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How Mission Creep Killed a Gaming Studio
Nerval's Lobster writes: Over at Kotaku, there's an interesting story about the reported demise of Darkside Game Studios, a game-development firm that thought it finally had a shot at the big time only to collapse once its project requirements spun out of control. Darkside got a chance to show off its own stuff with a proposed remake of Phantom Dust, an action-strategy game that became something of a cult favorite. Microsoft, which offered Darkside the budget to make the game, had a very specific list of requirements for the actual gameplay. The problem, as Kotaku describes, is those requirements shifted after the project was well underway. Darkside needed more developers, artists, and other skilled tech pros to finish the game with its expanded requirements, but (anonymous sources claimed) Microsoft refused to offer up more money to actually hire the necessary people. As a result, the game's development imploded, reportedly followed by the studio. What's the lesson in all this? It's one of the oldest in the book: Escalating and unanticipated requirements, especially without added budget to meet those requirements, can have devastating effects on both a project and the larger software company.
>kotaku
a thousand times a day across all industries.
So the real story is that bad contracts killed a gaming studio?
What idiots signed a contract allowing Microsoft to unilaterally change requirements mid-project with no increase in budget?
In my years of Software Dev, the pressure has always been coming from sales. They push and push for new features, some go so far as to go around the Software Director and try and get the developers to sneak in features as a favor to them. In my last job, it was so ridiculous that I watched the Sales Director actually convince the CEO that she could do a better job than the Software Dev Dir. She literally stole the project from IT so Sales could have whatever they asked for. Of course, it didn't quite work out for her.
In a company focused on IT and software, I expect better from upper management to control their managers and directors from making these classic mistakes. In smaller companies where IT is a support, I can understand when CEOs and Execs who don't know IT make the mistake over and over again.
Sounds like it truly is one of "the oldest ones in the book": Working with Microsoft is a bad idea.
Haven't we heard of multiple companies being screwed in partnerships with them over the years (long before Nokia)?
Requirements creep kills more projects than anything but mismanagement, and the two often go hand-in-hand...
This is why I hate the business. We never learn.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Probably good to have something like "if you change requirements after XYZ and don't provide additional fund, we can take the money and not deliver anything"
Or run on time + materials, so you get paid for time, not deliverables.
Kotaku confirms it.
This happens with pretty much every game. "And then what if you could fly into space and then built your own spacestation and!" etc. etc. Thing is it usually happens on the devs side, as game devs are usually made up of people that got into the industry because they wanted to make games, not because they just want a paycheck. Unusual to have it on the publishing side to be honest. Publishers can have an onerous history of various shit shows, but feature creep is a rare one.
Escalating and unanticipated requirements, especially without added budget to meet those requirements, can have devastating effects on both a project and the larger software company.
Not to mention the company's workers, who are likely to be burnt in the process before getting lay off
if those 'requirements' were oodles of day-1 DLC.
This is why we all need to support business models that get middlemen out of the equation.. Not everything will be good, but the best will rise to the top, and be in control of their own fate, not answering to idiot middle managers who have never written a line of code in their life (or for that matter never made a 3D model) and have no idea what it is that the artists and programmers do.
This is why having good management matters.
Good management keeps this from happening.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Phantom dust was an excellent game. One I would gladly pay money for. Again.
Fuck all reboots. Make something new.
at work, we're trying to land this huge client, and they keep adding new features they want added, and our IT manager keeps saying ok sure no problem! :-D - without changing the deadline. So now we have 4 weeks plus they want us to work nights and weekends. WTF. The last manager I had (elsewhere) who did this was promptly fired.
Kill competitors early by hiring them yourself, then jerking them around until they die. When you're big and they're small, you're bound to have better lawyers.
Just space out at your desk and hack the payroll system in the 15 min of work that you do each day.
Stretch rewards you say? Me wantee Tides of Numenera.
Basically, if it isn't XBox and a big name, Microsoft has NO idea how to handle it.
So all the schmucks in their gaming divisions play ego games and try to fuck with the studios as much as they can.
What a studio needs is strong enough leadership to tell these little pissant middlemen to fuck the hell off and go right over them whenever they attempt to interfere.
Like any other software project, you stick to the spec you're paid for. Changes require more money. PERIOD. No discussions.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Ex. The No Child Left Behind Act
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
I notice in the article that Microsoft repeatedly released information about the game that was completely divorced from reality. Complete bullshit. Repeatedly. That should have been a gi-frigging-gantic red flag, right there.
