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Investors on the state of video games: "We are investing, but the bar is so much higher"
(www.gamesindustry.biz)
this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2024
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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
The math works out. If a job takes 10 people a year to turn out, then 100 people should be able to get it done in 36.5 days? /s
What do you mean it would take 2 or more years for 100 people because they spend all their time bickering over what needs to be done? And those 10 managers holding 20 hours of meetings every week. Those meetings preparing for the upcoming meeting, about a meeting that was held last year where nothing was decided are important.
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
The Mythical Man Month is the book it came from, in case anyone cares.
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.