Hacker News Reader

The game business is like the movie business in that projects are "seasonal" rather than a constant thing. Unless you are working on a tight little indie game or a recurring blockbuster series (Call of Duty, Madden), the number of people that are required at any one time in development is incredibly variable. "Pre-production" headcounts need to be very small because the devs are still figuring out what the game is and so don't have anything for an army of artists or engineers to do.

Programming jobs in the games industry (and the entertainment industry in general) are not like "normal" programming jobs, despite the fact that they require an almost identical skill set. Put another way, they require the skills of a programmer but function on the employment schedule of a Hollywood lightning technician.

(It sounds like the company your friend worked at was also mismanaged on top of this cycle, which always makes things worse. Sometimes very much worse.)

If this is the case then why don't they staff them like movies – on a freelance basis? To keep costs down?

To be cynical but honest: the AAA game industry is fueled by crunch time. You can't convince an hourly freelancer to "buckle down" and work 60-80 hour weeks for months on end without paid overtime.

Also, the devs aren't unionized like all trades in the movie business are.

sounds like they should be!

Francois Truffaut's Day for Night is a movie about making a movie. In the end when the movie is ready, everybody is laid off and they're figuring out what to do next, where to go etc.

I think part of what tends to get missed is that while AAA game development certainly has software development as part of it, it's a relatively small part of the overall project from a person power and cost perspective. It's not uncommon for a ~200 person game development team to have only ~15 software engineers on board, with the rest being on the game development side (game designers, animators, artists, level builders, game logic creators, testers, community managers, marketing, etc).

It's also not uncommon for the internal tooling that gets created to allow the game development folks to build out the game to dwarf the actual game code is size/scope. There tends to be a large upfront effort from the software engineering side to get the engine ready and the supporting internal tooling ready for the game designers to go to town, after that it can be years in the game development process with only bugs, maintenance and smaller feature additions to the engine/tooling for the software dev side of the process.

With such a lopsided time investment schedule between disciplines you need to be either a massive company or only work on games with a small scope to achieve smooth employment for all involved.

Unless things changed in the last 5 years or so, your numbers are way off base.

Last game I worked it was around 100 dev people where 30% was software development, and from those 30% maybe 20% were tooling support.

It depends on the technology model. If the company is using a licensed engine than there's very few coders - 10%-20% would be the number I'd pull out of thin air (probably 5% if you count all the outsourced artists working in sweatshops that never get credited). Some projects don't even need their own coders if they're reskins of other games and just borrow the coders from the original project when needed. Of course there are still companies which invest in their own tools and engine where the ratio is closer to what you propose, but that's rare. Now mostly big companies can afford to have their own core engine division but in those big devs the amount of artists is even more mindboggling because they are likely to in-house their cutscenes, voiceacting etc.

All this works on the assumption that scripters are not coders which is debatable.

Well, I did leave the industry in 2008, but last 2 projects I worked on we used Unreal Engine and the ratios for software developers vs everything else (except publisher's people) were about those 30% I mentioned. We didn't have many 'scripters', mainly some level designers that used Kismet and maybe a few UnrealScript classes but apart from that, most was done in C++ by software developers.

Very correct on the indie thing. It's the only way to ensure some stability: keeping it small, keeping it simple.

The big game development studios have always been like this. Half the time, they do have concurrent dev cycles, multiple games in the works, concepts being fleshed out for the next game long before the current game ships.

Here's the problem: the publishers. They give your studio money at the beginning of a development process, and that entitles them to be utter ogres about schedules and ship dates. It's very common for a "next project" to be yanked out of your studio's hands and placed with another firm. It's also common for development studios to pull in outside firms to help them on projects, as when Gearbox pushed the Aliens Colonial Marines game to Timegate Studios.

The end result is that there is this humongous push to get whatever is next to ship out the door, and to hire and freelance help around that project. Once that project is done, shifting to something new would require repurposing everyone, which means a few months of unproductive work, or worse yet: a few months of no work... Check out some of the details in http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2014/02/12/fa...

Going from the period of game development where you're experimenting, to the time where you're full-bore pushing on a final vision is not something you do overnight. it requires a lot of prep work from game designers, engine developers, and art directors. If they've just been doodling around and trying to "find the fun" as is the primary goal in most early game dev processes, then they're probably not ready to gear up for a huge push on something as soon as the previous game ships.

Thus, you get this scenario where AAA require millions of dollars to make, but developers don't have that kind of cash (save a very few), so they get it from a publisher, who then handcuffs them to ship dates. Anything you can do to get that ship date met will result in a return of vastly more money to your studio, due to how contracts tend to work, so you throw money at the problem through staffing up.

Then, when the game's done, you go around to publishers with the next idea and take on another million dollar contract. Why? Because the funds you receive from publishing that last game don't come into your account (if you actually get any money at all: many agreements are only for the up-front $) immediately. These are effectively royalties, so you will basically be waiting a full quarter to get your next check from the publisher. At this point, you can't afford to float 200 AAA developers and artists for a full quarter.

