The daunting aftermath of releasing your dream game
pcgamer.com
pcgamer.com
You might think that by now it would be easy, or at least routine. Nothing can be farther from the truth.
Every time is a horrible ordeal. I often feel physically sick during the process.
To start, I will have just completed a bunch of crunch. We try as much as possible to reduce this for the team, but for the founders and at least a few key people it’s always right up to the last minute. So we are already in a super stressful state.
The second stressor is questioning if anyone will even come to play the game. It’s almost impossible to know.
Next up, will players even like what you made? This is a dread that is hard to shake, and in our case we have a bunch of players all hyped up for a release and if they don’t like your new content there will be a lot of anger and disappointed people. People are brutal towards game developers in comments on the internet.
And then there are technical issues. We are an online game and it feels like every release there is some major issue.
When there are 150k people banging on the door and the game has a critical issue stopping them from playing, it’s very hard to describe the feeling when you are the responsible person and you have no idea what is wrong.
Debugging in that scenario is like having an anxiety attack.
These 4 issues together make game release seriously awful.
You have the worst aspects of being an Artist, a Business Owner and Live Ops all in one nice package and right when you are low on sleep and after weeks of stress before hand.
It’s a perfect storm of hell.
GGG is one of the companies on my short-list of inspirational studios out there now. Growing off cosmetics in a F2P game is probably one of the more ethical success stories out there for those examining current industry success.
Provide quality improving patches throughout the life-cycle of a major patch. Engage with fans and provide top-tier customer support.
I look to what you're doing right and hope I maintain the cognizance during product development to do what you folks do to keep people happy.
I'm looking forward to Delve, and I hope you know you have starry-eyed fans out there!
I don't know if "you've bought yourself a good amount of emotional-leeway with this fan" helps lift any stress from the GP, but as one service-running-engineer to another, I look at PoE when I need to hold up an example of how I should be producing as a True Professional(TM).
Large game studios hire tons of quality testers and post-release consumer services to deal with this complexity. It is really amazing to see that human testers can catch many bugs (subjective or not) seemingly impossible to detect. For smaller teams, good luck to you all.
Also if you really are the dev of PoE, keep up the great work. I've never even remotely come into contact with your game yet Ive heard so much about it. That says something.
And I gather that you believe this is The one dev - there is a sizeable team making this game.
Every patch has your heart in your chest. The game itself on initial release is unknown if it will be hit or miss. super stressful. One misstep on day 1 and it’s front page of kotaku and players are beating down your door calling you incompetent and retarded- that’s just the ones who don’t ask for refunds.
Luckily things went really smooth with my launch, and the game I launched /mostly/ met expectations- but my publisher is not well liked and people are always looking for a reason to be mad anyway. It’s exhausting, all you want is the best for the player and you do your best but there are so many variables that cannot be controlled. And any attempt at being conservative so you can control the variables is met with a "they didn't try"- it's lose-lose.
Honest to god question. Have you considered changing domain for a while? I work in a chill software company and I wouldn't trade my free time and lack of anxiety for pretty much anything
Cut forward two years later, a couple of rewrites (from idle game to turn-based combat, then from a monthly competition to a long-term progression with multiple classes), and finally I launch. It got approved by Slack, it goes up on the app directory, I make a couple key reddit posts, and... Like 5 new users.
I'm sure folks here can tell the problem already - spending 2 years on development and maybe a couple days on marketing is always a recipe for a shitty launch.
Over and over again, I read stories like this and think "thank God this is just a hobby for me and not my main source of income, not something I took out a loan to achieve." I like to think that if it were a more serious thing, I'd have been more serious about the marketing, but even still, that's no guarantee.
Oh, also - I'm up to about 20 daily users these days. Even with that few, I still get nervous pushing out any new code. Getting very polite "Hey, the game isn't working" emails while I'm stuck at the day job and can't go fix it is devastating. I've ended up with a weird release schedule because of it - I generally only roll out code on Friday evenings, so that I have as much time as possible to fix potential bugs.
If I start just about any other kind of business other than a creative one, I can buy products or services that will help me get to market 10x easier than if I try to go it without. But if I try to venture outside of established biz modes and start to wander into the creative, I don't have to go far before I'm in an awkward no man's land of ugly, no one cares kind of having to burn the candle at both ends in order to push through to some kind of stability, and this article shows that that stability is a mirage.
The historical answer has always been to collect your efforts into an industry. And yeah, that option is there. You can go work for EA.
But it would be so much better if the games industry didn't have to eat its young. Or at least, not all of its young.
Hollywood's answer to the problem has been to double down on the community. If you want to be a screenwriter, first you need to realize that it's a hard hard thing to break into, there are always going to be more people looking to break in than there will be jobs, but you can still at least find a little bit of glory in the industry through YouTube or temping or whatever while you figure out what your plan B is. And everyone around you is going to help you figure these hard things out.
But you want to break into gaming? Haha fuck you buddy. Nobody gives a shit, go work for EA and get shit out when you finally stop making them quite as much $$$ as you did when you were young and stupid. Sure, go make your own games, I don't give a shit, don't expect any kudos from me, better hope you didn't dare spend any company resources on it because yes, we will sue the shit out of you for daring to get bigger than your britches.
I guess this is just my fervent hope that every industry can figure out how to be like craft beer.
Unlike screenwriters, whose alternative is making lattes, game developers who get tired of the chase can go work for a traditional tech company.
I've been working on ShittyEmu https://imgur.com/xgEMj5z (Basically an emulator that randomizes textures, sounds, and art assets of n64 games, and flips some of the bytecode ops deterministically.)
