What's Wrong With the Games Industry 119
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."
Proof? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
The irony is that I am posting this to slashdot while at work, and odds are you did the same.
Re:Proof? (Score:5, Insightful)
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AMEN!
At the only job I was ever fired from (not game-related), my cube was right at the intersection of the main corridor and the kitchen entry, the printer/fax center, and the door to the server room.
I told my manager I was hav
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Oh, I tried, but then that would have meant that the manager who assigned the cubicle was wrong.
No, the manager is always right, so of course, since I'm not being as productive as I can be, the best way to correct this is to ignore what I say, and keep me in the most v
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Don't I know it.
Well, back to work.
(yeah, right)
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Another reason you still need a centralized facility to do the work (office space) is because its the only place you have a controlled development environment. The lead designer/producer cannot check and see if the PC at the employee's home, which they work out of, does not
I worry about those boys.. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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So. Where's my jolt? Where's my coffee? How do you expect me to keep coding for 36 hours without either!
Aside of the usual stereotypical comments, you're absolutely right. Even though you can have a management that does know the meaning of 24 hour shifts itself. If they do, they can quite well sympathize and don't needlessly ask (let's be nice and pretend it's asking) you to spend your weekend in house.
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On the rare occasions I've pulled a 10 or 12 hour day, I usually got something that didn't crash at the drop of a hat out the door. Then when I needed to extend that code later, it almost always needed to be heavily revised or outright scrapped and redone.
I can't imagine frequent long shifts writing code. There'd be so much junk in the mix it would
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But think of this... Current management makes them go to the office to work. Because they think it's necessary for productivity. Maybe management is already doing its job! Not everyone can handle the added responsibility of working from home, and they seem to think the majority of their workforce is in that category. Maybe they are right.
Others noted that communication and collaboration
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A better reason to work in the office rather than at home is that the typical software developer in *any* industry needs to communicate with their colleagues. You can go the whole formal weekly meetings route
Snuh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Fixed.
Re:Snuh? (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Game developers and publishers focus too much on flash. When you're only worried about how good your game will look in screenshots, videos and ads, gameplay suffers. A game should be just as fun to play with primatives and stickmen as it is once you add your pretty coatings on top, if your game isn't as fun or "cool" without out all the flash, you have a crappy game on your hands. The same goes for story and cinematics. Yes, story can be very important, but your gameplay should always come first (unless in perhaps the case of an RPG).
2. The industry is stagnating. 99% of games released these days are rehashes of old games that don't even bother to try and add a new twist or anything. Why would any gamer want to buy the same game they already own but with a different title? Hopefully advancements in physics processing and controllers like the "Wii-mote" will help get the creative juices flowing again in the industry, but I fear most of the problem comes from investors and publishers not wanting to risk any money on anything even remotely original. It's the same exact problem we're seeing in the movie, TV, and music industries as well...
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Right, and this is nowhere more evident than on the evidence of how some games can keep pumping out sequel after sequel. Pokemon (barring my joke down the thread), Dynasty Warriors, Castlevanias on game boy. Very little upgrading of graphics over time and they're still best sellers.
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Look at the tax rate for personal income (which dividends are taxed at) and then compare it to the tax rate for capital gains (which share buybacks are effectively taxed at). That is about 99% of the reason why companies choose buybacks over dividends. Significantly more money ends up in the shareholders' hands through a stock buyback.
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I'm going to say this is pretty much BS from where I'm sitting. It might be true for certain genres like FPS's and whatever genre console action games fit into. But for the rest of us I think we're starving for a bit of "rehasing" and "same ol same ol". I'm interested
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As a not so well known example, I'll sing along to Boulevard of Broken Dreams and give it p
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Silly me. I thought there was only one.
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3. Hire actual writers/scenarists. I am really feed up with great games with piss poor story, filled with pathetic video game cliché. If you're going to put a long story, might as well make it interesting.
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Well... (Score:1)
Tell that to whats-his-name who never returns my e-mails!
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You wanna know what's wrong wtih the industry??? (Score:1)
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(I actually don't mind sequels and remakes the way the Slashdot crowd seems to hate them. I liked the Matrix sequels more than the original. I just could never get into Zelda. Let Zelda Die.)
i kind of disagree. (Score:3, Insightful)
team-based on-site coding does improve productivity. its much easier to shout over at someone to find out information or get something done, instead of exchanging emails or ims. emails and ims are easy, but not the fastest or most efficient way of doing things.
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Buzzwords (Score:4, Insightful)
"Welcome to the games industry, version 2.0."
I was almost fooled for a minute...
Negative Weight (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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I think one problem is you see a lot of games built from scratch, at least in the smaller shops. EA produces so many games I bet they have several underlying engines to support different types of games, and they improve upon these engines over the years while each game takes a version and builds something closer to a mod than a full game. W
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To a certain degree, I think you're already seeing the PSP gamers revolt. Quite a few of them have moved on to the Nintendo DS, which does NOT send out large system patches to fix "system issues". Especially when most of those "issues" are attempts to plug holes homebrewers are using.