What did the game studio think? That stuff would magically work itself out? It sounds like they waited too long to review the actual features versus the Marketing hype with Microsoft.
There are plenty of people that will demand changes to software on a whim even without considering whether the change is a good idea or not. Requirements can change and then change back if you have stakeholders with differing ideas.
There are also people who feel they need to be involved so they suggest some wild idea just to prove that they have had input.
Then, more often than you'd expect, there are others that come onboard for no reason other than to sabotage a rivals idea so your project can be in danger of being deliberately set up to fail. Such stupid fuckery can persist in places that are "too big to fail" such as MS, HP, IBM etc while much smaller places would have the perpetrators run out of town on a rail.
If you can't tell people with major changes without extra resources to fuck off it's not entirely your project and you have to keep the damage to a minimum.
I've seen that in a different industry - a huge client that demands all the resources you have "just in case" and then fucks you over. About the only thing that can help is money in the bank.
There's a certain type of person that decides they need to "own" you, and they can apply a lot of pressure if they are their only client at the time so they make sure that happens.
When a big public announcement that has nothing to do with you makes promises you never could nor intended to keep in the first place? Would the 'gag order' nevertheless allow them to dissociate themselves from erroneous hype, for example?
Then they need to resources and the guts to back that up with lawyers at ten paces.
The company didn't fold due to scope creep, the company folded because the people in charge were not willing to say "No".
You can argue that it's one and the same.
The difference, at least in my mind, is that scope creep simply causes never ending projects. Requirements are allowed to expand because there is no good reason and, thus, no political will to deny the request.
On the other hand, accepting new requirements when you don't have the budget for it, and where you are betting the farm, is a completely different animal. It sounds like management wasn't mature enough to say No at the point when Microsoft wouldn't change the Budget. They even had the loopy idea that if they completed a chunk of the game that Microsoft might relent. Pure wishful thinking....
It's up to the company to manage both its own budget and its image. Falling down on not being involved in the marketing effort and not having a marketing veto again shows just how poor management was. The Execs didn't know what they were getting into and didn't know how to manage the contract.
But... Agile! (TM) That will solve it! We'll just throw some Business Maj... I mean, "Scrum Masters" at it. That will solve everything. Then we can be justified in changing the requirements daily because it's the "Agile Way" (TM)
Get you contracts setup right.
"Escalating and unanticipated requirements, especially without added budget to meet those requirements, can have devastating effects on both a project and the larger software company."
No, this is not it at all. What this should say is:
"The customer (Microsoft) will always demand more than is agreed to, while simultaneously refusing to pay for it, and expect the vendor (Dark Side) to foot all of the expenses to meet the additional demands."
Big companies will dangle a huge carrot (or suitcase full of money) in front of a bunch of 20-somethings and their startup company to get them salivating, and almost every time those 20-somethings will chomp at it without questioning motives, analyzing risk, or even having a lawyer look at the proposed contract.
It wasn't mission creep. Mission creep is when the mission changes unexpectedly. Microsoft knew damn well what they were doing, and intended to exploit Dark Side for free work product. Maybe MS didn't anticipate them imploding like they did, but it likely didn't matter to them since they no doubt retained ownership of all of the work product anyway, which they could hand off to another firm to finish, or implode trying.
Honestly I don't see why anyone would do business with Microsoft, or any other huge, publicly-traded bureaucracy for that matter.
dev studio pitches a game, gets funding but is to stupid to realize its funded to make 2 games for the price of one. failed basic math. and no agile wont fix that, agile eats time, money and people and if you forget risk managment with agile your doomed.
IBM almost killed Apple with Taligent. A larger company can wave a poisoned carrot in front of a smaller company. If the smaller company takes the carrot, the larger company will doom the smaller company with project creep and tie up all of the resources of the smaller company.
I actually RTFA.
Microsoft changed the requirements just a week after signing the deal. Not a nice thing to do, but Darkside hadn't spent all the money then, and could have simply said no. They agreed to the change with the hope they could convince Microsoft to give them more money later.
Microsoft decided they didn't want to throw more money than what they wanted to at it and did the smart thing and cancelled the contract. They had already spent $2M, the studio wanted up to $3M more than they budgeted for to complete the project. Cancelling the project saved them $1M and all of the risk involved.
What in the hell are you doing here? You don't belong here.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it