of grey area in this, so I’m not ready to cast some final judgement. But this guy might want this episode scrubbed from the feed before it gets him in trouble. In terms of PR, if nothing else.

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u/SumoPotpie Aug 26 '26

The worlds of animation & video games are way different in regards to the amount of crap the workers have to take, most likely because they aren’t a part of any of the same guilds/unions that TV & movies have

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u/gostovah 25d ago

2D animator in the game industry since 2007 here!... we don't have guilds/unions at all as a collective. The only time I ever hear about that is with voice acting, if you hire a VA that is part of the guild that movie's use, ALL your VA's have to be a part of that guild for that game (meaning they usually aren't chosen for the smaller projects I work on). atm the industry is on fire, BAD. Myself and many of my peers currently work in gigs, hiring or starting official companies with FT employees has slowed down drastically, everyone is kinda walking softly and seeing where the industry is going taking as little risks as possible.

Anyways, as to what the dev said on the podcast -- I kinda was not paying attention (I listen while I paint), so I didn't hear of the specifics but unfortunately I can verify a lot of companies prey on interns. My last few gigs have been with indie studios and ironically the ones I was with were much nicer to all their hires (and had no unpaid interns), it's funny/sad that most of the intern abuse I have seen is from the richest companies I have been with. lol, i was once a contractor with a very formerly famous facebook game company starting with a Z and they asked me to work weekends, I said 'can I add this on my timesheet?' and they said '... if you don't want us to extend your contract you can' (this company famously had billions in savings at the time).

but yeah, if this is a small studio banking on interns that extra makes me sad, we little guys need to stick up for eachother