Nonsense. Cliffski is an expert on everything based on gut feelings and anecdote. 20% doesn’t sound like a pulled out of the ass-number to me at all.
Yes his numbers are bollocks, but the things he identifies do exist throughout the industry, to greater or lesser degree in various studios, creating a generalised game development culture that tends to grind down on people such that the experienced ones, the ones you would otherwise rely on to bring a product to market, on time, and to budget, are in fact often demoralized to the point that it becomes a significant impediment. I know I’ve met plenty of seasoned veterans who have a thousand-yard stare. I think it’s a process issue though; the whole large-game-publishing-industry thing, makes tiny cogs of all the development staff.
Game development costs are escalating, project budgets continue to grow and team sizes grow with them. I suspect, and I believe cliffski asserts, that this is in part because of the industry itself, burning out development staff. There’s no viable middle-ground any more for medium sized teams; they don’t do well enough to compete with the AAA titles for shelf space and advertising space, and they cost far too much to fund with indie-game returns. Hm, taking a break to do an indie thing for a couple of years is probably the best answer when one feels this way.
This is a bit more along the lines of the high cost debate, but…
“Crunch” applies to multiple professions in that there are periods where you must work insane hours in order to get the work done even though there are not enough hours in the day to do so. I work 55-60 hour weeks from January through May or June. Not as bad as some professions, but worse than others. I enjoy my work and think I get compensated at a rate relatively close to what I deserve.
If there is poor pay, disappearing bonuses and slave-driving management that folks cannot tolerate, then people need to GTFO of the profession that is making them miserable or live with it. Isn’t that just the nature of business? I understand the issue people have with it and the reason it leads to inefficiency, but it will not go away as long as there are people that want to remain in the profession under those conditions.
Cliffski, do you not think you sound cynical and a tiny bit miserable yourself? Or were you including yourself? Or am I reading that into your post? That is a sincere question and I attempted to remove any snark.
Annnnd closer to the topic at hand…
I, like many, can no longer keep up with the high cost of upgrading to play the games that are continuing to drive the market towards graphical nirvana. (Unfortunately, that includes consoles for me) It may be wishful thinking, but maybe this will turn some developers back to strategy games that do not require all the horsepower to provide the best game play experience. Yeah, that’s probably me hoping for some gaming Fantasy Land (of the turn-based variety of course).
We have all tried these games once we folded to the pressure of joining Facebook, so that is the only perspective from which I can comment. I think it is too early to tell the long-term effect from the shift of game developing talent. The majority of those playing will not have ever played “real” PC/console games. Some percentage may want something deeper and be brought to non-social games. My hope is that the money they currently generate will subside as the ultra-shallow game play will burn people out. This would, hopefully, be followed by a shift of developers back.
An industry question that I have no feel for, is what is drawing the top talent over to the dark side, which has been covered somewhat. Do they just want a paycheck? IS there the same satisfaction in developing these types of games? Again, it is like any other walk of life. If you are not sacrificing your happiness for a paycheck, then those people should probably stick. If they realize, these games are shite, “I want to go back to making something I would enjoy”, then I would hope developers would do so.
If I had to speculate about why developers would cross the line into social game development, I would guess it had to do with the shortness of the feedback loop. Because the web games are transparently auto-updating, you can deploy new features or tweak old ones live. When you do that, you build a close relationship with the players. They ask you for a feature, you make it, and give it to them; you’re a hero. You can experiment with a live player base.
Compare that to the AAA experience, where you’re simmering and stewing your game for 2-3 years before anyone outside the company gets to play it. Maybe you’ve had the occasional focus test, but for many developers the focus test is a cudgel wielded against them by the publishers, and is tied into milestone payments. All too often your schedule comes up short, and you are compelled to ship before you’re done tweaking and tuning. The game ships just shy of the level of polish you know it could have. No time to work on it post-ship, you gotta get the next game rolling if you’re going to keep the lights on.
I call bullshit on this. Certainly, there are issues, but there are issues everywhere and stating that “most dev studios” run at a ridiculous efficiency rate is just bogus.
In the cases where this is true, it’s pretty obvious – those studios make bad games. The studios that put out good games defy your assertions, and on top of that, your argument doesn’t even begin to make sense with respect to cost.
No, cost comes exclusively from the size of the game. You can pretty much look at a game’s trailers nowadays and accurately estimate how much it cost to make. The more complex it is, the more programmers you need. The larger it is, the more artists you need. The more polished it is, the more you need to spend in voice acting. Etcetera.
I don’t doubt that cost is somewhat increased by some of the issues you bring up on a small scale, but to say it’s a 1:1 correlation is ridiculous and simply proves you are out of touch with how the industry works today.
