The game industry is immature. As an industry, we just haven’t hit our stride. We still rush licensed fluff out the door in a year and some change instead of a fully fleshed out three year title. We still crunch for insane hours, yet we’re paid less than our more stable software engineering compatriots over in normal product development. It still sometimes feels like we’re a bunch of guys making games with violence, boobs, and blood just so we can see violence, boobs, and blood. We’re still evolving. Warning: This post may be inspired by personal experience.
At my current company, we don’t crunch often. However, you may have noticed quite a bit of silence. If you’re at a game company or into games you may also have noticed the correlation between that and E3. Yes, correlation is causation in this case. I’m not bitter or anything. Crunch was pretty light, especially compared to other game companies, and I was mostly staying at work late the other week only due to the time zone difference between Austin and Los Angeles, where the convention was held. My friends were not so lucky. We all know the tales you hear about living at work can be true and for some of my friends, workload was heavy and stress levels were high. People were pretty grumpy. There were many complaints. I almost felt guilty.
This reminded me of an article I read about the game industry maturing. How long is it going to take for the game industry to mature? What happens when we do? As much as I yearn to make a really awesome game, I also yearn to play Ultimate Frisbee, and see my wife among other things. Although I’d be hard pressed to choose work over Ultimate, Ultimate has no say in the matter. Work can put the pressure on you. My wife, on the other hand, can voice her opinion. Apparently she wants to spend time together. Huh. Who’d have thought? It’s like she expected to see me. (I told her I wanted to make video games before we got married! Fair is fair, right?) If Rockstar San Diego is any indication, there are plenty of wives who agree. How come we don’t hear about the Steel Worker’s Union up in arms?
Can video games break out of this rut? The falsehood exists that crunch is an acceptable part of life. It’s less common to see a senior level developer actually be a senior citizen since they’ve all long burnt out on the industry. We tear through young blood for the meat of the development effort. Why? How much are people worth?
What happens when we as an industry mature, however? Movies take a year to make and we can’t and won’t lengthen that process. Can we make games faster? I doubt it. Either the team needs to somehow quadruple in size and we need to find some magic bullet project management techniques or we just need to stop rushing bad licensed material out the door.
Will crunch go away? Driven by milestones, we rush to show off our work. Will we be able to schedule with bugs and found work in the original estimate without bloating the schedule? (Can we just write games without bugs?) It’s a case of the devil you know. I can’t imagine a world void of crunch, but you can hope, right?
I’m going to cut this short because it’s sounding like a rant. My main point is this: can you imagine a “mature” game industry? What does it look like and what has improved?
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I'm not sure it'll ever mature. With software development a product can be fleshed out over X amount of years because the development team usually have a contract with their customer. In game development, the customer are the gamers. If they don't get their game soon they can easily lose interest and/or buy another game. 18 year old Mark is very excited over a game that is currently in production. The company take their time. The game is finished 4 years later. 21 year old Mark is no longer interesting.
From my perspective the production cycle of a title was rushed in order to get it to the customers as quick as possible, in order to get the $$$ as quickly as possible. So can it mature?
So I see one problem that could be fixed here and that's to not advertise / hype so early! In some book I've read, finding the sweet spot of when to begin marketing a game is an art that can be refined, and perhaps we need better collaboration between development and marketing in order to grow up.
Unfortunately, we're definitely a hit driven industry and the top 10 or 5% of games make most of the market share. Until our market is big enough that a slightly longer cycle is still profitable, I agree it won't happen. I just want it to happen.
On a related question, how long until the movie industry matures?
The game industry is doomed in this regard simply because the differentiator of games is "something never seen before". The really hit games show something new, and you can't predict how long it will take to make something new because by-definition no one has ever made it before.
Movies don't have this problem. They only very rarely have to deal with deployment of new hardware. (for example 3D) and when they do, it's a very long processes. There are no Wii/Xbox/PS3 movie theaters that your movie will only play at. There are no capricious approval processes to get access to SDKs and documentation. Frankly, a movie is a vastly simpler product than a video game AND it only has to tell a story. It doesn't have to fundamentally create a new type of user-interaction just to get noticed.
Frankly, when a game design studio matures, it DOES become better. But with that maturity comes constant risk of either being under cut or being unfunded due to a perceived lack of novelty.
In the end you can't 100% dedicated to everything. Life is a trade off. It sucks, but people without spouse and family have a huge advantage as far as work goes because they have so much more time to be taken advantage of.
I mean imagine you're a Producer:
Do you want the Epic-Mount?
Or do you want the Mount-With-Kids-That-Cant-Be-Ridden-After-6PM?
It sucks, but then so does old age without any children…
I agree, it's hard to predict how long innovation takes, but we can certainly make great strides and get better estimation.
As for the first parties, if Sony and Microsoft can hold true to their 10 year life cycle for consoles, do you think that this would help? What about if they streamlined the approval process?
I think the main problem here is that people are used to the way it works and navigate it as such. Clearly the only ones complaining are the wives.