Comment by SimpleMinds | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SimpleMinds | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I agree with what you said with my limited experience. I hope it's anecdotal nature is good enough.

I worked in a company that went from doing software gigs in general to be full mobile gaming company. Before it was quite standard Agile style company: Scrum, code reviews, TDD, cross-functional teams (front end devs knew how servers works in general), focus on quality over quantity (one dev, rotated weekly or biweekly, focusing on fixing bugs), separate concerns.

After going full game-oriented, company hired couple of people from gaming industry into higher positions - tech leads, project managers etc. Over couple of months, people with many years of experience in those big companies dismantled what was standard for me, using combination of two arguments:

- big names don't do it, so it must be wrong - it's a waste of time

Before I quit, there were no longer code reviews (waste of time), all testing was to be handled by QA team (waste of valuable dev time), ship with issues (waste of time to fix minor bugs when can add features), single system responsibility (one dev to write code for client server protocols, one dev for UI, one dev for assets etc, that's gow big names do it).

At one of the last talks with "industry veteran", when I mentioned those things - and how negative, in my opinion, those changes are, his response was "so you are saying that whole gaming industry dev practice is wrong". At that point I thought he's right and I sound full of crap, now I believe that yes, AAA companies are simply bad development practises shops.

My guess as to why is because AAA is very strongly driven by deadlines and marketing, where you cannot simply delay release (Christmas shopping spree is coming). This idea I saw articulated on HN first and I agree with it.

If the AAA practices had been so bad then, by now, we had Agile-TDD-etc shops taking their lunch and driving them out of business. As of now there is just one studio practicing Agile, Blizzard. If it is not known, Blizzard is also famous for incredibly long projects and missing deadlines. I had personally observed collapse of two Agile AAA studios, who, while doing pretty well by the industry standards, did not have the super-profitable titles to hold them up during 5+ years of development cycle. So I believe we have the AAA practices not because game programmers are stupid but because studios that don't use them are not around for long.

The answer is fairly simple here, is that software quality is not everything in this space. The systems are not mission critical, and PR, marketing, money and a good "property" (eg: star wars) can pave over quality issues.

For example, look at Assassin's Creed - will the bad launch cause people to avoid AC in the future? Maybe, but probably not.

there isn't any reason to suspect that a small company doing one thing better will walk all over AAA, that's hyperbole. AAA's culture is good enough and their other large advantages give them their market share.

What are the advantages AAA studios have? There are no patents or secret know-hows, there is only reputation they have built themselves. If you have a superior process why cannot you do the same? For example, a small company id Software started developing games in C when everyone else had been doing Assembler and pretty soon not just established itself as a AAA studio but effected everyone else to switch to C as well. This is how a superior process works in the games industry.

> What are the advantages AAA studios have?

Shitloads of money. Massive institutional knowledge of public relations and marketing. Direct lines to Sony and Microsoft. Every kind of benefit of economy of scale you could want.

You seem to be confusing publishers and studios. If you are so good with development practices you can sign the same contract other AAA studios do and get the same access to the benefits of economy of scale you attributed to studios.

Um. Publishers own the majority of these studios (or they self-publish, generally after a spinoff or long working relationship under a publisher). That's why those advantages apply to them. Otherwise, how exactly do you propose to "sign the same contract" without having money in the first place to build the infrastructure and already having spent a shitload of money to be in a position to be considered for it?

It's not like the idea of a barrier to entry is a new concept.

Some studios are owned by publishers, some are not. The statement I argued was made about every AAA studio, BTW. But if you cannot compete with a publisher owned studio then go after ones that are independant like Epic or Bungie or Insomniac or Arena or Telltale or Riot etc. etc. If you want how it's done look no further than Respawn. The studio was just founded in 2010 , signed a publishing contract without long relationship with the publisher and infrastructure, shipped a game already. It is how almost every AAA studio started (there are few studios that had been seeded by publishers, but as far as I know, none if them exist now).

