...if you're following close enough that I could be mistaken for towing you, you may be too close.
That is all.
2010/11/06
And Now, a Rant From Our Sponsors
I'd say that few things get me into a ranting mood but that'd be a bald-faced lie. Instead, I'll pick one thing that sent me into a frothy rage last week and go from there.
If you aren't familiar with The Escapist, it's generally a pretty good gaming-oriented site with a bunch of usually-reasonably-well-thought-out articles and home to the terribly amusing Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation fame. (In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if half their traffic is directly attributable to ZP.) So last week while waiting for a (terribly long) compile I pop over there to see what's what, and I find this: Open Letter to People Who Make Games as penned by Russ Pitts. It's not a long read, but if you, like me, have ever spent time in the Biz, you'll get good and frothy too. Feel free to read it if you like (I'll wait), but I'll sum it up: the game industry is doomed because game people suck. One particular quote really sent me off the deep end:
Let's start here: No one in the Biz wants to ship a shitty game. I don't care about your hypotheticals about evil execs and pernicious designers, none of the untold hundreds of people I've worked with personally have ever set out to build a game that sucks all ass, ever. It's just not part of the culture which is why I have no issue making such a blanket statement. Most games are released before they're ready which is part of what Russ's rant is about but that's largely decided by execs and money guys; you know, the stuffed suits that make the real money.
Why is that? Well, because it's a business. That business would be making as much money for investors as possible and that means shipping the most things with the most appeal at the most opportune times. Hardcore gamers just looooove to whine about how everything is getting dumbed down. This isn't a coincidence. The economics of the thing is that if you need a budget of $30M (small to middling these days; giant when I started in the Biz) you have to sell about a bajillion copies to break even. Sorry. That's just the way it is if you want your spiffy art at a decent framerate. So the industry as a whole tries to open up any given game to the widest audience possible even if it means knocking off all the gnarly corners that us old-timers really loved. Usually this is stuff like "approachability" and "accessibility" and probably a bunch of other "ibilities" that escape me at the moment.
The "opportune times" bit also comes with baggage. Everyone who's ever worked on software knows that software projects pretty much always run long; sometimes way long if they even ship at all. This is super bad when you start talking about fixed schedules like we almost always have, i.e., we mostly ship around the holidays. How fixed these schedules may actually be tends to never be as fixed as management would make them seem to be which is part of why at most companies people crunch like fucking corn flakes most of the year. The best part? A lot of the time your reward for being a hero is getting laid off at the end of the project!
Software people outside the Biz understand a lot of this. No plan is ever as complete as the Suits would like and no plan ever survives first contact with theenemy schedule. In the greater software world this is generally understood which is why stuff like Agile is such a big deal. If you can't adjust the ship date, then you'd better be able to adjust one or both of { budget | feature set } otherwise, well, in the immortal words of one Adam Savage: "Failure is always an option".
In the Biz, teams which can actually affect quality directly almost never have control over any corner. Our ship date is fixed and most times pushed inward due to certification checks and manufacturing, our feature set is largely fixed because it's part of what the Suits want to market (not that they wouldn't change their minds midway through a project and mandate said changes without adjusting schedules or budgets or anything), and as a kicker, the same Suits who fix the ship date also fix the budget. Each of these things from a business point of view is sensical but it means that there's never enough of anything on a given project and you're usually short two if not all of the three.
Software is a pretty young art (almost certainly not a science despite what my two fancy, expensive pieces of paper say) and the greater industry is still wrestling with its care and nurture. The Games Biz is even younger and seems to be so heads-down that we can't even effectively learn from the larger body of experience that the software biz has. Why is this? Our management tends to be inexperienced. I've had maybe two or three managers that didn't outright suck over a couple dozen of them and I don't think I've ever met a reasonable exec. Real Managers (TM) don't often show up in game dev because pay is so comparatively low and hours are so comparatively crappy. Managers, unlike artists, designers, or programmers, don't grow up wanting to make games--at least, I haven't met any good ones that have at this point in time.
And wouldn't that be just like a disgruntled worker-cog to pin the blame solely on management? Probably, but our worker-cogs tend to be inexperienced too. We turn over something like 20% of our workforce every year. Other than college sports rosters, I don't know of any group that does that and remains competitive. (Maybe we're only competitive because most of our peers are doing it too.) Most people burn out after a few years. It turns out that crappy working environments + long hours + looming layoffs + lower than average pay is way greater than the idealism that drives most people to get into the Biz in the first place. But, as it turns out, this is kind of what drives a lot of studios because for every one of us that falls there are ten bright eyed kids that would do the job for free. Never mind the fact that only a few of these kids will statistically stick around for more than a few years or that exceptionally few of them are actually qualified to do what you need them to do. I've been on more than a few teams that bulked up during the painful phases of a project with a bunch of junior people who made the entire thing generally much harder. It's almost as if we should know better by now. This is part of why studios go through the hire/fire/re-hire cycles and part of why salaries are so comparatively low.
So, OK, Mr. Pitts:
If you aren't familiar with The Escapist, it's generally a pretty good gaming-oriented site with a bunch of usually-reasonably-well-thought-out articles and home to the terribly amusing Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation fame. (In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if half their traffic is directly attributable to ZP.) So last week while waiting for a (terribly long) compile I pop over there to see what's what, and I find this: Open Letter to People Who Make Games as penned by Russ Pitts. It's not a long read, but if you, like me, have ever spent time in the Biz, you'll get good and frothy too. Feel free to read it if you like (I'll wait), but I'll sum it up: the game industry is doomed because game people suck. One particular quote really sent me off the deep end:
I know that some of you take this seriously enough to devote your working hours making these games right, making patches and fixes that will resolve your players' issues. I know that some of you work overtime on this. I know you lose money. I know it sucks for you. And yet, I don't care.This is indicative of the kind of entitlement that the general public has that is particularly maddening. If you've heard about the jackasses who did a DOS attack on Minecraft because they weren't happy with Notch's speed of updates then you know exactly what I'm talking about. I could probably link a bunch of other similar things but I won't bore you with that. Instead, I'll bore you with a bunch of my observations across five companies and more than a decade of professional game development.
