I think management, like you describe, has to force a delivery eventually. Game development is full of bottlenecks and there are very different groups of people working at the same project at the same time. If the architect isn't amazing and everyone is motivated and efficient enough to deliver a tested product in time there is going to be a shitload of problems in a 300 people project. If you delay and delay it also doesn't set a good picture for upper management nor for devs for their next game.
Obviously the solution is to schedule more time for bugfixing and polishing. But we all know how well that works. Devs see the timetable and start planning twice the content they originally should deliver. Especially since software developers tend to have flat hierarchies.
All the problems shrink in size if you develop in a small studio like blizz back in the day, but naturally the risks increase and the revenue decreases. So most "masterpieces" come from small studios. Also IIRC sc1 was pretty ridiculous before BW and I just checked the version history and they were still fixing crashes in patch 1.15. If anything Blizz got a good reputation because they continued to support their games years after release.
I still think that EA's and Atvi's management long term hurt the gaming industry with their business decisions and are now reaping what they sowed. But hey I like both better than google, so here's hoping that they stand strong until google gets out of the market again.
On April 09 2019 00:54 fishjie wrote: upper management are the bad guys though. this is only fair, because developers do all the actual work, upper management get all the rewards.
No , I do not think Upper management are, as a rule, bad people. The CIO isn't bad; the Project Manager isn't bad; the Business Analysts I work with are not bad. The users are not bad either. No one is bad. The "Bad GUy" is the tough job of software development. Developing new software is a very difficult process. That's the "Bad Guy". Many members of the general public will have a hard time swallowing "the process" as being bad. So its easy to create a "villian" and the general public will gobble it up. Especially, in video games, where much of your audience doesn't have much life experience. These over simplified paradigms go over great with inexperienced young people.
Part of my job as a software developer is to insure I only work for quality people. Are there lots of dev shops that will try to exploit me and take every advantage they can? sure. My defense against that is to build a network of Project Managers and CIOs who already know what I can do. THen I can pick and choose between the projects I want to do. I can avoid projects where I know its a bad scene.
These "evil CIO"//"evil publisher" stories all assume the developers are these helpless victims who have no control over their own decisions. That is not true.
I and many of my colleagues don't get caught up in these bad situations because we never accept the work in the first place. We stick to the little network of CIO's and Project Managers we've built up over the years.
On April 09 2019 00:54 fishjie wrote: . they are evil. "they" being a crappy company like EA. OG blizzard had the right idea with diablo and starcraft and etc having multiple delays, but when it was released, they were MASTERPIECES.
Morhaime acknowledged SC1 spent too much time in "crunch". This included Bob Fitch doing the Hermit-Coder thing for 6 weeks to make a new engine.
I've done the hermit coder thing 3 times over the past 10 years. Its definitely "an experience". you ever done the hermit coder thing?
On March 27 2019 06:39 Excalibur_Z wrote: I really have to disagree with the demonization of some of the larger game studios like ATVI, EA, and Ubisoft, that is so pervasive in the greater gaming community. They get knocked for "money-grubbing" through aggressive business tactics and attacked for rehashing the same games every year with minimal innovation. I feel this is a misguided approach, and of course it serves nobody.
a couple of points about this common "narrative" many software dev houses "sell to the public".
Some insightful games industry journalists have a very specific method of getting inside info. THey schmooz the front line or mid-level people. In order to keep the information pipeline open they can never assign blame to the front-line and mid level people. So when things go wrong.. its anyone's fault but the front line people. They have to be careful not constantly to criticize the fans as well. They can not constantly call the fans "entitled". If they constantly demonize the fan base that also harms their livelihood. So what's left? Upper management. Bad stuff happens... its upper management's fault.
In my career in software development I got a speech from a guy in his 60s that stays with me today. We were late getting a new app done that saved the payroll people a giant tonne of gruesome manual spreadsheet manipulation. It was 100% my fault. I had a spotless reputation up until that point. I was loved for making everyone's job easier... viewed as a creative "get it done" guy. The Project Manager would not allow me to accept public blame for it. He looked at me and said "you good cop... me bad cop". He took the public hit for it. He claimed he assigned me to a different project and this new app was not a priority. I got it done 1 week late. Why did he do that? .. Upper management people are the "bad guys" .. they set all the money and time limits on everything.. they fire people.