Anyway, as for outsourcing, it helps, but it is a temporary solution, as games will continue to grow and eventually will be too big for even that.
Me, I dream about a day where we procedurally generate the first 80% of the game, and then have all the developers spend their time on the last 20%. They say the last 20% takes 80% of the time anyway, so why not give them as much time to do that as possible?
As graphical fidelity plateaus, there’s more and more ability to reuse simple assets later on. You shouldn’t need to model a new cup for a game that has cups. Of course, this also relies on devs actually sharing effort, which is pretty rare itself.
The problem will always be the core assets (characters, custom devices, custom art look) coupled with the size of the world. The size can be mitigated with procedural generation once we really figure it out.
Core assets, however, aren’t going to change until our asset creation tools change. You have to realize, games are effectively using the same tools they were 15 years ago at this point. It’s kind of bullshit.
Firstly, of course the numebrs are pulled out of my ass. Is anyone that delusional to think thats based on spreadsheets?
And no, its not based on one datapoint. I’ve had more than one job, and speak to a lot of people in the industry. Its amazing how many people spill the beans about their working conditions when you don’t work with them or know their boss.
And yes, I do include myself in that list of cynical and bitter industry types. Hence, I don’t work in ‘the industry’ in the conventional sense any more.
I’m the most productive and motivated and creative I’ve ever been, and that’s after I left mainstream dev. That’s my whole point. Working for a triple-A studio shouldnt be where you learn to code so you can quit and start your own company the minute you know how it’s done. At least, that shouldnt be the objective of your employer, anyway.
If you work in the industry for years, you get better and better at your job. The industry should try and keep people in it long term, by sensible hours and decent salaries.
I’m pretty sure theres a strong correlation between efficiency of a developer and the staff turnover.
My theory is that a lot of devs go to social gaming for the money. They get fed up with 5 years crunch for £35-40k when their mates who code for merchant banks earn quadruple that. At some point, people realise they need to pay off the mortgage one day.
What percentage of coders on Assasins creed II have more than 10 years experience?
I’m happy to be proven wrong.
As for the original topic, the fear of Farmville is more from a creative point of view. Contrary to some popular belief, we’re not a bunch of crazed greedy money mongers. The idea of monetizing our games the way Farmville is monetizing them is horrific to the majority of us.
But as Farmville and its ilk continues to roll in the cash, there will be more and more pressure to build games in a way that facilitates that kind of money milking. Especially since on the surface, “free to play” is more appealing to gamers, and at the end of the day, these free to play games are often making more money than games sold for $60 at retail.
I don’t know about you guys, but I’m pretty sure I’d probably quit gaming forever if the next Mass Effect was built to be free, but then the game was designed to simply suck if you didn’t dump $150 in to it. Which is effectively how these free to play games are being built. Or alternately, they are built to be fun, but then an event destabilizes the game balance to the point where you pay money to fix it so you can still have fun with it.
I don’t like that at all. It turns my art* in to a business intent only on making as much money as possible. And while making money is the goal for the large industry, the fact is that we’re still as much about creating great experiences first and foremost, and the money is a happy second.
With Farmville and such, the premise is to make a lot of money, and that is the drive that informs every single decision. With the rest of the game industry, the premise is to make something entertaining.
See the difference?
*If you don’t like the word, pretend I said passion.
What percentage of coders on Microsoft Office have more than 10 years experience? Your argument is a bullshit straw man because even in a healthy industry, those with the most experience often move on to greater things, or projects where they have more control or are fulfilling their own wishes first. It’s ridiculous to assert that a healthy project is one where no one ever leaves to do something else.
On top of that, your argument also ignores the fact that there’s a fuckton of grunt work to be done on any software project. You think someone with 15 years experience want to write a button clicking algorithm? Or implement text boxes? Or arrange menu items?
If you think the grunts on Farmville are making fat sacks of cash I expect you’ll be sorely mistaken. In fact, given how much money is at stake, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out crunch is even worse on those games. Especially given that you can’t actually finish a project, it can always be tuned to make even more money.
As for 5 years of crunch and silly low salaries, I’ve been in the game industry nearly 11 years, knowing that I could switch to a more well paying job in business programming, and I’ve never done that much crunch and I’ve been making more money than that for 8 of those 11 years.
chillax dude. jesus.
People still write new button clicking algorithms for each game?
Holy fuck.
It’s an example. Pick anything you want that isn’t fun and interesting.
This article covering a talk by EA’s Ben Smith shows the kind of trend good designers are currently having to fight against:
Making the implicit assumption that games have more in common with cans of beans than say, cinema.
