Creative Downturn Comments by Rob Fahey

Good article, especially this part: However, trimming the fat from those teams is hard work. Everyone on the team will fight their corner, claiming their intrinsic worth to the profitable project. Each middle-manager will act like a minor feudal lord, jealously guarding his painstakingly accumulated collection of vassals and subjects. Team sizes, all too often, end up being more to do with office politics and power-grabs than to do with the actual requirements of making a game, and extricating a small, lean, efficient team from this quagmire requires a huge amount of work and some very tough decisions.

We discussed this very issue just yesterday. Processes that involve three departments that could easily be managed by one department but whenever you raise this issue everyone involved claims how important they are and that it has always been this way. It's funny how many people complain they have so much work to do yet when you actually want to optimize how things are done then nobody wants to listen.

Good read.

...the slow but increasingly assured rise of independent games as a commercial force in the market........the studio system is no longer alone, and its role in creating commercial success will soon no longer be a monopoly....

Best thing to happen to the games industry in a decade. It was becoming pretty stagnant.

^^ I agree, if the likes of World of Goo can be put together by a couple of guys and find its way onto the Wii, I have high hopes that the downloadable element of all the current systems (and soon to be the DSi) will keep the creativity flowing and open the eyes of some of the big developers.

Intresting read . games industry seems to be a bit like music industry ( in the past ) before it became all pretty boys and girls and clever producers, targeting 12 - 15 year olds. We may be entering a time of inovation . I hope so . It would be nice to play somthing that you never imagined you'd play . maby its time to put the developers on compulsory ' medication ' and make them trash hotel rooms and stuff .

Good article, thanks! I strongly hope the conclusions reached in it will prove to be true.

Didnt the halo series start as a RTS game? so rehashing an old idea isnt really a risk now is it?

p.s. i didnt read the article just amused you put a halo pic up :)

I'm still playing the first x-com at least once a month, and since it was released in 93 it must've been developed doing the 87-93 period where the ecconomy was doing a lot worse than it is today. :p

Oh really, against all economic markers, this is a depression that is at best 3 times worse than 87. Ask a trader if you like?

Isn't this the exact same article that went live a couple of weeks ago?

Gaming isn't being hit by recession, the cuts would have come anyway, smaller, more independent title may suffer.

Stardock are independent and been making good monies for a while.

"The explosion of creativity which will be created by this change is only beginning. Certainly, barriers to entry still exist, but they are slowly coming down - and I anticipate that it won't be long before services like PlayStation Store and Xbox Live Arcade start to offer developers the same level of easy access to market that something like Apple's iPhone App Store does."

What about the "Community" games on Xbox Live? How is access to this marketplace from a developer's point of view more difficult than the iPhone?

Just stop making shitty overhyped shooters...tnx

Creativity...lol

...it has always been this way.

That phrase is bandied about by so many. It's the club that's used by the fearful to batter down basic common sense. "Yeah, we always crunch rather than properly plan - its always been this way". "Yeah, we always just hire more producers and throw them at problems, rather than actually figure out what the issues actually are - its always been this way". Etc... I hope things change, but there are a hell of a lot of folks out there with a very vested interest (they think) in things staying the way they've always been.

GhengisNaan +1

Couldn't have said it better myself. The Games Industry has the worst production department in any forms of computer development.

What GN said. In spades what GN said. In particular...

Crunch. Study after study shows that it destroys productivity, that more mistakes get made not less, and that the workforce burn out, and that the end product suffers. And who does the 'best' stuff in crunch time? The guys who do the good work during the normal 9 to 5. So, the good guys get burned out and the rest just coast along. Crunch is just evidence of bad project planning and bad personnel management, and yet so many companies seem to shrug their shoulders during half-assed planning meetings and just say "Well, if it all goes wrong, we can just crunch". Or, worse still, they timetable a crunch period. "We can work normal hours for two years then get the team to crunch the last six months." Yeah, coz that always works...

@ GN

Don't think this just applies to the game industry; this mentality pretty much applies in any industry you work. Middle management usually are in the worse of jobs as not only are they passing the shit downhill but they are getting more shit and pressure from up top who know even less than them what its truly like at the bottom. Try and put yourselves in their shoes, they have been given a deadline from their boss which is not negotiable, things start going wrong and they have to make decisions. You will never always agree with their decisions but could you make them decisions yourself? Its how they then communicate them decisions to motivate a team that counts and I'm sure like any other industry there truly are some real arseholes about. But all senior management will see is the deadline met not how it was achieved. It sounds like the progammers, artists musicians etc. need to think about joining a union. It wouldn't take too long to do away with Crunch, not with the rates of pay they would negotiate for doing them anyway, the only trouble is you would need a very high percentage to join all at the same time and all be willing to stand side by side. I'm sure the Unions lawyers would love to go head to head over an issue like that and all it would cost the members is the monthly fee, usually around £10 a month!


