Crunch is avoidable. But it requires a level of maturity and acceptance that the game industry sorely lacks. People argue that there’s always a period of crunch necessary at the end of a project. But that’s not true, either. If you are disciplined enough to accept deadlines and understand that there’s a point where you have to stop adding features, schedules can be planned with some lead time for debugging.

Anyone who tells you crunch is unavoidable is a fool. It might be that the games being made just now are unprofitable without crunch, but that’s not a reason to crunch; that’s a reason to change the way we make games.

On a similar note, you will find a couple of opinion pieces from me over on I <3 Crunch, a new blog set up specifically to raise awareness about articles on crunch, studios who are crunching their staff (and those which aren’t). I hope that by talking about this more we can put to rest this ridiculous notion that crunch is somehow acceptable or something we just have to live with. It’s the industry’s dirty secret, and the more we bring it out into the open, the better we will all be.

My issue with the way the IGDA work with regards to these reports of crunch is pretty much the same every time. They don’t seem to do anything unless someone makes a formal complaint to them, and even then they seem to put the onus on the individuals at the studio to be acting on it themselves. To me, it should be the other way around. There should be a ‘report a company’ button on their website which is 100% anonymous, and really simple to find/use. Once pressed, the IGDA (or whomever) would come along to the company and ask the company if it’s true. Either:

1. the company says it is, and they’re not ashamed
2. the company says it is, and they’re sorry, and here’s how they’re going to address it
3. the company says it isn’t.

In 3) the IGDA can then ask if it can speak to employees at random for their opinion. The company can only really refuse if they’ve got something to hide. The company won’t be allowed to know who said what, and they’ll have to ask enough people so that the employees can’t be threatened or accused of ‘ratting the company out’. The employees will either:

1. confirm that there’s no crunch, and the original report was bogus
2. confirm that there is crunch (and ideally give details), showing that the company is both deliberately crunching, and deliberately lying about it.

In most of those outcomes, they can publicly state the results of their investigations. It doesn’t have to be a big fanfare or singling particular developers out (at least to begin with), just quietly announcing what they discovered when they asked the question.

• If a company is never reported on, you can take that as a good sign.
• If a company isn’t crunching its staff, it can be held up as a good example.
• If a company is crunching its staff and isn’t ashamed, the IGDA can publicise that fact (and discourage potential applicants).
• If a company is crunching its staff but wishes it weren’t, that can be publicised, and the situation monitored; if they have a plan to fix it, the IGDA could go back in a year or two and see if they’ve made progress, and if so hold them up as an example to others as to how to get out of crunch mode.
• If a company is crunching its staff but pretending they aren’t, that can be publicised as well, including the fact that their staff say something different, all of which will discourage potential applicants.

Even those at the IGDA who are convinced that the “40 hour week” is some crazed ideal that not everyone agrees with can’t really argue against that, because you can do it neutrally, without stating categorically that crunch is bad. Even if you think crunch can be a good thing, it can be highlighted in the findings. What matters is that the situation be made clear to one and all.

It only relies on the simple fact that any organisation can ask a question of another publicly. The respondent is then put on the spot, either they have to ignore the question, lie, admit it, or deny it. Failure to answer the question is damning enough in itself. An organisation which doesn’t crunch has nothing to fear, an organisation which crunches and doesn’t care (like Team Bondi) won’t mind the question being asked. The only organisations which would be disadvantaged are the ones who are crunching and trying to hide it. In which case simply asking the question is enough to bring it out into the light.

Our real problem is that the press and the IGDA and others aren’t talking about it enough. Not in general terms (‘crunch is bad’), but in specifics (‘the kind of crunch being talked about at Bondi is bad’). If no-one asks the awkward questions until after it’s been so f*(&ed up for years, then it’s only going to continue.

I loved the original, even though I wouldn’t have bought it were it not tacked onto Half-Life 2: Episode 2. It always struck me as a wonderfully weighted title – just the right length, elegant in its simplicity, and with a level of polish that larger titles just don’t achieve. More than anything though, it was a title that left me wanting more, not because it was too short, but because it was so good. Much like a wonderful novel or film where I get immersed in the universe and characters, the end comes with both a warm glow of satisfaction at the conclusion, and an aching for more. More of the characters, more from the rich universe. It’s a rare creation that brings that level of quality to the observer, and both Portal incarnations have that quality in spades.

I’ve been ranting somewhat about the poor judgement of top-end games development recently. Quality of Life and financial issues are just one facet of a deeper problem: that we’ve been trapped into an arms race of scope. To justify a ‘full-price’ cost, developers feel they have to match or out-do each other. Worlds grow larger and larger, not even bound by memory constraints, since every large game streams their environments off disc. Stories grow more and more epic, and require game-play lengths to match. More characters are wedged in, even though there’s not enough time to get to know them in any great detail. Their voices are provided by more and more famous actors. Cut-scenes get flashier and longer.

The problem is that the underlying mentality to it all is ‘go big, or go home.’ Budgets spiral upwards, or if they don’t, then quality spirals downwards. Both hurt a title’s chances of success. But more quality doesn’t justify a higher price tag to match the increased costs. The players have shown in a wide variety of ways that they’re not prepared to pay any more for games than the already high cost. Second-hand sales and rental mean that the RRP quickly gets turned into the ‘real’ price – far lower. Popular titles drop slower than unpopular ones, so market forces still apply. But as an industry we still delude ourselves that we ‘deserve’ the RRP times the number of units sold.

That’s not the real madness though. The real madness is that despite all our profitability numbers showing the decline, developers and publishers keep on down the same path. They know how much more it costs to increase the scope of the games we make, but they do it anyway. Why? Because they know if they don’t invest enough in titles they flop, because they are competing with other titles on quality. But they don’t know how to turn investment money into quality. Quality is hard. It’s intangible, and you don’t always know it until you see it. So they put the money on things they can understand. More levels, more characters, bigger worlds. They set themselves a benchmark of their competitors, plus some. Because if X was a success, and we have more of everything than X, then we’re as good as X, right?

So when a title like Portal comes along, I regain a bit of hope for our industry. By showing that you can make a massively successful title, not by making it bigger, or more complicated, but by making it good, it’s a bit of ammunition for the decision makers. They can point to Portal and say “it doesn’t need to be big, as long as it’s fun”, or “let’s find a mechanic that works well, and just stick with that”. And maybe we can halt this crazy race to massacre our industry’s profit margins.

[EDIT: the original draft of this article did not mention the IGDA press release made a week after the Rockstar San Diego Gamasutra post mentioned. Thanks to Erin for pointing this out in the comments, it's definitely pertinent information, and in the IGDA's favour.]

Credibility Hit #1: Mike Capps and working hours

This was the incident which prompted my previous posts: a board member, who had become aware of the IGDA’s efforts to work towards more sensible working hours, and didn’t agree with those efforts. Now, fair enough, the best (indeed only) way to influence policy in an organisation like the IGDA is to get involved, and he’s forthright about why he joined though:

But yes, I’m familiar with that [IGDA QoL white paper]. In fact it’s one of the reasons that I joined the Board in the first place. Because when I ran for the Board it was right around the time of “EA spouse” hitting and there were certainly organizations that were not taking quality of life seriously. But I thought that the efforts of the IGDA SIG task force were really misguided.