80 million users. 80 million users. 80 million users. All your traditional video games don’t have 80 million users and are therefore not as important and will be supplanted. At least if we limit the definition of a game quite a lot and assume that this new limited definition covers Farmville and Quake but not Chess or Football.
Making the game worse can make it generate more revenue. The lesson is to focus on generating fast bucks over improving the artistic quality of your game. Enjoyment isn’t as important as long as they keep paying and playing.
The dividing line flaring up is an old one; are games an artistic endeavour furthering culture or are they just slot machines to be designed for revenue maximisation. Facebook and Zygna have just relit the touchpaper on an old war.
Disgust and condescension towards social gaming smells a lot like barely concealed fear to me.
Things come along in life or in business that force you to reflect on who you are and where you are going. And many times those things point to a future that, at best, we don’t understand. At worst, we see a future that looks decidedly less enjoyable than our present.
We all feel like we own gaming. We’ve been the only thing going for years. Then social gaming comes along, and has the gall to do some things better than us. They are accessible and attractive to normal people, for one. That may be what stings the most. I’ve tried to play Farmville. I do not like it. It makes me doubt that I’m capable of making a game that appeals to regular people. (Which is a minor bummer, because I have always fostered the dream of making games for normal people, not just hardcore people like me. Not that I’ve really done anything about it. It’s easier to imagine that non-gamers just need to see the light, rather than confronting the fact that I might be the one in the dark.)
AAA, hardcore, etc. games aren’t going to disappear. And thank God, because that’s where my heart is. But they are going to change. At the very least, they aren’t going to be the only show in town anymore. Is social gaming going to have the seismic impact of multiplayer, modern consoles, etc? I have no idea. I do know that as it stands right now, social games have a lot of room to grow from a design standpoint.
So thank goodness for Brian Reynolds, and Sid, and all the good designers giving social gaming a go. If they can help us harness the things that social gaming does well, and marry it with the things that we do well, then we have everything to gain. If they can’t, well, it doesn’t change anything.
No point in being scared of the future. It’s coming no matter what we do, and by the time it gets here, I doubt it will look like our nightmares anyway.
PS - A lot of the comments about social gaming sound like the console hate speech that comes from the hardcore PC people on this board.
Are flames coming out the side of your face?
I’m still curious, is there really a war brewing in the game industry over Farmville and its ilk? Even the emergence of casual games didn’t cause this much dissent within the industry, but somehow people are now inclined to take sides on the matter. What changed? Is it a shift by the core, or the idea that there is no core, or what?
- Alan
I’m not ‘afraid’ of Farmville, I just think it uses an ethically corrupt business model. I care about the future of the video game design and would rather see more people pushing in a positive rather than negative direction.
As Charles said earlier its not ‘social games’ or even Facebook games that are the problem, its the methods of game design that Farmville uses to hook its players. Its not just Farmville either, hardcore favourites WoW and Diablo make use of similar techniques in a less distilled form through their loot mechanics. Put more simply, Famville makes overt use of known psychological techniques to influence and control behaviour and ties that directly into revenue generation. The interactive nature of games means they can exert a very powerful effect over their users, how that effect is used and for what purpose is what I am interested in.
When you have games industry professionals from large companies arguing that we shouldn’t worry about making a game less enjoyable as long as it generates more revenue to me that is something to be concerned about.
See above for one of my examples in the way they may change.
This influence isn’t good. That you can use psychology to entice people to play a game of dubious quality and then use that to make money doesn’t make it a good alternative. If that’s what we have to do to get 70 million users, then… I’m glad that I don’t sell my games to 70 million people.
As Dan said, “Making the game worse can make it generate more revenue.” This is the problem. Farmville’s formula is simple. Make it easy to scream forward to the point where you can’t properly spend your coins anymore without spending real money. Shazam. That’s not good game balance, it’s not entertaining, but it sure does convince people to dump money in to the game.
As far as I know, there’s very little precedent for the corruption of a medium like this, because there has never been this much opportunity for rapid iteration and user tracking. Do not misunderstand me, I am saying, without any ambiguity, that doing this is wrong. I see very little difference between this and tactics at stores such as raising the price of something, removing functionality, and slapping a “On Sale 40% Off!” sign on it. This kind of thing is all about making things worse and then making people pay for them.
As much as I may have an issue with the Wii, at least the Wii is trying to make new gamers and doing it in a tried and true method of creating quality games and experiences. This new thing isn’t that at all.
I think its part of a gradually growing awareness over the effects and powers of game mechanics combined with a new buisness driven urgency. Casual games were a ‘new’ market for video games. Farmville-esque mechanics for maximising revenue are something that can be broadly applied across all demographics (see Civ for facebook).