It's pure meritocracy here, if you are good then getting a publishing deal is not a problem.

So you have a list of studios that all either got big when the barriers to entry were much, much lower than they are now (Insomniac did not spend a hundred million dollars on Spyro the frigging Dragon) or were founded by people with significant industry contacts and kicked off with direct lines to Sony and Microsoft and to publishers right in hand because of who they are? Are you sure you're proving what you think you're proving?

The core of an "AAA studio" is a big fat wallet. It's essentially definitional. You're not actually saying anything with respect to them in any of your posts.

So who were Riot's founders? Who were Media Molecule founders? Did the barriers for entry suddenly rise between 2008 and now? From what I see it's much easier to publish a game even for consoles. There are tons of indies doing that regularly. In 2008 you had to have a secured office and 20K in cache to get a devkit, today you can get a loaner at home if you cannot manage 2K price.

AAA do get a lot of money but it's the effect of them making games that sell well. There are dozens of startups in SF that cannot make even mobile games with their piles of cash and hundreds people. Money do not make you a AAA studio.

I was not implying that game programmers are stupid, sorry. I meant that they way it was told in the company how AAA do it sounded similar to what I learned about how big companies done it 10 or something years ago. Coming from agile workplace, I think there were things that could have been kept in place to improve quality of life for developers and art teams. I'm not sure if I can express what I mean correctly. For example, why the dreaded "crunch time" in gaming is treated as norm, while in modern web/mobile shops its believed that something like this is going to result in worse quality over time?

I could see arguing here with myself that AAA games are usually "ship and forget", with some bugfixes only. Maybe because company I was working in was not AAA, but small (by industry standards) f2p mobile shop, where applying AAA ideas is not that great (in my opinion). I mean that's where your product is more along lines of web apps - you are going to constantly add content, update code base, refine features, so focusing on quality in long term is better. This, thought, I was not able to articulate clearly and properly to AAA veterans.

I feel like not all ideas from current practises can be applied to big gaming studios, but saying that I believe it can be improved. This may need time and risk that companies that are big enough to be called AAA are not willing to take.

Why two companies you mentioned failed? I think we can assume there might be more reasons to that than only being Agile, maybe their games were just not that good, or IP was boring? Still you sound like you have more experience than me here, I'm trying to wrap my head around whole AAA industry thing. I'm ranting about it so much because making games was way more entertaining than web/mobile, but the industry is so poisonous for pure developers that I had to quit to regain my sanity :)

I am not sure people outside game industry do not crunch. A brief search shows that the term existed long before the modern game industry or any game industry at all. Same goes for "overtime" - the term is even codified in laws. I assure you nobody treats crunch as a normal mode: even people who are forcing unnecessary crunch understand that it's something unordinary and often do it just because it is not something normal (to show how good they are at management, to extort a bigger budget, to undermine their political rivals etc).

>This may need time and risk that companies that are big enough to be called AAA are not willing to take.

Infinity Ward, the original home of $1B+ games, had about 100 people at the time of the split from ATVI and founding Respawn. It's about the same size now as well as the Respawn. Media Molecule is just a few dozens. Size does not make a AAA studio.

And you don't even need to show the best practices right at the AAA level - start small and if it's any good people will copy you or, at least, you should be able to grow yourself.

>Why two companies you mentioned failed? >I think we can assume there might be more reasons to that than only being Agile

Indeed, it would be naive to blame Agile on destroying multi-million businesses. Agile seems to be just a symptom. It could be that the management sees that the development process is failing and tries to improve it with a well advertised technique, for example. Or that some Agile enthusiast gets too much power due to the weakened culture. What I was trying to say is that very few AAA studios practice it now and the ones that did in the past are not in the business any more.

Also, there is no single AAA development way. For example, Valve's practices are very different from Bungie's, which are different from the R*, which are different from ATVI's COD teams etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com