Development of Final Fantasy XVI is almost six months behind schedule – Gaming – News

Yep, can’t give this enough upvotes. A bit snippy to claim that everyone works better from the office, it will vary greatly from person to person and role in how much one is better for production (and also the employee) than the other. I am a lighting artist myself at a fairly well-known studio and have to say that for me, personally, working from home is far superior to going to the studio every day for work. This is partly due to concentration / less interruptions from people who are at your desk or that of someone else. To be honest, my biggest problem is the (4G) internet connection here in the countryside of Sweden, otherwise it runs quite well and the quality of life has improved a lot.

Unfortunately, the boss does want people to come back to the studio and tries to encourage people to do so. About the same arguments as quoted above under the guise of “then we work more efficiently”, however if I look at my own output of the past 2 years it has increased below the line so again I would describe that as short sighted / one size fits all instead of looking at what works well per person and role.

As far as the dynamics are concerned, in my subjective experience it is not super different than sitting in the office with everyone on the headset, most communication can be done well via slack or teams so it is not necessarily worse communication because you do that digitally now. Showing or pointing things out works fine with the tools that slack offers, such as drawing on someone else’s screen, etc. Personally, I think that physically working in the office as a (forced) default is quite outdated. The other way around, it should ideally also be the case that the choice is free to come to the office if the specific employee prefers, of course.

Heck, looking around LinkedIn there are more and more full-time remote jobs in the games industry, I even see them talking about maximum deviation in time zone or specific states (USA) that one can live in and work remotely for certain positions. Likewise the same job that is offered as remote in certain cities (eg Austin TX, Seattle WA, Los Angeles CA etc). I really hope this continues, it would be nice to be able to continue living outside with wages / work offer from the big city

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