Games

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 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.

The book that explained all this is now almost 50 years old and people still try to add more bodies to speed up development.

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.

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.