Let's start here: No one in the Biz wants to ship a shitty game. I don't care about your hypotheticals about evil execs and pernicious designers, none of the untold hundreds of people I've worked with personally have ever set out to build a game that sucks all ass, ever. It's just not part of the culture which is why I have no issue making such a blanket statement. Most games are released before they're ready which is part of what Russ's rant is about but that's largely decided by execs and money guys; you know, the stuffed suits that make the real money.
Why is that? Well, because it's a business. That business would be making as much money for investors as possible and that means shipping the most things with the most appeal at the most opportune times. Hardcore gamers just looooove to whine about how everything is getting dumbed down. This isn't a coincidence. The economics of the thing is that if you need a budget of $30M (small to middling these days; giant when I started in the Biz) you have to sell about a bajillion copies to break even. Sorry. That's just the way it is if you want your spiffy art at a decent framerate. So the industry as a whole tries to open up any given game to the widest audience possible even if it means knocking off all the gnarly corners that us old-timers really loved. Usually this is stuff like "approachability" and "accessibility" and probably a bunch of other "ibilities" that escape me at the moment.
The "opportune times" bit also comes with baggage. Everyone who's ever worked on software knows that software projects pretty much always run long; sometimes way long if they even ship at all. This is super bad when you start talking about fixed schedules like we almost always have, i.e., we mostly ship around the holidays. How fixed these schedules may actually be tends to never be as fixed as management would make them seem to be which is part of why at most companies people crunch like fucking corn flakes most of the year. The best part? A lot of the time your reward for being a hero is getting laid off at the end of the project!
Software people outside the Biz understand a lot of this. No plan is ever as complete as the Suits would like and no plan ever survives first contact with the
In the Biz, teams which can actually affect quality directly almost never have control over any corner. Our ship date is fixed and most times pushed inward due to certification checks and manufacturing, our feature set is largely fixed because it's part of what the Suits want to market (not that they wouldn't change their minds midway through a project and mandate said changes without adjusting schedules or budgets or anything), and as a kicker, the same Suits who fix the ship date also fix the budget. Each of these things from a business point of view is sensical but it means that there's never enough of anything on a given project and you're usually short two if not all of the three.
Software is a pretty young art (almost certainly not a science despite what my two fancy, expensive pieces of paper say) and the greater industry is still wrestling with its care and nurture. The Games Biz is even younger and seems to be so heads-down that we can't even effectively learn from the larger body of experience that the software biz has. Why is this? Our management tends to be inexperienced. I've had maybe two or three managers that didn't outright suck over a couple dozen of them and I don't think I've ever met a reasonable exec. Real Managers (TM) don't often show up in game dev because pay is so comparatively low and hours are so comparatively crappy. Managers, unlike artists, designers, or programmers, don't grow up wanting to make games--at least, I haven't met any good ones that have at this point in time.
And wouldn't that be just like a disgruntled worker-cog to pin the blame solely on management? Probably, but our worker-cogs tend to be inexperienced too. We turn over something like 20% of our workforce every year. Other than college sports rosters, I don't know of any group that does that and remains competitive. (Maybe we're only competitive because most of our peers are doing it too.) Most people burn out after a few years. It turns out that crappy working environments + long hours + looming layoffs + lower than average pay is way greater than the idealism that drives most people to get into the Biz in the first place. But, as it turns out, this is kind of what drives a lot of studios because for every one of us that falls there are ten bright eyed kids that would do the job for free. Never mind the fact that only a few of these kids will statistically stick around for more than a few years or that exceptionally few of them are actually qualified to do what you need them to do. I've been on more than a few teams that bulked up during the painful phases of a project with a bunch of junior people who made the entire thing generally much harder. It's almost as if we should know better by now. This is part of why studios go through the hire/fire/re-hire cycles and part of why salaries are so comparatively low.
So, OK, Mr. Pitts:
When I play a game that you have made, and which is broken, I ask myself the question: Which is it with you? Did you not know that your game had problems, or did you know and decide to ship it anyway? I hope you can understand that either way we have a problem. Actually, the problem is mostly yours.I'm really not sure who he thinks his audience is. I sure as hell don't decide when the thing goes out. I don't think I've shipped a title that I didn't wish I had more time to fix. Maybe Suits read this stuff. Either way, most games don't ship in as broken a state as he seems to imply. All software has bugs. I dislike buggy games as much as the next guy (actually, probably way more than the next guy) but to reiterate: no one wants to ship a shitty game. Want to send a real message, one that will be way more meaningful than a snarky plea? Stop buying games you think are broken. Bonus points if you don't give a broken game a buy recommendation. Tell the Suits that this just isn't good enough and maybe they'll start getting us worker-cogs enough resources to build better games. Seems pretty simple, right?
You will be the one who has made a game that is so bad I can't actually play it. You will have failed at your only job, tomake a game. Worse, you will have contributed to the depression of your industry. You may be putting yourself and people you know out of a job.News flash for you, buddy: I'm probably out of a job either way. Ship a million copies or miss a ship date, it doesn't really matter. The economics just plain don't scale and most companies just plain don't care about the people they employ either way. The typical work agreement is that they can fire me at any time without cause! That's right, kids, you're just a cog and they don't even need a reason to kick your ass out the door. That's just part of the cost of following The Dream. Apparently another part of it is suffering fools who really ought to know better.
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