His stance ran completely counter to what the IGDA had been campaigning for. When pressed, the IGDA had the choice of standing by their original position, or defending what Capps had said and done. They chose the latter, which to me invalidates all they’ve stood for. Worse, individual board members made statements which pretty much supported Capps’ views, although many of them were later retracted.

Credibility Hit #2: IGDA and Rockstar San Diego

A chance to redeem themselves came in early 2009, when the wives of various R* San Diego employees got together and threatened legal action against their husbands’ employer. Not the best of moves admittedly, but a move borne out of frustration and an inability to help their situation any other way. After a week, the IGDA posted a press release which nodded to the Gamasutra article, and re-iterated their position on QoL, without outrightly accusing R*SD of anything (understandably so). This I can’t disapprove of, although I felt it could have been far more critical, and should have called for R*SD to respond publicly to the accusations made against them.

However I was worried by the immediate response (on the day of the article) from the IGDA, in the comments, as represented by Erin Hoffman. In it she voiced vague moral support, followed quickly by claiming that things were better than they were 5 years ago, defending the IGDA against criticisms about its inaction, and seemed to be blaming the developers for not asking the IGDA nicely for help.

It is an inflammatory red herring to call attention to the IGDA in this case. I have sat on the IGDA’s Quality of Life committee since it was formed and the ECQC since 2005 and its formation. No one from Rockstar has ever once contacted either group, nor, to my knowledge, sought advice from the IGDA on this issue at all. I have individually spoken with multiple Rockstar San Diego developers over the years and have known that this was brewing, but until someone was willing to do something about it, there was nothing to be done from the outside.

The QoL SIG has achieved very little over the years, and it seems very much that it is content to sit and debate the issue, without taking any active steps. What role does it have, if not to act as an independent voice through which the development community as a whole can criticise the actions of studios who abuse their staff’s quality of life? They shouldn’t be waiting for permission.

If there’s even a hint that conditions like this exist at a studio, it’s time to make a carefully worded statement condemning such practices, and asking the studio in question to defend itself: either by debunking the accusation, or by coming clean and apologising for the way things are (and explaining what they intend to do to fix them). The IGDA is one of the few organisations in a position to bring these practices into the light, and by doing so help us start the conversations needed to fix them. I was cheered to see their statement in January about Kaos studios and a similar situation. This should be the norm, and I hope to see more of it in the future.

But at its heart, the IGDA’s position is inherently unclear. Are they representing the individuals, the staff, who develop games? Or are they representing the studios (a large chunk of the IGDA membership is from ‘studio’ memberships, where every developer at a studio is a member only because their studio is a member). When it comes to Quality of Life, those two groups are in tension, and in trying to represent both, the IGDA would represent neither.

Credibility Hit #3: Tim Langdell

More trouble on the IGDA board. A member who not only does not represent the games industry, but indeed is someone whom the games industry is actively ashamed of. Someone quite happy to use the fact that he was an ‘IGDA Board Member’ to bolster his own reputation. Elected in March 2009, eventually forced to resign in late August 2009. His underhand tactics and practices regarding abuse of tenuous trademarks have since been thoroughly exposed, documented, and now thanks to EA of all people, consigned to history. But I mention this here not for those reasons, but because even once the full extent of Tim Langdell’s business practices were exposed, the majority of the IGDA board not only condoned his actions, several of them even defended him. Much like the Capps affair, it seemed clear that the IGDA board would stick together, regardless of their members actions.

The resulting furore and outright uprising on the IGDA forums should have been ample indication to the board that they had royally pissed off their membership, and that they needed to do something. What they did, sadly, was to first ignore, then to suppress the discussion, by locking threads and deleting the increasingly shrill posts condemning their actions. Month after month, it dragged on. Those most passionate about the whole affair demanded that Langdell be removed from the board, but the board refused to do consider this, stating that the IGDA membership would have to raise a petition before they’d consider it. But, they wouldn’t consider the forum thread a petition, nor would they consent to actively poll their members on it. Eventually, those involved had to scrape the membership’s email addresses from the website just to solicit the membership opinion. Very quickly thereafter, the support for Langdell’s removal (or at least a proper vote on the matter) was irrefutable. Only then was the IGDA board even starting to acknowledge that Langdell’s position might be untenable.

Throughout this whole affair, I was flabbergasted by just how disconnected the board was from its membership. If this is how the IGDA as an organisation responds (or fails to respond) to a matter where their membership is clearly polarised, how can they be expected to reach a representative decision when the matter is less clear cut. As a democratic organisation, it is continually struggling to reach quorum on its votes, and as a result very little can be actioned. Even board membership elections fail to reach quorum, but by convention the board accepts the votes anyway (otherwise the whole thing would fall apart). So how it can claim to represent developers, I’m not entirely sure.

Website

Ironically, the mechanism by which the whole Tim Langdell debacle really kicked off: the forums, is also one of their most chronic failures. For several years, a new website had been promised, all bells and whistles, which was to transform the IGDA website and how the community interacted with each other. To say that the website, when it was finally delivered (late), failed to deliver would be an understatement. The old forums weren’t great, but at least it worked. The complaints about new forums are so bad, it’s no surprise that conversation has dropped off to a pitiful amount. Which I suppose is great for avoiding controversy and criticism by your members, but much less so if you want to maintain a thriving community which promotes communication amongst your membership.

Benefits

It would be remiss of me to write a post like this without talking about the up-sides to membership of the IGDA. For an ‘international’ game developers association, the benefits of membership are largely not that international. The biggest tangible benefit: health-care discount, is only applicable in the US. The discounts on conferences are mostly for US conferences, except for GDC Europe. There are discounts on books and they provide web resources though, which is very likely useful.

There certainly are useful SIGs as well: the Toolsmiths SIG is a gold-mine of knowledge, a great place to bring some very good and very experienced tools developers together to share knowledge.

But the biggest benefit of the IGDA in my eyes however has always been the social aspect. The local chapters are where the real value of the IGDA lies: getting game developers to come together, share knowledge, and get to know each other. That is why, for all the organisation’s flaws, I’m still happy to see efforts to restart the IGDA Scotland chapter. As a banner to rally under, it’s a pretty decent one – well known and easy to find.

The vast majority of usefulness I’ve seen come out of the IGDA has been voluntary work, done by chapter organisers for the benefit of their local community, not paid for by the membership dues. I want to know how I can support those people, not the IGDA. Absolutely, let’s get together and get involved: the more we work as a community the better we’ll be. But that doesn’t need to involve paying $48 dollars to a US-based organisation, for some intangible benefits. Especially when that organisation gains both cash and credibility by counting you as a member, but is not actively working in your best interests.

Some people think the IGDA’s day is past, and the declining membership is a sign that a new organisation is needed. I don’t agree. There’s a new crop of board members elected, that know fine well what has gone before. Some of them (like Darius Kazemi) have been open and honest about the organisation’s flaws, and are working hard to make things right. I want those people to succeed, and restore the IGDA to being something I am not only happy about, but would actively support. And in taking a stance against Amazon’s app store policies, it looks like they’re heading in the right direction. I look forward to the day when they sort out their work on Quality of Life in the games industry, and I can reconsider my stance.

It concerns a mother who is indignant that Microsoft are ignoring her complaints about her 11 year old child being ‘allowed’ to spend over £1000 on XBox Live. Over the course of six months as well, so it’s not like it was a spending binge.

Some choice quotes from the article:

“It is ridiculous to allow someone of his age to make payments without any checks being done,” out of pocket mother Dawn Matthews told the Daily Mail.