This is why online, in-game-transaction games are utterly decimating the publishers in terms of growth. Riot Games is immense. Valve makes oodles. Why? There are no publishers between them and the player. All the money comes back to them I don't think Riot's had a layoff yet. Valve's layoffs were entirely project-based, not funds-based.

Publishing yourself online is the future, in every way. It encourages agile development, and lets people go home at night to sleep (except the server admins, but they can't sleep in any industry).

The real problem is that the game industry is project based, but pretends like it isn't. Start a project, swell the staff, ship the project, shrink the staff. If they're lucky the next project will along in parallel and soak up the staff and the rest are "surprised" that this has happened.

The movie industry should be the same, but it isn't because outside of a few key people working the project (the actors, directors, producers etc.), almost all of the rest of the people are hired in via contract to production companies. So an SFX house or a Foley studio can keep their staff working on several projects at once and not have to go through as much of the hire/work/fire cycle. Cameras are rented from equipment companies and camera operators are similarly contracted.

So when you go to make a movie, the studio hires the key staff, then contracts out pretty much all the rest of the work to companies like Maslow Media Group or whatever and you get vetted professional tradespeople who come in, set up, do their job, and then move on to the next gig their production company has lined up for them. So their layoffs really only happen when the entire industry takes a hit.

In the game industry, they're still learning this lesson. There's a few places where outside contracting exists, mostly in sound design and music and middleware developers (various engines or tools), but that's about it. They still hire on teams of developers and artists, build the thing then fire all of them.

Isn't "come in, set up, do their job" most viable though if you're local to the project? I imagine a lot of the movie industry work takes place in LA, whereas game development work is spread out all over.

You could imagine that remote work might help in this situation, but I've heard stories about the difficulty of communicating artistic vision across geographically disperse teams.

Yeah it's true, but I don't know if it makes a difference in this case. Game developers are already working in locations that have big studios. They work for EA this year, get laid off, go work for somebody else next year, get laid off work for EA the next etc. They're already more or less there. It'd make more sense for them to work for a "Sivart13 Melbourne, Co., Ltd." and contract out your group of developers to whoever so they maintain employment.

Instead of going through expensive and time consuming HR processes every year, the publishers could just go through half a dozen contract negotiations instead.

One well known example of this model is TOSE, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tose_Co.,_Ltd.

It seems like the model is much closer to that of a Hollywood movie than that of regular software development (which in a lot of ways makes sense). At the beginning of a project, you only need a handful of people to develop the core of the idea you want to develop. You don't need a full-sized AAA game development team until later on in the project.

So the only way to keep all of Irrational as it is now (remember, the team grew substantially through the development of Infinite) together is to immediately turn around and work on another AAA game, and at that one that's already ready for immediate large-scale development. That's the model of someplace like Infinity Ward or DICE, where you need to churn out this year's iteration of Franchise X. It doesn't sound like Levine wanted to do that, though, and if the 15 or so people he's keeping with him are all key people at Irrational, you're left with a large staff but no leadership to shepherd them through getting Obligatory Bioshock Sequel developed.

When you develop Windows 8, you know what's next (depending on the scale you want to look at -- there's Windows 8.1, Windows 9). Same with Office -- you iterate on the existing product to improve it and add features. There's a handful of cash cow game franchises that feature a similar iterative development model. But much of video game development is a more artistic or creative process, for a lack of a better term (that isn't to say that regular computer programming isn't creative, I think it very much is, but it's a different sort of creativity). And expecting to get that kind of creativity through project management is how you get Call of Duty games. I'd rather Levine work on more original games like Bioshock Infinite, rather than working on more Bioshock games that are unoriginal.

"""It seems like the model is much closer to that of a Hollywood movie than that of regular software development (which in a lot of ways makes sense). At the beginning of a project, you only need a handful of people to develop the core of the idea you want to develop. You don't need a full-sized AAA game development team until later on in the project."""

Absolutely! And you know why ? Because they don't aspire to make good /games/. They are actively trying to become like Hollywood. They're making spectacles and stories. Replayablity be damned. It's a dirty word. Modern games are often sold on production values.

Trailers! Trailers are a thing straight from movie industry. Nowadays, even strategy games are commonly advertised with trailers. Even strategy games usually have promotional screenshots with GUI turned off. They don't want to show you how the game /plays/, just how it /looks/. Gameplay videos are increasingly rare, and the term is becoming meaningless anyway because of the coming of "gameplay" trailers, which dillute the meaning of the former.

Because then the people who got bonuses would only get $298 million. Worker supply is too high for their needs to really be considered. There's always another bright eyed 21 yr old wanting to risk flameout for their chance in the industry. Its just unregulated capitalism with no damping.

> Its just unregulated capitalism with no damping.

Bullshit. Nobody's forcing anyone to go and work in the games industry if they don't want to.

Horrible working conditions are not excused by the voluntary nature of employment.