Tonight it was pretty cool to see the result. But there's not some pie in the sky goal, except a vague idea that I'd like to make something entertaining. It's just iteration and incremental improvements.
But that mindset ends up being far less stressful than trying to develop an epic game from first principles over the course of years.
Just have fun coding. Try out crazy ideas. And yes, the industry as a whole is pretty dysfunctional. So why join it? It's never been easier to go from a blank vi screen to a shipped product on Steam. We're in the golden age of gamedev.
Hollywood's answer to the problem is unions. Screenwriters have unions. Actors have unions. Directors have unions. Even the people who provide food on the sets of movies have a union. Hollywood doesn't care about "community" any more than the video game industry. They just realized that there are more people who want to work in the entertainment industry than there are available jobs and a union was the best way to protect themselves from being taken advantage of because of that fact.
* Overtime pay (very rare of in the game industry).
* The allowed amount of hours overtime (a.k.a. crunch, there's alooot of hours overtime allowed in the collective bargaining agreement).
* The detrimental effect of open offices.
So understand me right, I'm a union man without a doubt, but just having the union box checked does nothing. The union has to be a fighting union, otherwise it will wither away.
I live in Atlanta, huge movie and TV presence here, I rub shoulders with actors and all kinds of workers. The people who are in the system are extremely quick to lend a helpful ear or advice or stopgap job here and there. The whole system is set up to gently shake the talent pool so that people eventually find the part of the industry that they can find a foothold in that won't kill them. The people who do wind up as grips or whatever can still nurture their creative side and there's still quite a bit of glory in working on that side of it.
Hollywood, somehow, has figured out how to stop eating its young and start nurturing them.
I'm not sure I agree with this - there is a huge game development community. A game can be an artistic success without being a commercial one just like an indie movie. And you bet there are plenty of other game developers out there who participate in the community, help mentor newcomers, etc.
The industry options out there aren't bad at all anymore, AAA companies have largely gotten their crap together and at this point mostly know what they're doing (they'd have to to stay afloat with the budgets they're throwing around). The indie companies tend to be more head-on-fire-this-may-all-crash-and-burn-at-any-moment-we're-on-a-shoestring-budget. The AAA-ish companies (smaller shops with small publisher deals) are somewhere in the middle. I'm not saying there are zero problems, but there are quite a few options for employment in video games at whatever level of risk and startup-culture-ness you're comfortable with nowadays, and a supportive community to help. That's not to mention the huge hobbyist community who are happy just making games for fun without stressing about financial viability.
I don’t make games, I make comics. Four and a half years quietly working. Another year to do a messy Kickstarter. A year of feeling lost and empty afterwards. And then, finally, starting up the familiar grind on the next project, which I’d been kicking around on and off during those two years.
I know a few professional authors. They seem to be able to go from one project to another fairly easily; they also typically have much shorter schedules. I kinda envy that sometimes. A lot.
The solution usually ends up being “a new project”. After a while.
As someone in a similar boat, the burn of "hey, I just wasted my 20s working on some project that didn't really go anywhere" is an incredibly painful pill to swallow, and perhaps something you never fully come to terms with. Life is so very short, don't waste it.
I'm really not sure how this helps or what is the point here. Should people take no risks?
Long-term solo projects are like taking a lengthy road trip. If your emotional gas tank is too low, you're going to end up miserable as you push the rest of the way, and neither accomplishes much of anything. Creative endeavors are best pursued in a happy state, which is to say not stressed out about finances nor teetering on the brink of crippling depression.
The point is that people can have their cake and eat it too. As counterintuitive as that may seem, it's usually the case that most endeavors are not as urgent as they may seem, and that the risk involved is best taken from the most advantageous position possible. The time cost incurred by one's ancillary needs will likely end up a net benefit to the project in the end.
The tricky part is, most people who end up working on solo projects absolutely don't envision themselves working on them for so long, so they're ill-prepared to begin with. It sort of happens by accident.
Technically time not spent on relationships is time spent not learning in that specific regard, and the end result is being way behind the curve while peers end up married and whatnot.
In keeping with the vein of your comment though, it sure as hell teaches you to value the time you've got left.
(Sometimes it's because it's a socially negative job that serves only to enrich some people at the cost of everyone else (cough ad cough tech), but often - perhaps more often - it's because of the complexity of our world. Your job may be a crucial component to some very socially good thing, but if it's one of thousands of such components, it can be hard to see the connection between your work and the end result.)
Working with people you like on projects with varying levels of appeal, while gradually improving your personal situation, can be a very satisfying way to spend your career. Grandiose goals are a risky way to look for meaning/value in life.
But it's a thousand times less painful to swallow than the one that goes "I never tried to live my dreams".
It's a thousand times better to try and fail than to never try at all. THAT is what life is all about.
Minecraft and co did the one in a million. Everyone else did not. You hear very very rarely from them.
While they did something without results, people around them have a house, family, holiday and money for retirement.
For sure believe in your dreams but try to evaluate what you are doing. There is a tremendous amount of crap out there no one needs or wants and behind that crap there is all story.
Don't suffer needlessly is a more apt advice, because everyone knows what the suffering in their context is.
After working on a project for close to 2 years with 2 other people (at work) we released it and just waited for the feedback anxiously. With a lot of crunching and last minute changes as well.
It was "just 2 years" and I already had such a bad feeling of not knowing what to do next that I can't even imagine what it must be like after 5 or let alone 9 years :o
Doing a product is hard. Much harder that you might initially think.
http://www.sickenger.com/articles/the_making_of_darkfall/
- was the creators' dream game
- 10+ years in the making
- team lost funding, went without pay, and moved from sweden to greece
- not a commercial success
- best game ever made.