Indeed. Lucky there are several checks in place to ensure that children can’t spend someone elses money. All of which you bypassed for him.

“When he is in gaming mode he can’t be thinking about the money. You can’t put all that responsibility on a young boy.

Yes. Heaven forbid a child understand the concept of money, and the spending of other people’s.

“It is impossible to monitor everything your children do. These companies should take some responsibility. They take advantage of vulnerable people.”

Well, someone should certainly take responsibility. I’m going to go with the person who gave the child the ability to spend that money, and to a lesser extent the child for actually spending it.

“A thousand pounds isn’t that much to people like Bill Gates,” concluded Dawn Matthews, “but for a single mum it is a lot of money that I don’t have.”

Okay, well a) Bill Gates has been gone from Microsoft for a long time, and b) if you don’t have the money to spend, then you should be careful about how you allow it to be spent. Six months went past before this was stopped. That’s six credit card bills with their contents ignored. If you don’t understand what you’re doing with your credit card, then maybe it’s not a wise thing for you to have a credit card.

As if the refusal to accept responsibility for disabling all the parental controls and putting her credit card details in wasn’t enough, a cursory examination of this 11 year old’s public gaming history shows a slew of 16+ and 18+ plus titles.

I was recently discussing the new GTA facial animation technology with some friends and someone made a comment along the lines of “Meh. It’s a shame people will be praising this, the gameplay will no doubt  suck.”

Hearing a comment like that isn’t uncommon, and nor is hearing support for it. There have been a bunch of memes with a similar attitude flying around the internet for the last few years, so I figured I should give a go at dispelling some of the main ones in the chance for some unity and piece of mind.

Modern games just focus on graphics instead of gameplay

This is by far the most common one to hear, and though there might be some truth in it, it’s just a gross dismissal of the issue. The statement is purposefully ambiguous – as to actually use a word other than “focus” ties people down. For these people graphics have just become a scapegoat for bad design.

Most commonly by “focus”, people mean that more money is being spent on graphics than is justified. While games do have much larger budgets for artwork now – budgets across the board have increased. Programming teams, too, are larger, with a requirement for a much vaster selection of technical skills. These teams have had to deal with increasing expectations from the industry as well. The building of expansive maps and characters, which is often the standard now, isn’t just an artistic burden! Design teams are larger too, with a host of new dedicated positions for mapping, scripting, writing and many others. The idea of this paradigm shift by funding toward “having to be the best looking game” is simply a myth.

Even more to the point – does anyone really believe money can simply be thrown at good game design, and if it was the case, with the kind of sums made from WOW, wouldn’t developers and publishers be doing it already?

All my old favourites were just about gameplay

Recently I went back and looked over some old reviews of one of my favourite games, Populous: The Beginning. I expected it to score well overall, being a fantastic game. But what I wasn’t expecting was the fact that in almost every review it scored 10/10 for graphics.

Thinking about it afterwards, it didn’t seem so odd. The graphics for the time were amazing. Deformable terrain and flowing lava, as well as a beautiful world which felt alive with a host of subtle touches. Thinking about it even more I realized that almost all of my favourite games are in the same boat – Quake, Black & White, Sonic 3, Half Life, numerous others. I couldn’t even think of an example with graphics significantly worse than average. Developers have been pushing both graphical and technical bounds since the beginning of gaming.

Graphics are largely unimportant in a game

I think most people would agree, that almost by definition, gameplay is the most important part of a game. But pretending that graphics are unimportant is simply ridiculous. Atmosphere is one of the key parts of a game, and is deeply tied to the graphical style and quality. Immersion also is important, and while this doesn’t really relate to the number of polygons a game can draw, the consistency of the visuals are hugely important.

Developments in graphics are a hugely important device in opening up doors and new opportunities for game designers. It isn’t just coincidence that the vast majority of games for early systems were very similar, and usually tile based or 2D scrolling platformers.

Perhaps in the near future we’ll see another shift in game design and development, similar to what happened when 3D worlds became a legitimate mechanic. I, for one, want to be around when that happens, not lamenting over my Sega Mega Drive.

I don’t care about graphics providing the gameplay is good

This one is most commonly heard from the die hard fans of games such as Dwarf Fortress and the various MUDs and Roguelikes out there. There are grains of truth in this statement but most advocates seem to just be picking and choosing what they consider to be “graphics” when it suits them.

Gameplay and graphics can’t be separated so easily. Interaction, the key element of games, requires graphics at some level, and if it is impossible for a person to relate to this representation of interaction, the game is bound to fail.

The origin of this meme appears as an attempt to distance oneself from the typical screaming Call Of Duty kid, but just because a game doesn’t look like a generic Gears Of War clone, with bloom and HDR turned up to 11, doesn’t mean it isn’t impressive graphically or technically – often quite the contrary.

A good example is the indie gem Minecraft. Perhaps suprising to some, most artists would agree Minecraft has excellent graphics – and the progammers are reasonably impressed too. The whole game is soaked in atmosphere, the style is charming and consistent. There isn’t much more you could ask for.

Look on the net and you’ll find hundreds of instances of most incantations of puzzle and platformer games. It isn’t a surprise that the most popular version is usually the one with the most charming graphics ( N,  Orisinal come to mind).

Number of polygons might not matter to some people, but the ultimate system for how interaction is achieved, does.

So whose fault is it

One of the common trends I see in great games that stick in your mind, is an approach where by the essence of the game appears to be drawn out from the world. Populous, as mentioned above, is a good example of this, as well as another old favourite, Dungeon Keeper. In games such as this, the world and gameplay go together so beautifully that it isn’t even possible to quantify the gameplay mechanics without including the graphics, the atmosphere, the story and all the rest with it.

It seems that many modern blockbusters have a focus on “features”. Fallout 3, for example, feels very odd to play because it is set in this wonderful rich universe, but the gameplay is still more or less completely separate and abstracted from the setting. In a similar way, you could name a number of other recent titles, that seem like basic first person shooters with a graphical setting, and a number of “features” tacked onto the side – and none of that holds together very well.

Graphics and gameplay aren’t these two brothers competing for attention, and if you intend on making a truely great game, act like the responsible parent and don’t send them to their individual rooms – force them to play nicely together.

And therein lies the problem. There aren’t enough successes. Sure they’re out there. World of Warcraft, Halo, COD4, Red Dead Redemption. But for every Halo there is a Haze, for every World of Warcraft there is an APB. What matters, for the health of the industry in general, is that the averages play out. It’s not enough that a hit brings in $100 million in profit, if for every hit a publisher also ships 6 titles that lose $20 million each. If every title was independent, that would be fine: quality is rewarded with profit, and its lack with loss. Businesses who make poor quality product should be punished, that is all part of a free market system.

But the problem is that the businesses at the core of the current system, the publishers, are shipping titles on both sides of the line. This is what they’ve always done. There’s nothing really wrong with that: it’s extraordinarily hard to predict in advance whether or not a title will be a success, and certainly not before a lot of money has already been sunk into the project.

What made such a system workable was that in the past, the profits on the hit titles were so much larger that they easily paid for the development of the flops. All publishers had to do was to stay on the right side of the line – make sure their hits were big enough and their flops were infrequent enough. So what has changed? Budgets.

Development budgets used to be far, far smaller. The retail price of games has stayed mostly the same, and the number of units sold has risen, not by much, but risen. But the budgets have gone insane. In any other business, the notion of accepting costs an order of magnitude higher, knowing that the incomes wouldn’t jump in the same way, would be madness. Bit by bit, the publishers have slipped to the position where only a few flops in a row is enough to cripple them.

