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

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. :)

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.

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.