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Gamers want good games. Technology is only a canvas on which games are painted. It should not
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I suspect this is what game production will look like in the f
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One Reson: (Score:2, Insightful)
It's not just this (Score:3, Insightful)
First off, you have a lot of copycatting going on. Everybody wants in on the big trend, so they're trying to recreate the big game of the year. There aren't many that aren't essentially clones of some other game. Ico, DDR, Katamari, Okami and Gitar Hero are new games. Most of the rest are pretty generic, to the point where if you've played one game in the genre, the rest are rentals -- because other than the graphic art, they play identically. And that's not even counting the sequels of the generic games.
Secondly, especially for TV/movie games, most franchise games are made with very little understanding of what made the series good to begin with. http://www.gamespot.com/xbox360/strategy/startrekl egacy/screenindex.html?part=rss&subj=6152227 [gamespot.com] This is just one example. I don't know how you could watch a show where 90% of the time, they negotiate their way out of danger and decide that the best thing to make with the franchise is a shooting game. I won't even bother bringing up Anime franchises.
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Ever see Fritz Lang's Metropolis? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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We simply do not have the collective wisdom to manage large groups of people.
Perhaps, but that's not really what I meant...
I mean that the game industry has "crunch time" as a planned phase of development, a period in which the employees are supposed to work for 60+ (70+, etc) hours a week, for weeks, for each project.
This is expected of their employees, if you don't like it? Get out of game development, we have PLENTY of young people who are
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More to the point, if they thought they could do it, wouldn't they try? I don't doubt that it's possible, but there are few people capable of managing such a project. Of course, this also assumes something that American management is no longer willing to
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Well...
Of course, this also assumes something that American management is no longer willing to accept: Employees aren't commodities to be used up and thrown out.
You kind of answered for me there
I'm affraid they've been making too much money working like this to change their way
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I don't know what the real s
Bizarre statement (Score:2)
That is one of the most bizarre statements I've read in a long time. A union is nothing more than a bunch of workers getting together and asking for something as a group instead of as individuals. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. It's nothing like extortion.
Clearly, there are unions which do stupid crap, but finding "the idea of belonging to a unio
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Well, the problem is slightly more complicated than that. They are making too much money today and they don't care about 5 years from now. The biggest problem is ultimately sacrificing the long-term for short-term gains. When companies come and go on a month-to-month basis, one's view becomes a little narrow compared to a company that's been around 20, 50 or even 100 years. People who understand the long-term view will
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The net effect is the same though.
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Just to point out, that was really the style of the time. Film was just finding it's way around (in the dark) narrative, and had basically been just transplanted from the theatre (of which mellodrama is much more of a requirement, due to suspension of disbelief issues). Fritz was one of the first guys to begin to realize film as something more than recorded theatre, but he was still very naive. Also, the lack of sound required actors t
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That would be my point, yes
40 hour weeks simply are the most efficient way of working your employees.
Hmmm, I guess that's a matter of perspective. From a manager's point of view, I guess that's true. But from an employee's point of view, I don't think that's quite right.
40 hours a week is the most you can systematically sqeeze out of them without burning
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Oh noes! Anonymous Coward don't take me seriously! Woe is me!
easy (Score:5, Informative)
Sony
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Bunch of fluff (Score:5, Informative)
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:
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.
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Been there.
Done that.
Check.
Yep.
Sounds familiar.
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Waiting for the primer to dry before we can put on the first layer of paint, boss...
What job doesn't have it's technical downtime?
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Simple, EA (Score:2, Informative)
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Innovative games are out there, they just don't have the widespread appeal of mainstream games, hence they are lost in the noise.
Customers don't necessarily want innovation, they want fun, and EA makes games that are fun for the masses.
There's plenty
Trust No One At Home... Or The Office... To Work! (Score:2)
This will never happen since there's no trust in the video game industry to allow this to happen. When I worked at Accolade/Infogrames/Atari for six years, it got to point where people weren't trusted to do their jobs at the office. As a lead tester, I spent so much time documenting that everyone working on my project was doing work for every minute, that I barely saw the games that I was supposed to be testing. Before I left, management was talking about replacing the cubes
Re:Trust No One At Home... Or The Office... To Wor (Score:2)
Maybe TFA was actually on to something, after all?
like off-sourcing, but without foreigners (Score:3, Interesting)
"Hey, we were able to cut costs by not hiring a salaried Audio Designer or building a decent sound studio onsite -- turns out there's a hundred suckers willing to pay for all the equipment themselves in exchange for no job security. I wonder if this system for taking advantage of creative professionals can be used against any of the other seats on the development team...?"
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Not an uncommon situation in Silicon Valley. One company I know about was bullied by the I.T. department to provide equipment to the contract programmers since the virus outbreaks were started by the contractors plugging in their own computers into the network.