For the games industry to be healthy again, an average game needs to be able to make money. That’s how averages work. If you have to be in the top 10 or 20% of titles just to break even, then there is 80% of the titles being made that are losing money, and those 80% cost almost as much to make as the top titles. And in the end, the funding for that top 20% comes from the same businesses that are funding the bottom 80%.

It’s not entirely the publishers’ fault – the console platform holders gave them a technology platform for which the development costs were far higher, and then took the old platforms away. No-one asked the consumer if they were prepared to pay a higher price for games on those platforms, because we knew they wouldn’t. Instead, the industry held their breath, and sucked up the increased risk and cost, hoping that they would be able to make good enough games to survive. That’s not a healthy business model.

Have you seen any new publishers enter the market recently? There’s a reason for that. Our business isn’t one that people want to get into. If publishers were making good money, for every failure because they shipped consistently poor games, another business would arise with a better focus on quality. That’s not happening – even the most experienced publishers are struggling for air.

It’s not just the publishers either. I know many developers who refuse to consider making anything but top-flight AAA titles, pushing the hardware to the limit. When it is suggested that titles on that scale aren’t profitable, they sneer, and point at the successes, and ignore the failures. They say that if being profitable means making social networking games, or mobile titles, then they don’t even want to be in the industry any more. What sort of an attitude is that? “If I can’t make these shovels out of diamonds, I don’t want to make shovels any more.” Does anyone want a diamond shovel? No. If you’re offering one for the same price as the old wood and steel shovel, then sure. But the old shovel was fine for me, and I don’t have any more money to spend on shovels than I had before.

The pre-owned market is a big indicator of the pain going around the industry at the moment. Consumers think even the current price points are far too high, so when retailers like Gamestop, etc. offer them a re-sale value that gets them the same games for cheaper, they jump at it. Why are the retailers pushing it? Because their margins were getting trimmed to the point where they couldn’t make a decent profit. Why? Because the publishers were also trying to maintain a decent profit level themselves, as risks and increased costs of development slashed their profits to ribbons.

What to do? Fix the budgets. Better efficiency. Get scope under control – no more long games for the sake of it. If one publisher takes the first step, back towards to profitability in their core business, is the consumer really going to abandon them? Will they really not buy a high quality game because it’s shorter than some other publisher’s offering? And if they don’t, what about next year, when that other publisher has gone under, and there’s no “other game” to buy?

Executive Summary:

If the government wants to help the games industry, rather than through relief on corporation tax, it should do so by improving the quality of the talent pool. By supporting education, apprenticeships and internships within games developers, and making it easier and cheaper to hire talented but inexperienced staff. In doing so, it will help maintain the UK’s competitiveness as a creative centre, and the returns in increased profitability for UK developers should pay for the incentive schemes. Any incentive scheme which rewards large non-UK publishers will in my view be less effective than one which supports the myriad of smaller developers, many of which are wholly UK-owned.

Full Response:

Sadly, since the original request for input to this inquiry, the Scottish games industry has suffered a serious blow in the loss of Realtime Worlds. I would like to start by raising my voice against the ridiculous notion put forth by various MPs to the media that the previously cancelled tax-breaks proposal would have somehow prevented this company’s failure. The scheme proposed relief on corporation tax, and Realtime Worlds’ issues were certainly not down to being too heavily taxed.

I run a small studio that provides development support services to the wider games industry, primarily in the UK. We are members of the trade association TIGA, whom I believe will also contribute to this inquiry. TIGA were instrumental in persuading the previous government to take up the proposed tax relief scheme, but I must confess that I am not and never have been entirely convinced that their proposal is the best approach to boost the industry.

When the current government announced the scheme would be scrapped, I cannot say that I was concerned. It had never been implemented, only proposed in loose terms by the previous government. I doubt it would have ever made it to implementation. Its absence will not hurt the Scottish games industry, where the only sizeable developer left (Rockstar North) is foreign owned, and solid for other reasons than financial ones. The smaller developers left here are not in a position to expand massively, tax-breaks or not.

While corporation tax-breaks would I’m sure attract inward investment to the UK as a whole, their nature is such that the biggest winners in such a scheme are large, multi-national publisher/developer corporations. Implementing tax breaks might attract them to form or expand studios here, but aside from the direct investment here, their profits still largely go abroad. Once in place, it seems to me that removing those tax-breaks would quickly lead to studios being declared unprofitable and being shut down again, such is the fickle nature of games development.

Furthermore, subsidising the industry solely because the French and Canadian governments do seems to me to be a dead end road that can only end in subsidies escalating out of control. Yes, we are losing development talent to Canada, and the more developers that go out of business here, the more of our talented workforce will emigrate there. But when studios go bust, their talent doesn’t just leave the country, some also leave the industry, and our available workforce pool is diminished. The tightening belts of the publishers and financiers of the industry don’t allow developers the leeway they need to recruit and train new talent, and that hurts the industry both now and in the long term.

I don’t want to see subsidies for general game development. I don’t want to see incentives to make culturally British games (although I do think that there should be more of them made). What I think the government should be doing is to support what makes the UK competitive in the world market: our creative talent. We need more developers doing innovative, creative things. We can’t compete with Eastern Europe or Asia on labour cost, but we can compete on labour quality. But for that developers have to be able to take in new talent, new ideas, and reinforce a waning labour pool.

I would propose subsidies for education and training. And since the only kind of training that is really effective in the games industry is on-the-job, what I would like to see is more support from the government to get students and young people inside developers and doing real work. Apprenticeships for game developers almost. I’d like to see real financial support for developers who want to take on inexperienced but talented people. That might take the form of subsidised placements, internships, or PAYE relief on students. The universities like Abertay are doing well with their industry outreach efforts, but with better financial support they could do far better. The developers want the talent, but they can’t afford to take risks in hiring, or to get the people up to a useful level of productivity. The universities want to get their graduates into the industry. The government wants the students in jobs, and it wants the developers healthy and profitable.

So in summation, if the government wants to help the games industry, it should do so by reducing the real costs UK developers have: the staff. In doing so they will enrich the talent pool, maintain the UK’s competitiveness as a creative centre, and the returns in increased profitability should pay for the incentive schemes.

That was late last week though. Come Tuesday afternoon, news surfaced that there had just been a company meeting to announce that the administrators had been called in. And not in a graceful, let’s wind things down sort of way. In an almighty, we’re all out of money, and by the way you’re not getting paid for August sort of way. While that’s not unprecedented (when VIS went down, they at least had the courtesy to do so immediately after a pay-day so no-one did any work that wasn’t going to be paid for; but DC went down with unpaid wages), I don’t think it’s ever forgivable. But the difference was, those other studios had been operating milestone to milestone for a long while, burning through their cash. RTW had their investment up front, they knew what money was coming in, and when it would stop. To go under leaving unpaid wages (and word is, a bunch of trade debt as well) is to me a massively negligent failing of those in charge.

The whole affair smacks of senior management, knowing they’d burnt through all their cash (and let’s not forget, that’s over $100m), and yet continuing to operate. APB had run over its development timescale, that was public knowledge, but if they didn’t have enough money to operate beyond its launch, this mess should have been sorted out when they realised what was going to happen. I’m sure they thought that to do so would further damage the APB launch: who would want to invest time in an MMO if it looked like the developer was going to go bust even before launch. That doesn’t excuse screwing over your employees: they chose to gamble everything on persuading new investors to save them. And since they’d already failed to show that they could deliver on the sort of projects they claimed to have expertise in, I don’t know how they thought anyone would believe them.

