I’m not sure it wasn’t like that from day one. When you had smaller teams, you had smaller budgets, so the risks were similar. You’d still have teams flame out after one failure.
In those days, publishers could last longer, though.
Funcom runs CS for Anarchy Online out of North Carolina.
>>>Bummer on the QA guys, Con. (And “hi!”, didn’t know you were hanging around in these parts.)
I’m mostly in lurker mode. Yeah, a real bummer about those folks. Hopefully a few will find jobs via the various devs in the Boston area.
>>>Legend co-founder Bob Bates goes way back, too. He developed a few games for Infocom before they died. Anyone know if he was still at Legend?
Bob Bates was still at Legend running the studio. If fact, both Murray Taylor (head of the HV studio) and I jokingly told him he was next after they shut down HV a few months ago (we had a conf call the day they laid off my team in HV). Wish I’d shut my fat mouth.
>>>So is the game industry going to become more and more like Hollywood, where the talent lives in one area (LA, San Fran, ???) and works not for companies as much as they get hired on from project to project?
No I don’t think so Mark. For better or worse, the industry will certainly be turning to Hollywood for voice acting, writing, high-end cinematics, mo-cap, art content and of course movie IP (shudder), but the brunt of the work - the actual game development - will be done by dev studios all over the world. I’m starting a new project and 80% of the developers I am talking to are from Russia, Czech, Hungary, UK and Sweden. There is just too much talent out there to centralize that kind of thing (and not a real need, since the publisher generally acts as the funnel to Hollywood). Remember, Hollywood started under vastly different conditions and had a real need to centralize (for obvious reasons).
Con@Atari
Hollywood’s system works as well as it does because the tech has stabilized. If I see that you were an award-winning cinematographer on someone else’s movie, I can with reasonable assurance expect that you will do an excellent job on my movie. The same assurance in no way can be expected with game developers at the moment. It takes months to train a new hire on local dev tools, pipelines, etc., and even the the fit may not work as well.
Also, Hollywood functions under a talent surplus. Not at the very top tier, perhaps, but there are plenty of competent people available to do the hundreds of jobs necessary to make the average movie. In the game industry, we have too few talented people, period. Team sizes have grown so quickly that there are not anywhere near enough experienced people to fill the average team. A contract-based industry would make this shortage worse; I’d rather let a talented animator, say, lie fallow for a month between projects and still pay his salary, as opposed to losing him to a big contract on another game. (I recognize that I could always contract him earlier, but in my experience with larger corporations this is difficult to manage. :) )
As Con says above, anyway, the pieces parts that can be farmed out to contractors are being done that way already.
Nice comparison, Kevin.
Does anyone have a good feel for what we might have gotten from Legend if they had not been shut down? Current projects, future projects, etc.? I thought WoT was mediocre (liked it at first, but got old fast, with some very annoying aspects), but it showed a lot of promise. I didn’t play Unreal 2 because of fan/media reaction. Is this a real blow to us gamers? I don’t keep up with such things very well.
I imagine it was something they HAD to do to stay alive for the long-ish term, but I heard Legend’s death knell way back when I played the first Unreal expansion. Talk about a) a complete 180 from previous products (adventures) and b) a tedious, lackluster set of levels. Never got much better from there, either.
–scharmers