Month: March 2014

Please fix your hiring practices. It’s a good one, I guess that we could extend to a lot of industries.

I feel the heat too, the more experience you have the weirder it is to sell it to an industry that relies a lot on fresh blood and specialization, the opposite of what veterans bring in.

And of course, experience  means more HR work to understand who this person is. Which means understanding game development at a pretty deep level, which is a difficult and bushy subject that HR people don’t really get into.

But as this excellent article says in three perfect points, it’s solvable if we think differently (nothing new here though):

The studio development model is broken. From an economic standpoint, studios are really just outsourced R&D for larger publishers. There are some exceptions—but for the most part, a studio exists to rapidly scale up an enormous development effort, ship a product, and then shed off unneeded staff quickly. While this model has succeeded at producing huge games like GTA 5, it is a lousy model for creating sustainable businesses for all but the very largest games. Big studio-developed titles usually don’t benefit from the creation of best practices, the institutional memory, or the perfection of craft that is acquired over the course of time.

And yes, game news are surprised when they see Irrational Games going out of business, which shows that game news don’t get it, and don’t care as long as majestic 3D is sprayed all over their retinas.

Unrealized profit potential. Games should be thought of as a type of service rather than a product to be thrown over the wall and handed off to marketers. Every game developed in the ship-it-and-forget-it vein has given up an opportunity to have the original developers continue to innovate and deliver value-creating entertainment experiences to the players who loved it over the long term.

I know right? This is where veterans shine and bring in experience. This is where those people get some stability instead of being fired at the end of the project in the studio development model right? Ten years ago I thought that MMOs and game as services would provide long term work and sustained development. When I see Disney laying off 700 people mostly from online operations last week, I realize that it’s because they still think with the old model, like the music industry with digital music they play with numbers and have some insane cash flow, so they just shift+delete those people’s jobs.

Developers and not just game developers, are pretty bad at business and don’t understand why they are treated as cogs most of the time. Except for one industry, the web. Which is one of the reason why Kentucky Route Zero, made by web guys, is so different.

The web industry changed a lot in ten years. The web changes all the time. Web developers think way more about long term, they know that it’s crucial in a world of tabs and immediate competition. There are plenty of great stories about small web businesses run by a team of two growing to healthy and pretty big companies. Web companies try and fail faster. The same in the game industry? We all look like one-hit wonder so it’s cool when it’s Minecraft, but otherwise it’s not great.

Anyway, I’m just the sound guy. Hire me.

Excellent article on game prices.

I don’t think free will win. For two reasons:

– Hardware is no longer the tractor beam it was once in fact, it’s boring. Today after a decade of digital miniaturization people don’t care what hardware they run as long as they are comfortable with it. All platforms are OK. There is no “much better platform” out there.

Valve is trying to disrupt that but looking at how hard it is for console manufacturers to ship stable, desktop-class hardware (we’re in the billions of transistors per machine, imagine the clusterfuck) even with decades of experience, it’s probably insane for them right now with Steamboxes.

Why hardware fatigue is important? Because it means we’re maturing and that people will differentiate themselves with apps, not free apps that everybody can get but paid apps that could even be pricey. That’s my bet.

“Yeah, it’s an app to do [X] and it’s really awesome. They respect everything about me, no weird phone book access or shady server connection, it’s all local and private stuff. The experience blows the competition out of the water. It’s quite expensive but it was so worth it.”

See what I mean? Second,

– Developers, now that they know that they are just a commodity for Apple and Google, either they still try hard to get the jackpot with terrible odds against them, or they start thinking about making some money too to sustain their butts. Then they’ll start thinking trial/paid like the good old shareware model or Win8/WP.

They’ll start thinking shipping real nice stuff, SaaS, they’ll start to think about the user experience and how it shapes so many things instead of releasing software with such poor design that it shouldn’t even be released to the world even if it solves a problem for someone. We’re drowning in apps and software mediocrity. There is room for “star developers” that you follow like you follow a band or a movie director and you don’t need to master 3D like John Carmack to make great software or games.

So short term, yes game prices will go down as so many young developers are desperate to get traction and have heard about the ridiculous amount of money you can get from a sale or featured slot but in the long term, if you want to sustain yourself making games and software without depending on sheer luck, you’ll need to bake shit perfectly and sell it with pride.