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This has to be THE champion 'dup' topic EVER... (Score:2)
How to fix the game industry (Score:2)
These companies are the game industry's sole problem, IMHO...and for as long as they exist, things are going to stay broken. Think about it...every single megahit game that's ever been released (with the possible exception of The Sims) has been released entirely
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John Romero.
Daikatana.
Work at home vs. at a facility. (Score:4, Insightful)
I work for a large defense contractor (think Raytheon, Boeing etc.). Most of what I do, I can practically do from anywhere be it the office, home or a coffee shop. Well, the coffee shop would be problematic, I do handle classified and controlled information so passerbys might not feel comfortable thinking any moment Secret Service will jump in and erase their memories.
OK. So, aside from having to handle sensitive information or hardware. My more mundane activities can very well be handled at home or where ever I may connect to the internet.
For some reason, this is the way most corporate work places operate. Joe walks in, plays like he's a well brainwashed representative of society and socializes with co-workers while smoking, drinking coffee etc. Then he walks over and turns on his computer, and checks his email where for another hour to three hours he's pretty much doing the same thing for distant co-workers or on-site co-workers also playing with their emails. Then, he does some actual work, maybe an hour, may four at most. We are at 6 hours now. Then he spends another two hours away from "production" interests, to handle things that will sadly have more an impact for upcoming review. He asserts his politics and opinions on the new name tags to be issued. He sends out a memo essentially complaining about the coffee maker being a mess everyday. He sends his opinions down to maintenance becuase he thinks the power outlets need to be verified or checked.
This is a "busy" work day.
An average day... he might do one hour of "production" work, and BS for the rest of the day. For managers that joke about this "horror" to themselves... Managers are even worse than the workers. Managers typically do nothing of their inherent model suggests, this isn't being said jokingly either. Mangers really do nothing, even when they think they are doing something.
It's the feel that something is getting done. It's why we have meetings and all the sort. The last time a Meeting ever amounted to something, was when this one nobody held a meeting in the back of a German beer pub, later to wreck havoc across Europe. Ironically, even that meeting resulted in disastor and mayhem.
Just like Meetings make us feel like something is getting done... the same feeling is derived with actually seeing other people gather. Really, reporting to work, for most people who use a Computer, is a huge big-picture meeting! We get up, endure the assanine daily routines of office politics and becuase of this, that's work.
Personally, my best work comes within the first hour of waking up, and the wee hours of the night when I'm fully relaxed and able to focus becuase there is no distractions. I can listen to music, without fear of someone taking offense. I can chose to go sit outside and ponder something without fear of someone thinking I'm not doing anything. I can take as many breaks as I want, I can lounge in the comfort and safety of my own home. I enjoy the food at my own home. I enjoy the 50 dollar couch I have over the 150 dollar chair at work. I can wear something comfortable at home (Any man who says slacks, a tie, and a collared cotten shirt is "comfortable" is either very ignorant or out right lieing to your face. Even if it might be physically tolerable, it's still mentally uncomfortable to have to dress that way and worry about spilling coffee on it.). Sweats pants and a t-shirt, now you can't get more comfortable than that. I want to be at home anyways!
And if there's any better real life example of how much more people are willing to work when at home, we only need to ponder the speed, effectiveness, quality of OSS software development over proprietary counterparts 'minus exceptions of proprietary protocols etc.'). At home, I'm much more willing to work much more, becuase a great deal of it won't even be considered "work".
But, try to tell your boss that! That's the tricky part. He'd rather pay you for less product, just to see you once a day abide by ru
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Slacks, a tie, and a collared cotten shirt are comfortable.
And I'm not lying.
Maybe you should try a looser cut for your pants & a wider collar on your shirts (less starch if that's a proble
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One good example recently was when a co-worker felt that he came up with
Underlying Concept (Score:2)
Throughout the entire article, I kept seeing two names being implied even though only one was explicitly mentioned: negative, game industry = EA; positive, game production company = Blizzard. (You can extrapolate that Bli
Ugh another "what's wrong with x" (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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And the result of re-using that engine is that every game you guys put out feels pretty much the same. This can be a good thing; familiarity equals comfort, after all. Or, it can be a bad thing; there's no sense of progress, of growth, of innovation.
Let's not pretend this is a rec
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The best way to go about it is to have a robust engine but not be afraid to change it to your evolving standards. If you keep everything the same, yes you get the Street fighter/Mega man syndrome.
The time you
And here's my obligatory lefty comment (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Wow (Score:4, Insightful)
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-Eric
A lot of judges reasonable people (Score:2)
Actually there are a lot of judges out there who are very reasonable and full of common sense. You mostly hear about the foolish ones but there are plenty more who put careful thought into the choices they make even if the subject matter may repel them.
You make a great point though about all games being judged based on what a child might do with it. What I think will help t
Offtopic. (Score:1)
Found it... (Score:2)
Never mind, it was under the couch cushion.
?!?!?