Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

This is an easy book to like. Schreier is a good writer and his access to key figures in the industry is exciting for a behind the scenes on big moments in gaming. Indeed, the first couple chapters he covers are interesting as broad surveys into the perils of game development such as scope creep, marketing and the crunch.

But the longer you go on, the more you get the sense that his attempts to cover the crunch and similar dysfunctions of project and business management in the industry are more an apologia for insiders with survivor bias than a critique of toxic work environments.

In that respect, I found myself getting more irritated as the case studies went on, since every developer's inevitable deadline push and 100hr work week just felt banal and awful rather than a triumph of creative passion. I'm not in game development (thank goodness!) and it's largely because the norms that go relatively unchallenged in this book work really well for select game devs with credibility and power, whereas the common employee is treated like garbage and told that this is for the great good. I doubt this was Schreier's intent, but the sum total of the book reads more like an attempt to spin complete management dysfunction as normal operating parameters.

Fascinating behind the scenes view on how video games are made. And it's hard!

This book gave me a new perspective on gaming and how passionate people dedicate endless hours on creating a new game. I didn't realize how much these teams need to crunch (aka “to work extra hours for extended periods”) in order to meet a deadline or finish a game.

A video game is a complex interactive experience that is somewhere between art and technology. There is an analogy in the book that says: “...making a game is like constructing a building during an earthquake. Or trying to drive a train while someone else runs in front of you, laying down track as you go.”

Each chapter tells the story of one video game and my top 3 favorites stories were:
1) Stardew Valley (I haven't played this particular game, but it's fascinating to learn that it was a one-person-team game, truly indie),
2) Dragon Age: Inquisition (I love this game and it's interesting to understand the team's effort to make the best Dragon Age they possibly could),
3) The Witcher 3 (I am currently still playing this game which has one of the best storytelling and world building I've seen on action RPG's).

This book is interesting, fun and a must-read if you ever played or still play video games.

This was a very good look into game development. Listening to podcasts and reading articles during the development of all these games gave me some insight into the surface level of what happened but Schreier definitely dives deep and gives context. It is a hard look into a difficult art form and career. Highly recommend to anyone who has a passing interest into video games.

Did not finish. It was okay, but I got up to chapter 7 (of 10) and realized that each successive story was barely different from every story that preceded it (“Stardew Valley” was the only outlier).

The book is more like a collection of unrelated articles, which makes sense since the author was a journalist for Kotaku at the time.

Executive Summary: I think this book can appeal to both software developers and fans of video games alike, but it's definitely targeted more at the latter than the former.

Full Review
This book was previewed with an excerpt from the chapter on Diablo 3 (which incidentally is the ONLY game in this book that I've actually played/plan to play).

When I was younger I wanted to make video games. Somewhere along the way however I felt like I'd rather spend my time PLAYING games instead of making them. This book helps to illustrate why. I work 40 hours/week as a software developer. There have been days or weeks where I had to stay late, or when things went sideways and I was fighting a fire. But nothing like the “crunch” described in every single story in this book.

It's a wonder games get made at all. These people must really love making games. Personally, I'll stick to writing business apps for my day jobs and keeping video games something I consume.

I've read some better/more in-depth books about video games, but this made for a decent sampler with a variety of stories. It was a quick read, with each game getting a single chapter of about 20-30 pages each.

Each story in here is unique enough to be interesting, but they do all share a theme of things running over budget, behind schedule and requiring insane hours/overtime to finish at all. You get some stories of indie games, and huge big budget games and a few in between.

The tone is definitely more for fans of games, and not (potential) developers. Anything even slightly technical seems to be explained in a footnote that I often skipped, but I imagine will be useful to most readers. I didn't find that to be the detriment of the book however, as despite also being a software developer, I'm a fan of video games.

Of all of these stories, the Stardew Valley one was probably the most interesting. I had mostly picked this up to read the rest of the Diablo 3 story (so good job on that marketing Kotaku!), but I liked reading about all of these games.

I think if you're a fan of any of these games, or just a big fan of videogames in general, this is a pretty good read.

The book tells the story about ten different video games and the hurdles they managed to (or not to) overcome during development, all the way to release. I especially liked the stories of Stardew Valley and Star Wars 1313.

It seems like every game's success story boils down to excessive crunch time, which is a bit sad. The stories are interesting (even if you're not familiar with the game being talked about), but man I do not want to work in the video game industry.