I’m sure there will be more details and analysis from those who saw this mess from the inside. Even last week, this RTW person let go in the MyWorld redundancies put an insightful but damning post over on Rock Paper Shotgun. I’ll come back to this one once more of the details have become clear. Sadly, even if a phoenix company does ride from the ashes (again stirring memories of DC and their similarly resurrection), it will be a dim shadow of what RTW once was. While there are still several good businesses in Dundee doing alright, the heart has been cut out of the industry, both in Dundee and in Scotland in general. We’ll lose a lot of good talented people, because there is no-where else with the capacity to pick them up. Again, Scottish development will take years to rebuild, if indeed we ever manage it.

Next time, I think, will be a rant about development budgets, and how they’re hurting us all.

Why don't you have a decent search facility WiiWare? Why?

It’s true. One of my biggest issues with the games industry as it stands today is with the digital distribution stores (DDS for brevity) in place on the various platforms. I’m not going to jump on the bandwagon with others who have predicted the imminent death of physical retail stores; I think there’s still a large place for brick-and-mortar game shops, and they’re certainly not going away any time soon. But I think a large part of the continuing need for retailers is down to the failings of the various digital providers. Let’s list the most relevant ones:

• Amazon
• Steam
• WiiWare
• XBox Live Arcade
• Playstation Network
• iPhone App Store

Amazon of course isn’t really a DDS, although I believe they’re changing that. It’s really just a retailer of boxed products – the shop-front might be on-line, but the products are generally posted to you; however the problems it faces and has overcome are very much relevant to all of these services. Steam is much more relevant to the discussion here, as it’s a proper DDS, and it has learned from many of Amazon’s lessons; sadly it is let down by uncompetitive pricing and the lack of community integration.

Really though, my irritation comes from the remaining 4 DDS – each of which is the only means of buying product for their respective closed platforms (Wii, X360, PS3, iPhone). All 4 suffer from the same problems, all of which have known solutions as demonstrated by Amazon, Steam and others. And the 4, together or separately, represent a massive market of game-hungry users, with cash to spare, who just want to find the good games and ignore the crap.

Here are the main problems, in order of importance to me (the user):

1. Navigation: How do I find games that I want to buy
2. Selection: How do I choose when I’ve found those games
3. Purchasing: How hard is it for me to buy the games once I’ve chosen them

Navigation is the real fundamental problem here. All 4 providers suffer from the same issue: their services are popular, so developers make many titles; users are then swamped with choices. Without any external information (reviews, friends’ recommentations), all products look mostly identical, with only a superficial information (title, image, etc.) to distinguish them – assuming the user wants to read through every title’s description in the hope of finding something they like. If the average quality of titles is low (i.e. shovelware), then great titles are lost in the noise of rubbish, and customers are forced to take a punt on titles when they have little idea of their quality. Once they get burned once, they’re reticent to come back, and likely to dismiss the entire shop as shovelware.

All 4 holders recognise this as a problem, but take varying strategies to get around the issue:

• Top X lists (sales based): Popular products are easy to find. Great. New products have little chance to generate sales because the titles in the top X list keep selling (because they’re the only ones the user can readily find).
• Title searching: Allow the user to search for a keyword in the title or description. Great. As long as the user knows what product they want in advance. Little to no chance of discovering relevant products.
• Limit the number of titles in the system: The console DDS do this more than the iPhone, simply by maintaining high barriers to entry (requiring approval prior to development, enforced QA standards, etc.). But at best this delays the problem from becoming serious. XBLA recently wanted to implement a policy of culling poorly reviewed/low selling titles which was a clear attempt to tackle this issue, they’ve since backtracked on this in favour of better searching (yay!)
• Highlight particular titles: XBLA prefers this approach – titles get a week of being featured prominently on the front page. Great. Now you have to make enough sales during that crucial week to build enough momentum to get onto the top X list. Miss your week, and you’re shafted. Better hope you’re not featured during the same week that GTA4 comes out, eh?

The approach of limiting the amount of titles in the system is pure short-termist madness. Maybe it is just a short-term fix until a proper storefront system can be made, but XBLA has had what, 3 years now to mature their navigation systems? The solution is one already demonstrated by Amazon. Navigation is the key issue. Searching is only one potential fix. Products need to be categorised into groups so that users can find the set of products they like by interest. Products need to cross link to each other: “Liked this title? Why not try X and Y, also from this developer?” “Customers who looked at product X ended up buying product Y and Z.” “Customers who viewed these titles,” etc.

Random title prominence: this is so underrated. Sure, the front of your store is prime real-estate, and you probably want to sell it, but you can come up with a system which allows games to be featured if they’ve paid, or if the users have rated it worthy.

I can see the DDS people’s defence: “that’s too complicated a UI to put on a console, it needs to be kept simple”. Well maybe you’re right. That brings us straight to point 3: ease of purchase. Why is the game store only on the console (or phone)? It needs to have a properly integrated equivalent on the web. Customers like shopping on the web. They prefer it. They’re used to it, it’s more flexible, and it supports a much more pleasant experience. Ever tried to enter your credit card number using a joy-pad? It’s not fun. Why are you making me do it? I want to be able to browse a game-store on my PC that gives me as much functionality as Amazon, purchase my game, and then press two buttons (Shop, Download Purchased Titles) on my console to get that game downloaded.

Sure, some times it’s nice to be able to buy direct from the console, but it’s not my first choice. Keep it there as a more limited option and I’d be fine with that, as long as the web-store was nice. But as a developer, I want to be able to publish links to my game on a web-store, so they can get straight to our games, and get them onto their console in minutes.

Back to point 2 though – choosing products. I don’t trust reviewers as to what games are good. I certainly don’t trust the platform holders, since they have a financial interest in the products doing well. I trust the customers. Not individuals, because there are clearly nut-cases out there that rate highly or lowly depending on whether they took their medication this morning, but aggregate ratings over time.

Tell me what games sold big in the last week, or month (doesn’t have to include numbers). Tell me the average rating in the last week or month, and how many people rated it. Publish customer reviews, and professional reviews, and metacritic scores. Put all of the rating functionality into the search system, so you can find titles that rated over 4 stars in the last month in the flight simulator genre. Show me the all-time classic RPGs, based on ratings since the store first open. Maybe I’ve a hankering for high quality old-style adventure games, let me find those.

None of this is crazy blue sky thinking. It’s all been done, it’s all been shown to have worked. Build a better DDS, and you’ll sell more products, we’ll sell more games, the customer gets more games, and they get better games so they come back and buy more. I can’t think of any good reason why they wouldn’t want to fix their stores, other than to make little kittens cry.

First off, this implication that number of hours you work has absolutely zero relation to the level of talent you possess. I’ve worked with talentless hacks that “worked” 60-80 hour weeks and still achieved less than everyone else. I’ve worked with amazing people who worked bang on 9-5 Monday to Friday and were some of the most able and committed developers. Of course there are extreme cases – talented folks who love their job so much and are willing and eager to work extra hours, just as there are people who are so apathetic about their work that they don’t even want to do their contracted hours, and coast at every opportunity. Talent and the number of hours worked are independent variables. To try to connect them is not only foolish, it’s selling your employees short.

