Comment by ender7 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ender7 | Hacker News Reader

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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.)

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.

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.

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!

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