Anyway.....

At the moment I think were getting quite a good mix with games. We are getting the AAA franshises that everybody knows and enjoys at least one, two or more ie FIFA, COD, Halo, Gears etc. These are then balanced out by the more creative low budgets games which occasionally throws up with some real gems like Flower or Braid. This is definately a good time to be a gamer. Its also good to see the way EA seem more willing to take chances as well with the likes of Deadspace and Mirrors Edge. And to anyone who says all the Xbox has got is grey/brown FPS; play something like Banjo - Kazooie Nuts & Bolts where once you get over the fact you are not racing at 200mph or trying to commit genocide with a variety of big guns you will find a whole lot of fun to be had.

This is an excelent article, thats all i can say.

Funny how this is exactly what I've been saying for ages. The industry is a joke, both in terms of production, process and practicality. It shouldn't take 20 million to make a AAA game by even the most amazing stretch of the imagination. Not on the wages they pay the programmers and artists who work in the industry.

Instead we end up with super large and expensive teams who are so inefficient that communicating, let alone produce a game in a reasonable amount of time is impossible. In real work terms it actually takes no more than about 6 months to a year to create a game from scratch. Somehow this is stretching out to multiple years. From my own experience I have spent weeks in a games office waiting for a producer to make a decision that should have been made during the pre-production phase. I've sat through endless meetings where nothing was decided simply because no-one felt secure enough to make the hard decisions.

I'm moving towards the indie scene and have been for a few years now. The fun has indeed gone out of working for large games companies. A few years ago I went the contractor route and haven't looked back. I work on a lot of AAA titles and simply move on as the project ends. As a result I am able to more openly express my opinions on what I see wrong with a company or where I think they need to change.

@Ghenghis

It is bloody depressing when you put it like that isn't it? Well said though. Good to see an article that's well written, and a slew of comments that are intelligent and well thought out. Makes a nice change!

I've been in crunch since last summer. Yes, summer 2008. To say I'm burnt out doesn't even come close. Add to that the fact that management are useless, and one particular person seems to have a grudge against me, and I'm seriously considering leaving.

But where would I go, if the same thing will essentially happen all over again somewhere else?

There is a little hope though. If you have a look at http://www.relentless.co.uk/ you can see they seem to have the right attitude with regard to development. There's also an interesting Finnish study on there on the effects of working long hours.

Its fitting that they would have Master Chief as the picture for a creative downturn.

Why take risks at all?

gamers have proven time and again that they'll only buy something with lots of shooting and swearing in it.. and having a guy in a space suit wont hurt either.

To JAF

I bet you get told how much your efforts are appreciated, and that loyalty will be noticed, etc, etc. Bet you get told what a team player you are. I think there's a book somewhere, called something like "Meaningless Platitudes Vol.2", that those phrases are drawn from.

Best of luck, mate. Hope it all goes well. :)

I assume some of you work for games companies . I cant give an opinion if your right or wrong , I dont know enough about it , all I know is that it sounds about right . you'll propably be all ' let go ' if any of your mates read this and grass you up to the ''company ' like the 16 year old school leaver shredding paper 8 hrs a day and daring to write on her facebook entrys that she found it boring . dismissed for ' lack of respect ' . very 1984 . employers Imagine that they own your soul 24 hrs a day .

I think I've been in crunch for about 1/3 of my career, and that is over 10 years long.

And how many times have the managers said 'No more crunch on the next project!'

I'd hate to think what would happen if we got a 'Games Industry' trade union togther, we could all go on strike in demand for better working conditions.

Sure, 'some' people get paid well, very well in fact, but if you aren't one of them, and you are working in an industry which is geared around university leavers willing to work 60+h weeks (like i did), then when you reach 30+ yrs old, you really don't want to be doing that anymore, you have other important things in your life..ooh, like a family...

At some point someone will realise that the really experienced guys who know how to do it all have left to go and do something more rewarding.

:(

@GhenghisNaan
Amen