What's Wrong With the Games Industry

Gamasutra has up a piece by game developer Stephen Ford, entitled What's Wrong with the Games Industry (and How to Make it Right). The article covers the idiosyncrasies of game development, such as the problems of pitching a title, making a demo, working to publisher expectations. It then looks at ways to make the same-old same-old 'right'. From the article: "One amazing fact that has yet to permeate the strata of the industry is that most of their employees have the equipment that they need to do their jobs at home. One example is freelance audio engineers, who do most of their work off site and mail the files in. However, for code, design and art there are still large levels of resistance to the idea that you can effectively export work off site and maintain control. On-site control is an illusion, and while the camaraderie of a large office space is nice, it is also the least financially efficient way of getting production work done in an age of broadband."

Comments

Proof?

[Aladrin]

"it is also the least financially efficient way of getting production work done in an age of broadband."

Have you got -any- proof of that? Some people do NOT work well away from the office. I'm guessing that game programmers, designers, and other game-jobs have huge amounts of people in that category.

In fact, anyone with ANY interest in games has a compulsion to play games. Try having a doctor do paperwork at the golf course and you'll see exactly the same thing. The temptation is just too close at hand.

Re:Proof?

[Doctor Crumb]

Some people don't work well *in* the office, playing games or surfing the internet. This is what managers and performance reviews and the like are for. An inability to get things done means that whatever management is in place is insufficient, whether telecommuting or in a traditional office.

The irony is that I am posting this to slashdot while at work, and odds are you did the same.

Re:Proof?

[iocat]

People can screw off anywhere, and they can concentrate anywhere, but for some (not all), the impulse to screw off is overridden by presence of co-workers and managers. For others, the ability to concentrate is destroyed by same. A good manager knows who can work well where and when. In my experience, people in the former category will tell you working offsite is impossible, and people in the latter category will make up a bunch of reasons for doing so. So it's not like people are trying to maximize their screw-off potential when they argue this point, it's actually that they argue that what works best for them works best for everyone, which is not necessarily true. Still, all things being equal, having people near each other so they can kibbutz and talk (not just IM each other w/ questions whne an issue comes up) seems to result in greater overall efficiency over the long term, especially in necessarily collaborative projects, such as game development. IM is great, but actually looking at someone else's monitor, overhearing info over a cube wall (in a good way), getting together in small groups occaisionally to discuss while one guys codes -- those are all valuable things that it is hard to replicate via IM or other PC-to-PC sharing tools.

Snuh?

[voice_of_all_reason]

But the King Cause is simply this: Most game development management is pretty incompetent. most game development management --> most management

Fixed.

Negative Weight

[AKAImBatman]

Developers don't know what to do with staff once a project winds down because the nature of the industry is such that nobody can guarantee constant work. When working in a low-cost market such as 16-bit development, this problem existed as it does today, but the negative weight of it was relatively insignificant. Yet as costs and contract issues and the seriousness of the industry has grown, the problems of having fifty or a hundred people doing nothing for an extended period of time have multiplied that negative weight, to the point that it kills companies.

Sounds like many game companies need to learn a newfangled idea (not really) known as "pipelining". You have various projects happening concurrently, with each project bubbling to the top as the necessary parts of the previous one are completed.

This would require good management, more normal working hours, and game development on a more normal schedule in order to happen. These things have been an antithesis to game companies, who have always struggled under tight timetables to get the game out while it's still technologically impressive. One is forced to wonder, though, is the technological death march really worth it? If your company's very existance is dependent on producing blockbuster after blockbuster, then you may be in a pretty bad position. No one can maintain a permanent streak, which is why you're probably only employed as far as the next game.

As much as I dislike EA, they do understand. (To a certain degree.) They have tons of projects in parallel, assuring that resources can be used and transferred as necessary. There's no "negative weight" holding the company down, save for post-launch vacations. If they would smooth out the development process, they could let everyone have lives so that they wouldn't need the post-launch vacations. Then their negative weight would reach pretty close to zero.

Games just aren't getting that much more impressive as time goes on. We're reaching areas of dimishing returns to where we can probably slow the pace in exchange for focusing on making good games that are fun, and have been properly QAed. There's no need for these last-minute additions or patches. Especially as the market revolts, and moves more and more toward console gaming. (Where proper QA is a requirement.)

Gamers want good games. Technology is only a canvas on which games are painted. It should not be the be-all-to-end-all of the game. If companies can reorganize around making high-quality games on more reasonable schedules, then I don't doubt that costs would lower and the products would improve.

