A perpetual problem I have as a Scrum Master in the tech field is the business people’s inability to understand that nine women can’t make a baby in a month. There are just certain things where throwing money at it won’t give you any faster of a return on investment. More money doesn’t make better games faster, if anything it adds bureaucracy that impedes critical work. Most great video games aren’t capable of being produced on an annual basis and trying to hit your Q4 results over and over won’t magically produce high quality output
I’m stealing that 9 women line. That’s fucking gold.
It’s a really old one and gets eyerolls in tech at this moment, since it needs to be used so often
And here I thought it was an obscure reference to Heimdall of Norse mythology…
I should probably go outside.
It’s a balance, no? Yeah, you can’t always just throw more money and staff at the project for infinite gains in speed, but on the other hand, there’s absolutely studios that suffer from understaffing, where just bringing on employees to get tasks done would massively improve the speed.
Eh, I think you’d be surprised. It really takes a lot of time to get someone from new hire to productive member of a team. Even with the money to just shotgun hire new people and keep good fits it still takes time for them to understand the vision, tech stack, workflow, and culture. I honestly think software is an environment where finding and investing in good people matters more than money and that no amount of venture capital will fix that
Highly motivated developers with passion projects will always exist (Minecraft, Stardew Valley, Undertale, Dwarf Fortress). However producing high quality art in a corporate environment is possible, repeatable, and scalable if you acknowledge the inherent reality of creative development
Agreed.
Including a shitty or just bad or incomplete on-boarding for the business processes just extends to time by a good margin.I was thinking of things like gamefreak, where they’ve been chronically understaffed to the point where they simply can’t get enough work done on the timelines they need to meet. I’d imagine that something like “model and animate 1000 pokemon” is the kind thing that can fairly easily be sped up by having a larger body of people doing the work, and the time spent bringing them all up to speed would pay off over the totality of games they end up working on.
Depends on how under staffed. You have to teach all the new people how to work there. That takes time, then once they know what to do, but now you have a bottleneck on approval and addressing questions. You can’t hire more for that, because it takes in depth knowledge of what the art needs to be.
The book that explained all this is now almost 50 years old and people still try to add more bodies to speed up development.
I don’t know where you two got this but that isn’t happening anywhere in the game investing business. If anything, they fire people. They always make sure they threaten smaller studios with termination if they don’t succeed, that has been the model for decades.
Maybe not ome project but havung many projects may make a yearly release possible.
But I believe the proportions for a company to have such a release schedule at a consistent good outcome would be near impossible.It’s times like this where I’m reminded of people like Chris Sawyer, Rand and Robin Miller, Markus Persson, Maddy Thorson and Noel Berry, and I wonder how much in the way of cash infusions and investors and bureaucracy made their games legendary.
Those investors that expect quick returns are directly responsible for ruining so many games in the last decade; pushing for quick releases of unfinished money grabs which makes players cautious about what they buy, or just wait for those half games to go on sale and buy them at half off (what they’re actually worth, if that).
Yeah, at this point, AAA is a negative rather than a positive for determining if I’m interested in a game.
Though with how regular steam sales are and the size of my backlog, even an AAA game that looks good needs a steep discount for me to consider it. I’m ok with not trying 2024 games until 2034, I’ll just add it to my wishlist.
Hell, even if I see it at 90% off in 2028, I might just buy it and have it sit in my library until 2034 before I try it, anyways. Especially now that I’m pushing myself more to finish games rather than let myself get pulled in by the 20 next shiny things I see.
Not to mention seeing a AAA game at a AAA price with MTX on top of that makes me assume it’ll be a shitty experience, even if they leave an in game way to get all of that stuff because I know that it’s going to be tuned to incentivise people to just pay the money (aka grindfest). A lot of that psychological shit that pulled me into WoW so hard doesn’t work on me anymore because the first sign of it turns me off. Daily quests to “keep me interested”? I don’t want fucking video game chores to do. I now recognize the whole “how do we keep players coming back to our game?” question as inherently toxic, just like website engagement mechanisms.
The AAA market is filled with high-budget low-inspiration cash grabs. And the more influence investors have over companies to push them to make more money quicker, the worse the game is going to be. Investors need to be more patient than gamers.
Older gamers understand that AAA = bad. Large publishers = bad. etc.
It’s a shame that most of the industry’s sales are from kids under the age of 14. They don’t know that they’re buying garbage. They don’t know that Ubisoft is 95% trash or that 2K is 95% trash. If it has colorful lights, kids want to play it.
Or parents/grandparents buying gifts for kids. As a parent myself, there’s price targets for gifts that AAA games fit right into. I deviated from it this past year and gave my daughter a cheaper game that I figured she’d like. It was a dinosaur-themed Harvest Moon called Paleo Pines. The bet paid off since she’s actually put down Minecraft to play this one rather than playing it for a bit and returning to Minecraft. Oh yeah, Minecraft itself isn’t AAA. So I’ve got decently high hopes she will avoid wasting her money on the polished turds a lot of the bigger studios are putting out now.
You are lucky.
We reached the AAAA market.Best I vould come up with on the spot: https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/1auigs0/comment/kr4h59v/
I know Ubisoft likes to claim AAAA, but I interpreted that as them assuming the number of A’s is relative to the goodness of the game and using that to say it is a really good game.
The way I see it is that once the production quality gets to a certain level, the higher the odds are that the people who have the power to determine what that game will look like are out of touch with what makes good games.
And that pirate game sounds like a good example. The choices that ruined the game were likely made at the upper or middle management level by people who had only, at best, a passing interest at playing the resulting game.
This game better make at least 3 billion dollars or there will be layoffs! Well, there will be layoffs either way, but let’s hit the goals and minimize the impact!
Read:
The SimpsonsFortnite makes a bajillion dollars per second, so if yourcartoonvideo game doesn’t do those numbers, you’re not trying hard enough.These people cannot imagine being the second-biggest fish in any pond.
You want high ROI for games? Find a niche that’s not served by eight hundred games per year, and take all their money.