The coasters need to be sacked, plain and simple. Those who work extra hours but aren’t very good should be given the chance and help to improve, but if they can’t they need to go too. Those who work the 40 hour week and produce are the core of your business, and need to be treated like the stars they are: not only are they good at producing, they are sensible enough to do it in a sustainable way. Those who are great and want to work all hours can be gems, but only if they are managed properly. Try to keep them to a sensible working week, and they’ll stay gems for longer; if you don’t they’ll last a while, and then burn out.

Burning out

We’ve all seen it, many times. Constrain their hours and they’ll find other ways to excel; they’ll cram the same amount of work into the time they have, or they’ll go away and enjoy their evenings, eager to come back in the morning, brimming over with good ideas that they’ve been thinking up while they were away from work. But most importantly they’ll have had a life outside of the work, and that will make them happier with their lives and happier with their jobs. If you let them work those crazy hours, you are both taking advantage of their generosity, and setting an unreasonable precedent that other individuals on the team should be doing the same. No matter how much you tell your employees that 9 to 5 is fine, they’ll look at the long hours those few are putting in, and feel that by not doing those hours they aren’t pulling their weight.

Most of all I detest the idea that making games is special, and that somehow by getting to make games we forfeit some of our rights because we get to do work that we enjoy. Screw that. I make games for a living because I love it. I’ve already sacrificed the higher salary I could get in the regular software world. I’ve sacrificed the stability you get outside the games industry. Now you’re trying to tell me I should sacrifice my quality of life as well? And to top it all off, I should be thankful to those who pay my salary for the priviledge of doing my job? No thank you.

When I’m making games, I’m doing a job. I deserve to be paid for the job I do. You want me to sacrifice quality of life, you pay me for the priviledge. My love for what I do comes out in the quality of the products I make, and that’s the only outlet there should be for it. Making games needs passion because the games themselves need love to make them good. By asking for ridiculous working hours or low wages, you are asking me to be less passionate about my job because to do it I need to accept being screwed on pay and conditions.

I’m not some idealistic student, I know that it’s not as simple as just clicking your fingers and suddenly we’re all working standard hours for good wages. The business needs are always going to come first. Sometimes the deadline will loom, or things will go wrong, and we’ll have to work long hours to put it right. We are dedicated people, and exceptional circumstances require exceptional measures. But right now, the individuals working in games development are being regularly asked to subsidise their employer’s costs by means of their own time and effort. Worse than that, many of those employers think this is fine and right and just the way things are. Wrong. The sooner we accept that abusing our staff is unprofitable in the long term the better off we will be as businesses. The sooner we accept that the 40 hour working week is the norm, and everything we do should be trying to get us closer to that norm, the better off we will be.

Slaves to the Grind

There are two parts to this issue really, the first fairly obviously is the problems that this has raised in the IGDA itself. Rather than take what seems to me the obvious route (make a public statement that Epic, while being free to run their studio any way they see fit, is choosing to operate in a way at odds with the IGDA’s stand on quality of life for developers), when pushed on the matter, the rest of the IGDA board has essentially folded, almost entirely on their QoL position.

Now for an organisation that has put QoL very high up on its list of priorities, this is a real problem. The developer community (or at least, that part of it that I hear from and talk to) has always struggled to see the value in an IGDA membership; it doesn’t provide much in the way of tangible benefits, and the social and networking aspect varies massively based on the activity of the local chapter in your area. Certainly the IGDA doesn’t provide anything like the benefits that a union would, as it’s specifically written into its constitution that it cannot become a union or anything like one. But the IGDA’s advocation on quality of life issues has always been one of the big pluses for it in my book – it occupied a niche in that it is placed to represent the best interests of its member developers in campaigning for a better industry for us all. To take away that advocacy position seems to me removes the biggest reason to support or recommend membership to others.

The furore surrounding both the original statement by Mike Capps, and the subsequent IGDA refusal to condemn his stance on general principle is what confounds me though. There is no reason why individual members of the IGDA, even board members, have to work for studios that slavishly follow ever policy that the IGDA might recommend. And with that in mind, it’s perfectly acceptable for Mike Capps to remain a board member, even when his employer’s position conflicts with the recommendations of the IGDA. The next time the elections come around, the IGDA membership will think long and hard about whether or not it’s a good thing to have a board member whose personal policies conflict with such a high profile policy of the organisation. Great. That’s democracy in action.

No, what bothers me is that the other IGDA board members have steadfastly reversed their own organisations positions rather than criticise another board member. They even seem to have gone so far as to implicitely defend Epic’s policy. What, exactly, is the point of saying “all studios should aim for a 40 hour week, because it’s better for everyone involved”, if you then follow it up by saying “oh, unless you’re an IGDA member already; in that case you can run your studio however you like, and I’m sure Epic have a good reason for preferring a longer work week, they do seem to be quite successful and all.” The whole discussion on the IGDA forums has been flabbergastingly forthright in its defence of the over-working of individuals in games development.

The board members, and other senior figures in the IGDA, all seem to be quite surprised at the vehemence with which they’re being attacked. They don’t seem to see their own stance as hypocritical, but attempts to get them to justify their position have resulted in only anger and latterly heavy-handed moderation to quell the continuing argument on their own forums. More recently they have come out with public statements to clarify their position, and to attempt to re-assert their original position on QoL issues, but it all smacks of too-little-too-late unfortunately. The board’s own defence (both implicit and explicit) of Epic’s practices have in my opinion exposed their stance on QoL as nothing more than lip-service towards the ideal, despite the obvious importance the issue has with their (non-management) membership. If that membership hasn’t already voted with their feet and left by the next elections, I hope they show their dissapproval and vote out the incumbent board members in favour of some who actually believe in the policies the IGDA publicly endorse.

All that said, I’m not an IGDA member, and with all of this, I have no intention of becoming one now. No, what worries more is the attitude shown originally by Mike Capps, and latterly people on the IGDA forums. That somehow a person who only wants to work a 40-hour week is just a jobsworth, there marking time and collecting a pay-cheque but with no real passion or involvement with the work they do. That somehow the number of hours you work is linked to your talent. That somehow the fact that the job is making games makes it special, and exempt from all of the normal moral implications of taking advantage of your staff. 

(continued in part 2…)

SomeObject::GetID method

Gets the ID for the object

Does not mean that you have thorough documentation. Seriously. That is all.

[in reply to the implication that really good employees are the ones who work extra and late to deliver over and above expectations]

While I heartily acknowledge that it’s daft to just up sticks and leave at some arbitrary time and break your flow, I think that its still going to be the exception rather than the rule. You don’t always hit your peak productivity at 4:30 only to have to leave at 5. Certainly there are some days when I’m just getting going when I really should be going home – I find a good point to shelve it and go home. And when I come back in the morning, I’ve had a whole night to ponder the work and generally do a better job of finishing it up than had I just forged ahead.

That said, I don’t want my team feeling like more hours = better work. The only way I want to see productivity improved is for people to work smarter and harder for those 8 hours. I want people to go home feeling like they achieved lots, but still get home at a sensible time that leaves them free to enjoy their own time. I want people to come in and focus, so we’re all in that intense zone of getting s&*^ done at roughly the same time.

We all spend time during the day surfing the web, emailing others, etc., and it eats productivity, and doesn’t necessarily improve the creative atmosphere. I don’t want people staying late to get their stuff done because they have only done 5 hours of effective work in the 9-5 period. Then they end up getting home late, and blame the job for sucking up all their free time.