He maintained his "fuck you" image.. i maintained my image and it allowed me to remain on great terms with the people with whom i had frequent direct contact. In the end, I owed him one... and he knew it! He cashed in on that favour he did for me a few weekends later.
This is the easiest narrative to convey to the general public... so its used a lot.
upper management are the bad guys though. this is only fair, because developers do all the actual work, upper management get all the rewards. they eat first, and eventually send some scraps down. i'll never forget one time we were working late many weeks in a row, the director at the time (who was acting as the dev manager until the role was filled), got bumped to sr director after, and a few years later hit VP. i dont mind it though, we got paid well, and the enormous pressure that upper management faces is not glamorous. people who don't work in corporations dont know. as a dev, i can provide business insights and recommendations, but im not on the hook for the decision making at the end of the day. whatever the management says, i may disagree, but i commit. if it ends up not being what customers want, well, i only built what you told me to.
so yeah, evil corporations are fully the incompetent management fault. its never the developers fault. if developers are incompetent, management is incompetent for hiring them in the first place, and/or not firing them. also, people who don't do dev, don't realize that slipped deadlines on any non trivial project are very common. coding is hard. coding when there's multiple external dependencies and coordination involved? good luck lol. so management has two choices - push the date back, or cut scope, or ship with bugs, or add more resources. the last approach sometimes makes things worse, as the famous book, mythical man month, talks about. now, i do web services my whole life, but i imagine game dev is no different, and that's why AAA games ship with bugs and cut features. the devs no doubt are working brutal hours to hit an unrealistic deadline, and management doesn't give a shit. they are evil. "they" being a crappy company like EA. OG blizzard had the right idea with diablo and starcraft and etc having multiple delays, but when it was released, they were MASTERPIECES.
Blizzard definitely has a reputation for polish but D1 had terrible online issues and a dupe bug that was immediately found and never fixed. SC1 had awful balance problems in 1.0 and no security against map hack which appeared almost instantly. D2 had online stability issues from the very beginning and asset loading problems (remember instant deaths to Duriel?).
That's not to say that those launches were bad of course, but rather it's important to keep in mind that if those were the issues that remained, you can only imagine the scale of the issues that were found and fixed prior to release. Those were considered high-quality, polished games at release, primarily attributed to the full-team QA crunch that always happened.
On April 09 2019 00:54 fishjie wrote: upper management are the bad guys though. this is only fair, because developers do all the actual work, upper management get all the rewards.
No , I do not think Upper management are, as a rule, bad people. The CIO isn't bad; the Project Manager isn't bad; the Business Analysts I work with are not bad. The users are not bad either. No one is bad. The "Bad GUy" is the tough job of software development. Developing new software is a very difficult process. That's the "Bad Guy". Many members of the general public will have a hard time swallowing "the process" as being bad. So its easy to create a "villian" and the general public will gobble it up. Especially, in video games, where much of your audience doesn't have much life experience. These over simplified paradigms go over great with inexperienced young people.
Part of my job as a software developer is to insure I only work for quality people. Are there lots of dev shops that will try to exploit me and take every advantage they can? sure. My defense against that is to build a network of Project Managers and CIOs who already know what I can do. THen I can pick and choose between the projects I want to do. I can avoid projects where I know its a bad scene.
These "evil CIO"//"evil publisher" stories all assume the developers are these helpless victims who have no control over their own decisions. That is not true.
I and many of my colleagues don't get caught up in these bad situations because we never accept the work in the first place. We stick to the little network of CIO's and Project Managers we've built up over the years.
On April 09 2019 00:54 fishjie wrote: . they are evil. "they" being a crappy company like EA. OG blizzard had the right idea with diablo and starcraft and etc having multiple delays, but when it was released, they were MASTERPIECES.
Morhaime acknowledged SC1 spent too much time in "crunch". This included Bob Fitch doing the Hermit-Coder thing for 6 weeks to make a new engine.
