Andrew Eades is the director of Relentless Software, and he’s proud to say that on a normal basis, he and his co-workers do not work more than 35 hours a week. Relentless is one of the few companies in the industry to put its foot down and declare that working overtime on a regular basis does not in fact benefit the game product, the company, or the employees. Eades spoke at the Game Career Fair in London last month about quality of life issues in the game development industry and what it’s like to work at Relentless.

Relentless is based in Brighton, U.K., and was founded in 2003, which according to Eades was “a pretty bad time for the industry. Many many people were going bust ... But we worked on this project that probably nobody has ever heard of called DJ Decks & FX,” an application more than a game for the PlayStation 2 that lets the player mix music and play DJ. It sold few copies and didn’t do much to build up the company.

The company started with a mere 12 employees in 2003, and it didn’t begin to really accumulate steam until it secured some publisher funding from Sony. The first title to come out of the relationship was Buzz!: The Music Quiz, a social interactive quiz game for the PlayStation 2. Relentless has since established a franchise of other Buzz! games, allowing the company to find a steady source of income and work flow. The Buzz! titles have done well enough to be continued through to this day; in October, the company released Buzz!: The Hollywood Quiz.

Nowadays, with steady projects and a confident source of income, the company has grown to more than 65 employees. While it may not be churning out next-gen console games with high-end graphics for high-definition televisions, the company takes pride in the fact that, in total, the Buzz! games have sold millions of units -- without the employees working obscene over time.

Chasing the Dream … Over a Cliff
“When I was in Dundee,” Eades says reminiscing, “I was working on a game called Lemmings, and it was in real trouble,” with the team working drastic overtime on weekends. “We eventually shipped it, months and months late -- but it shipped. And there was a launch party. And we all got a brown envelope full of cash,” he says. 800 British pounds, to be exact.

“I felt great until the boss of the company turned up in this,” he says, showing a picture of an Italian sports car. “I felt like I got slightly short-changed there. And that kind of encapsulates the industry’s problems ... Some people get cash, and some people get Ferraris.” What’s worse is that Eades and his co-workers were the ones who put in the overtime, stretching themselves and sacrificing their personal lives to ship the game on time and in good form, and yet the executive, more of a nine-to-five guy, was the one who got the car. The £800 bonus was suddenly put into sharp focus.

Eades’ philosophy is that there are three factors that truly drive the game industry at large: time, money, and quality.

Time. Time refers to time to market. “There’s one point in the year, starting now [late October] until January 1, that is the most important time to the game industry. If you don’t ship your game in the last quarter of the year, you won’t sell many games,” Eades says. However, he adds, there are very few exceptions, the Buzz! games being one.

Money. Still, the industry overall is money-orientated, and capitalizing on the popularity of the holiday season is primary to maximizing a company’s sales. He advises students and job candidates to remember that when a company hires an employee, it is making a substantial investment. “Understand that money is a real driver in the industry, and at the end of the day the people who will be giving you jobs ... would like to see a return on their investment.”

Quality. On quality, he says, “We have to ship quality games.” Quality has become the leading differentiator among games, so it too, like time, is connected tightly to money. “It’s about giving the consumer something they really want.”