I want a team that burns bright during their work day, and finds that balance between producing volume, and feeling the creative spark that gets them producing quality. If the only way I can improve the team’s productivity or quality is to increase the hours worked, then I’ve failed. If we’re really at our peak productivity in that 8 hour day, then I’m due to hire someone else. I’m pretty damn sure that if we every got even close to that zone we’d be one of the most effective devs around.

It’s with that in mind though that I’m throwing up a link to Fustian Future, a relatively new (3 months or so) indie developer whom I know via The Chaos Engine (hang out for games industry folks from all over). Yacine Salmi, the one man team behind Fustian, is of course far more dedicated to updating his blog than I wasam, so there’s a lot more to read over there. He’s mixing up the regular indie developer chat with some interesting stuff on new and potential technologies, and more general games industry stuff. In particular I’d point you to this post on a GDC talk/round-table on unions in the games industry that sadly won’t come to pass. It’s certainly raised some interest on the Chaos Engine forums as it’s a contentious subject; however pretty much everyone is open to more discussion on the issues, so it’s sad to note that it won’t go ahead. GDC organisers take note – this is one more voice suggesting that you do the talk next year!

That being said, I’m always torn on the unionising issue. It’s been done to death on the TCE forums, and very little new gets said about it. There are a few (quite vocal) advocates of unions as a serious answer to the issues of overworking, crunch and general poor employee rights that plague some of the larger (and not so large) studios. There are others who a) don’t see the value in a union, b) don’t trust any of the existing unions to properly represent our issues, and c) don’t think that game-developers on the whole are the sort of people who would organise into a union.

But there is a definite chicken and egg problem, which the discussions we have make readily apparent. Most game-developers have little to no knowledge of unions, so their objections are rarely based on informed choice. There is no union which caters specifically for games developers, although several of the more general ones would happily expand to cover the industry (BECTU being the most obvious choice). By and large though, not enough employees at games studios are members for the union to actually properly represent them, so no-one can relate stories of how being a union member was obviously advantageous. Because there is no anecdotal evidence that being in a union is useful, not enough employees join. And so on.

At this point in the discussions, the cry is usually “why don’t you just join and start the ball rolling”, which for me is equally frustrating. Of course, I am in fact management, and not just an employee. So it doesn’t make sense for me to be a union member. And my team, not being generally mistreated, feels no need to join a union either. Many of the voices on the TCE forums echo similar stories. Those employees who might actually benefit are the ones that need to be persuaded by the discussions, and for some reason they are absent from the debate. So while I’m still ambivalent about the idea of unions in general, I’m keen to see the idea discussed more widely and openly amongst developers, so the people who could benefit may consider it an option, or discount it as unsuitable once they know the facts!

Nothing that I’ve seen in the last 2 years has shifted my views on the likely fate of big-budget retail titles, although we haven’t seen a wholesale collapse in that sector of the market, so its likely things aren’t all that bad. Down here at the shallow end of the pond though it is small affordable to develop (and buy) titles all the way. We’re getting ever closer to getting our prototypes up and running on the console kit, but I won’t be happy until I can start tinkering properly and see the results on the television. Our story-board is shifting nicely over to the ‘done’ column though, so it will soon be time to re-fill the board with more significant and less engine-related stories.

Note to self though – follow up our post on the one true handed-ness with one on the one true endian-ness. Big endian is not our friend!

On an unrelated note, my train journey down to our client’s site yesterday was capped by a mother and her kids joining me at my table, a boy of around 6 and a girl probably 9 or 10. The boy had a PSP and was playing away, engrossed, but he would keep banging my laptop in his efforts to show this or that to his mother. So I asked what he was playing, and he replied “Grand Theft Auto”.

“Hmm,” I said, “Liberty City Stories?”.

“Uh-huh”, with an eager nod.

“That would be the 18 rated Liberty City Stories then?”, which I accompanied by a look for his mother which I hope conveyed the level of my disgust and disappointment in her parenting skills.

“Oh, ” she says, a bit flustered, “is it?”

“Yeah”

And with that the conversation died, thankfully. Anything else I could have said would have boiled down to “you’re really just a bad parent”. Really though, come on: you wouldn’t let your five year old watch The Exorcist, or Goodfellas, what on earth makes you think that letting them play an 18 rated game is okay?

The government is apparently planning to ‘clamp down’ on unsuitable video games. If I believed that it was anything other than a cynical vote-grabbing ploy to pander to Daily Mail readers I would heartily endorse this, as I’ve always been in favour of proper age regulation on games content, just as there is for films and television. Thing is, it’s already there. The games industry gets a BBFC/PEGI age rating on pretty much every title that goes out there. The console platform holders (Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo) insist on it as part of the publishing process. Big publishers would never think about not getting their game rated, it’s just part of making games. All in all, we’ve got a great record of self regulation – we are open and up front about the content of games, and we’re not trying to sneak games into the hands of younger gamers.

None of that makes a blind bit of difference though, as long as irresponsible parents refuse to accept that games deserve the same level of care as films. So you’ve found your 14 year old playing Manhunt, or GTA with the Hot Coffee mod – you think it’s outrageous that the developers can make such games. Well here’s a newsflash – we didn’t make those games for your 14 year old. We didn’t sell them to your 14 year old (high street retailers thankfully do pay attention to age ratings). But if their gran bought them the game for Christmas and you said “Oh, that’s nice, now go play” without ever actually checking what the game was like, then I’m afraid that the blame for your child’s emotional scarring lies firmly and squarely with you, the responsible adult. Stop trying to blame others for your actions.

We kick off on the second of our work for hire jobs this morning, so now we are splitting our time between jobs. Not many details to share as yet because I haven’t cleared it with our clients, but I hope to rectify that soon and have something to say here about it. Still not heard back from our licensed developer application yet, but I’m putting that down to applying over the holiday season introducing an extra delay. Admittedly, we’d have little time to do any solid work on it right now, but I’m hoping that things will settle into a more forgiving routine soon.

Interesting piece here with quotes from Jon Hare (ex Sensible Software) that popped up in the Google Alerts for my name (yes I know, how vain is it to be searching for myself, but it throws up the ‘other’ Chris Chapman as well). Two major points I agree with:

1) the quality of programming has dropped with the move to larger teams; I think that is somewhat inevitable though, you just can’t sustain the same team dynamics that you get with less than a dozen team members. Personally I think the approach of scaling up not by having a larger team, but by using multiple small (<12) teams has merit. Of course, the ability to do that hinges on being able to break up the development effort into tangible pieces that can be tackled by the teams.

2) British developers are continually being forced to ‘globalise’ (i.e. Americanise) their products in order to try and maximise sales in the North American market. But to do that, I think we are selling ourselves short – not just in terms of making the most of the British sense of humour, but also the culture we have here. There are a lot of stories to be told, and game ideas which could only come from a British team – but I think they are being passed over because the publishers think that they won’t sell in the broader marketplace. I’m very hopeful that reduced barriers to market from downloadable content will help the balance shift back towards interesting titles (and not just be an excuse for more shovel-ware)

Just read an interesting article here on longer term planning with the Scrum methodology. Good stuff, but there’s still the big chasm of “how do we get the publisher to sign up to this”. Until the people paying the money are okay with the less detailed milestone definitions that come along with agile planning, there will continue to be issues. It’s all very well running teams on agile internally, but until there is a solid contractual way of satisfying the publisher’s need for security with the developer’s need for flexibility, there will still be problems. At the moment the milestones are defined fully at the start, but it’s a naive producer that doesn’t expect the content of those milestones to change. It’s at the developer’s disadvantage though – the contract states that they are bound to deliver what’s in the milestone list, and if they don’t the publisher is within their rights to cancel the project at their discretion. They generally won’t, but it’s a quick get out if they want it. Even if the publisher and the developer both know that the milestones have become meaningless, when they’re written into the contract it means that there needs to be a re-negotiation to fix them again.