I've done the hermit coder thing 3 times over the past 10 years. Its definitely "an experience". you ever done the hermit coder thing?
keep in mind, i'm not saying management is inherently evil. that's something silly that a communist would say. good management, especially upper echelons of C suite management, is critical. i was referring specifically to the evil management of EA, which has had a history of prolonged death marches. this is different from a crunch time as you get close to the launch date. every developer has had to work weekends, but its a question of how long of a duration. game development is notoriously infamous for this and EA is one of the worst offenders. that combined with their terrible customer service, makes them evil. less evil than comcast, but still pretty awful.
at any company though there are going to be bad managers. many of them are people who are great at managing up, but then terrorize their underlings. sadly, this lets you go pretty high up at some companies. i've been lucky and avoided most of them over the years. at worst, they would be my managers manager, or a VP, and as long as i stayed off their radar, i was OK. like you said, if you've built up a good network over the years, then you are blessed enough to be able to change teams or companies pretty easily. i never did game development, but i assume these developers stick to their bad situation because they are young and idealistic and love the idea of making video games, and dont have a family to take care of and so dont care about having free time/social life, which the evil companies exploit. so they are more willing to do death marches.
that was an article i just googled, but i remember having read many similar things over the years. the big game publishers upper management create this kind of work culture. keep in mind i work at amazon, the same company that NYT did a hit piece on about people crying at their desk. i've never cried at my desk, but i have been paged at 4 AM in the morning by europe (global companies and timezones hooray) when our particular little web app stopped working and everybody was blocked. as you can imagine, it was stressful. but my work and contributions are actually valued and acknowledged. from the stories ive read about game dev, you work super long hours but still get treated as scum, for less money than other types of developers make. no thanks!
i never worked at blizzard, so i can only speculate, but i was impressed with their launches. yeah there were a lot of bugs and hacks, still what released was a well designed and fun game beloved by many. i was just a kid at the time, but after working many years in the software industry, i realized that the people at blizzard back then must have actually listened to their developers AND qa, delayed the launch so they could build it right, and put trust in them. with the debacle of many of today's launches (again i only speculate and base this on horror stories i read online), but management doesn't give a damn what QA says, dont give a damn about the devs either, and force them to work long hours to hit an unrealistic deadline. what results is worst of all worlds, fatal bugs, fatal crashes, not fun, and no doubt the management will try to blame it on the QA and devs instead of on themselves.
On April 09 2019 04:02 fishjie wrote: but my work and contributions are actually valued and acknowledged. from the stories ive read about game dev, you work super long hours but still get treated as scum, for less money than other types of developers make. no thanks!
If you want to be in game development ... I think the key is to avoid the game specific development work. Work on the middleware. Work on stuff like the Havok Technology Suite. A professor of mine, Eugene Fiume, ran (still runs i dunno) a team that made graphics and physics-sim middleware packages. The people on the team make great money, do really cool, interesting work and they work normal hours.
Imo to make great games, it takes people working on the game being able to create it as if they were making something they want to play themselves. So they need quite an amount of freedom both in choices to make and time. Making games is much more of a creative process than other types of software development, so the freedom part is very crucial. You need to be making many choices along the way that you can't just predict. And so you can't and shouldn't accurately predict the release date, either, unless you give it a lot of extra room than "required", if you want to make good games.
Apparently, we have a major EA layoff to be announced at the end of the business day today. This is the ideal time to deliver bad news because it misses the news cycle.
On April 09 2019 05:12 ProMeTheus112 wrote: Imo to make great games, it takes people working on the game being able to create it as if they were making something they want to play themselves. So they need quite an amount of freedom both in choices to make and time. Making games is much more of a creative process than other types of software development, so the freedom part is very crucial. You need to be making many choices along the way that you can't just predict. And so you can't and shouldn't accurately predict the release date, either, unless you give it a lot of extra room than "required", if you want to make good games.
You can definitely feel when games are made without passion or creative fulfillment or direction. Anthem being an easy one.
What might surprise people is OVERWATCH was developed that way, in a similar situation as Anthem. They made a ton of shit for Project Titan but the top guy who's name I cannot remember, was really uninvolved and it meant noone could get approval or show anything to the guy and it meant there was no real firm direction, so nothing ever got done with all of the stuff they were making.
Feels like AAA companies have an issue with decision making in development.
Interesting to me is that they took the next Star Wars "RPG" to Respawn Entertainment instead of Bioware. Says a lot about how much they trust the studio now a days. Could of course also be that the schedules don't match up but switching the genres of the studios around as they have done doesn't really bode well for Bioware.
On April 20 2019 21:52 Yurie wrote: Interesting to me is that they took the next Star Wars "RPG" to Respawn Entertainment instead of Bioware. Says a lot about how much they trust the studio now a days. Could of course also be that the schedules don't match up but switching the genres of the studios around as they have done doesn't really bode well for Bioware.