My 2 pennies, anyway. :)

Ever see Fritz Lang's Metropolis?

[Scrameustache]

Do you remember the scene where the workers trudge into the factory doors, who fade into the mouth of a giant monster devouring them?

This is what's wrong with the game industry: It eats people up, chews them out, and then hires the next batch of fresh, ready-for-overtime young talent.

Re:Ever see Fritz Lang's Metropolis?

[ConceptJunkie]

This is any large business. After my 20 or so years of experience working at companies of all sizes I would plot a chart like this:

Number of employees vs. Efficiency of the company as a whole

1 employee - 100%

4 employees - 95%

10 employees - 90%

100 employees - 50%

1000 employees - 25%

10000 employees - 10%

The U.S. Government - 3%

We simply do not have the collective wisdom to manage large groups of people. Maybe that's the next breakthrough that will allow us to make quantum leaps in productivity in the 21st century. Or maybe we'll just invent robots to do it all for us.

By the way, those numbers are flexible. I once worked in a division of 80 - 100 people who achieved about 5% efficiency for over a year thanks to exceptionally clueless management. By the same token, I would imagine Google doesn't quite fit this scale either.

easy

[minus_273]

" What's Wrong with the Games Industry? "

Sony

Bunch of fluff

[Lazerf4rt]

This article is a bunch of high-concept fluff. I work in the games industry and to me, the only problem is a productivity problem. We waste a lot of time, not because we're lazy bastards, but simply because:

• We wait for the compiler.
• We wait for our machines to synchronize with the latest network data.
• We wait for out machines to convert the latest game data to the target platform.
• We wait for the editor and tools to launch.
• We waste time manually loading and manipulating the game to get to the area we are testing/working on.
• We rarely use crash dumps correctly. When a rare crash is reported, we go back to our computers and waste time trying to reproduce it in the debugger.

I'm sure small projects are better than large ones. But I'm always amazed when people totally overlook the time wasted on all of the above.

Ugh another "what's wrong with x"

[kinglink]

Excuse me Stephen Ford, can I get some credentials? Do you work at EA? do you work at my company? Have you worked at a real company? How many? How many dev cycles? Finding your name on a Flash development site makes me wonder a bit. Or are you Steven Ford who talks about online gambling as an Analyst for Collins Stewart

I'm sorry I'm sick of listening to Gamesutra guys because most of them either don't know anything, or just have skewed ideas with only their personal experiences to go on, and usually those experiences suck or are non applicable to normal companies.

My company keeps a game project going at a time as well as one in flux. Most people find the office easier to work at than home, and it helps communication greatly, it keeps people focused, and while it costs 5K, that money is made up in wasted time. 5K per person isn't bad when you have a multi million dollar team.

Why not maintain a code-base, guess what? You don't sell them to make a profit. A good engine can work for every game you make not just the first one. Company at which I works uses the same engine and tweaks it every game, that works wonders especially when you consider we work on similar systems every time. It's true our first 360 game needed a lot of time (4 years dev cycle not fun) but we're running two products based on that engine now, we consolidate the similar stuff, and branch the non similar stuff. Money saved? 3 engines for the price of 1, you figure it out. And if something is bad in project 2 and great in project 3 we can bring the great system over to project 2. If it's something similar.

My company works, if yours doesn't that's fine but why tell us what's wrong with the "game industry" when there's not much wrong with the industry. The particular companies are the ones who have problems. His complaints sounds like a whiny guy who wants to program what he's working on, not constantly get bothered, and not get different scope changes. His only good advise is to blame management, but maybe his company sucks. Mine doesn't. If you don't like the company, change companies. If you don't like the industry, change industries. Just because this doesn't jib with you, doesn't mean it's a problem with everyone or everywhere.

I worry about those boys..

[PopeRatzo]

I know a few game coders and I'm honestly concerned for their well-being if they don't have to get up in the morning, take a shower, eat something and go into the office where they are forced to interact with other humans.

I have seen firsthand the results of 36-hour codings sessions and the psychological and physiological damage done by the outrageous demands of the software industry on young programmers.

Just because management puts up a nerf basketball hoop and stocks the fridge with Vault, they're expected to be seen as "cool" by their underlings who are then expected to push themselves beyond human limits.

Please don't mod this as "funny" because I'm dead serious. People are getting hurt out there.