Wasn't it a Star Wars RPG type of game with deep story and character development elements that put Bioware on the map around 15 years ago?
On April 20 2019 21:52 Yurie wrote: Interesting to me is that they took the next Star Wars "RPG" to Respawn Entertainment instead of Bioware. Says a lot about how much they trust the studio now a days. Could of course also be that the schedules don't match up but switching the genres of the studios around as they have done doesn't really bode well for Bioware.
Wasn't it a Star Wars RPG type of game with deep story and character development elements that put Bioware on the map around 15 years ago?
Erhm, pretty sure they did that with Baldur's gate.
a # of months ago someone proposed that although a video game "crash" was not going to occur... an end to large growth was on the way. a "consolidation" if you will. its looking more and more like whoever proposed that theory is correct.
On April 20 2019 21:52 Yurie wrote: Interesting to me is that they took the next Star Wars "RPG" to Respawn Entertainment instead of Bioware. Says a lot about how much they trust the studio now a days. Could of course also be that the schedules don't match up but switching the genres of the studios around as they have done doesn't really bode well for Bioware.
Wasn't it a Star Wars RPG type of game with deep story and character development elements that put Bioware on the map around 15 years ago?
Erhm, pretty sure they did that with Baldur's gate.
On April 24 2019 18:52 Harris1st wrote: Disney is about to buy Nexon for 13 Billion or something. No official word on that though Maybe this is Disney's way in to the (MMO) gaming market.
Its weird that Disney would buy Nexon when a few years earlier they disbanded LucasArts game development operations. LucasArts only exists as a Licensor and it no longer develops games.
On April 24 2019 18:52 Harris1st wrote: Disney is about to buy Nexon for 13 Billion or something. No official word on that though Maybe this is Disney's way in to the (MMO) gaming market.
Its weird that Disney would buy Nexon when a few years earlier they disbanded LucasArts game development operations. LucasArts only exists as a Licensor and it no longer develops games.
Not if they are simply in for the mobile gaming money, or even testing the waters for possible future games. Seeing how EA has nosedived the Star Wars brand.
On April 24 2019 18:52 Harris1st wrote: Disney is about to buy Nexon for 13 Billion or something. No official word on that though Maybe this is Disney's way in to the (MMO) gaming market.
Its weird that Disney would buy Nexon when a few years earlier they disbanded LucasArts game development operations. LucasArts only exists as a Licensor and it no longer develops games.
Not if they are simply in for the mobile gaming money, or even testing the waters for possible future games. Seeing how EA has nosedived the Star Wars brand.
or these rumours of Disney buying Nexon could be a way to jack up the price of Nexon for other bidders. time will tell...
On April 20 2019 21:52 Yurie wrote: Interesting to me is that they took the next Star Wars "RPG" to Respawn Entertainment instead of Bioware. Says a lot about how much they trust the studio now a days. Could of course also be that the schedules don't match up but switching the genres of the studios around as they have done doesn't really bode well for Bioware.
Wasn't it a Star Wars RPG type of game with deep story and character development elements that put Bioware on the map around 15 years ago?
Bioware also sunk a ton of money into a Star Wars (MMO)RPG which flopped immediately after getting bought by EA. Not surprised if EA gives other studios the job, especially since DAI is the only thing Bioware released in recent years that didn't struggle or outright flop.
Just read their wiki page and god I wouldn't be surprised at all if EA announces the closure of Bioware.
On April 24 2019 18:52 Harris1st wrote: Disney is about to buy Nexon for 13 Billion or something. No official word on that though Maybe this is Disney's way in to the (MMO) gaming market.
Its weird that Disney would buy Nexon when a few years earlier they disbanded LucasArts game development operations. LucasArts only exists as a Licensor and it no longer develops games.
Not if they are simply in for the mobile gaming money, or even testing the waters for possible future games. Seeing how EA has nosedived the Star Wars brand.
I'm not sure if that is the case or if Disney is just a chore to work with and had a tons of editorial control. From reports, Battlegrounds 2 devs and EA people proposed a lot of cosmetic options and outfits for the hero characters, but Disney shot the idea down and wanted only classic looks for the heroes. Other stories like that came out of the people making Disney infinity, where each separate brand (Disney Prime, Star Wars, Marvel) had their own input and editorial say over things. There was no overriding management to make all the disparate players play nice.
EA fucks up a lot, but this one might be a joint effort between them and Disney.
EPT
you ever done the hermit coder thing?