Personally I think it’s far better to start out with a high level statement of intent – that the developer will be working on a particular title for the publisher, and that they will use their best efforts to deliver builds of acceptable quality. The regular delivery of those builds is part of the process, and the method of arbitration as to what is ‘acceptable’ is written into the contract as well. That way the publisher still retains the majority of the power (control over what they deem acceptable), but they can’t use that control to avoid their responsibilities to allow the developer reasonable time to deliver something acceptable.

Nothing in the talk was particularly enlightening I’m sure, but I tried to impart a few of the things that you learn after your first years in the games industry: how to write a good CV, what it’s like working at smaller or larger companies, how to spot when your company’s about to go down the tubes. You know the sort of thing – stuff that no-one will tell you before you actually get your job, the sort of stuff you learn in the pub after work. I always remember talks from industry people when I was at Edinburgh, and they almost invariably had people saying “this is our company, look at how shiny it is, here’s our token recently hired graduate, listen to him tell you how shiny it is”. It was always about the potential for recruiting the graduates, and glossing over all the potential downsides.

So I tried to give a balanced view of the industry: a quick summation of the current state of the business, the potential likelihood that your employer will make you work unpaid overtime to ship the game, and the likelihood that the company folds while you’re still working there. Of course, I tried to stress the up-sides as well: the joy involved in making games, the rewards involved in shipping a title that people love. I hope it came out fairly balanced. Otherwise I must look like a bit of a numpty – why would I still be working in the games industry if the pros didn’t outweigh the cons?!

Anyway, if it didn’t come across in the talk, I’ll say it now – making games is great. It’s fun, it’s rewarding, and I find it hard to imagine how a job in the regular software industry would compare. Sure, there’s less money in games, but the non-monetary rewards are many.

Proper credits is certainly a real issue though, as it’s a tangible benefit to your team. Being able to point to a good and/or successful title and say “I made that” is of real value for their sense of worth and their career long term. While not being credited isn’t the end of the world, there are enough unscrupulous people that claim credit for the work of others that not being credited when it is due is sufficient cause for doubt on the part of an interviewer.

Credits are, in my experience, usually knocked together at the end of the development process, and not thought about in advance. The list of people is usually drawn up quickly, and if there has been a lot of movement in and out of the team, people can easily be missed. It’s the producers job to maintain a credits list throughout development, detailing who worked on the title and for how long, and it’s not a chore which should be neglected.

Finally, my biggest bug-bear is with the ordering of the credits. I’m sorry, but the publishers, external producers and company management are not the most important people for a game. The director comes first, followed by the core team, and then the less involved parties. It might seem like a good idea to pander to the management or external partners, but you’re selling your team short if you don’t proclaim them loudly to be the most important part of the game.

Anyway, the goal of the PSP is, as far as I can tell, to provide a vehicle for financing public service content, in the same manner that content like the BBC, ITV and C4 currently provide. I believe the remit goes something like “content that informs and entertains, and enriches our cultural heritage”.  The consensus is that the traditional TV broadcasters and producers are unsuited to finance new types of content, such as websites (interactive and regular) and games.

Of course, it is the games part that interests me. There is, I believe, huge scope for producing games which both inform and entertain. Specifically I object to the fact that we have to Americanise our games in order to target the largest possible audience. Even when set in fantastical or science fiction environments, we still get American voice actors to play our roles. Our children can readily identify many American cultural references, at the expense of our own. We don’t have fire-hydrants, our taxis are black, and our postal carriers drive red vans.

I think there are many games to be made that use British culture, settings and characters. Be that an adventure game based on Inspector Rebus, or a modification to a real-time strategy game to put it in a British historical setting. We invest much in British programming, for the education of our children or the entertainment of us all. For E.R. we have Casualty, for the Bold and the Beautiful we have Eastenders. But where is GTA: Liverchester? Okay, bad example.

Anyway, the seminar itself was informative, but not entirely heartening. The games industry moves very quickly. Project life-spans are measured in the order of months, not years – and I’m not convinced that the PSP would be able to move quickly enough to operate successfully in games. It was clear from the turn-out (a couple of dozen TV industry types, and only myself and someone from Realtime Worlds representing the games sector). Apparently in the London version of this seminar, games weren’t represented at all. And yet the shift in people’s habits, especially in the young, is clearly moving away from TV and towards games and the internet. While the PSP is a good step towards allowing new content creators access to public money to make worthwhile public content, it still feels like the traditional TV producers, who have little to no games experience (and I’d venture ability) are lining themselves up to be the ones to continue to recieve that public funding.

OfCom are still in the process of a ‘review’ stage that is feeling out the remit of the PSP, and from talk at the seminar, is more than a year away from even really getting going. With the rate at which technology is developing and public attitudes towards how they use media are changing, I can’t help but think that this is moving too slowly.

So in summary, I think the PSP is a laudable idea, but it needs to stop worrying about the bickering about what exactly the PSP should do (primarily by TV producers and broadcasters who feel their financing is being threatened), and get down and dirty and actually get to encouraging more public ‘new media’ content. Whether that be by financing, or simply by facilitating existing projects, whatever – as long as what they do results in publicly valuable content being produced that otherwise would not have been. Getting mired in an extended ‘consultation period’ where people argue back and forth is not only inefficient, it may mean that any action they take is just too late, and the free market will have replaced valuable public service content with commercialised pap (Beauty and the Geek anyone?), and may never get the public’s attention back.

Speaking strictly from a games industry point of view – unless the PSP is a responsive and fast moving entity, it will never be able to engage the help of the dedicated games sector, and may find itself quickly outpaced. That would relegate public service games to being second rate, pale imitations of their commercial counterparts, and so never gain the attention of the public they are supposed to serve.

Sure, in the many times in Milnes after work at VIS we laboured long and loud over what we (the grunts) thought the problems were, and anyone for several tables around would be able to repeat them, but I think in the end it wasn’t as bad as it seemed then. Of course, we don’t have any insight into the real goings on, either financial or managerial, so it’s all supposition. However, from where we were sitting it seemed to boil down to one thing: cashflow.

VIS was pretty big at the end – probably still over 100 employees. That makes for a lot of salary going out the door each month. We had two big and one small project on the go (State of Emergency 2, Brave, and NTRA: Breeders Cup), and those had been going for a while, so there was probably little sales revenue from previous titles, only publisher milestone payments. Then of course Brave completed, with nothing to take its place – suddenly more than a third of those payments are gone, with potential sales revenue from it not likely to appear for many months. That’s going to hurt any company’s books, and if the balance is already tight…

That’s not really a ‘why’ so much as a ‘how’ though. The ‘why’ is even more supposition, but I think is reflected in much of what I’ve said here before. Publishers were being hit by tighter margins due to increasing costs, and were responding by tightening down on the developers. Slice the margins thinner and thinner, and the developer becomes so fragile that they cannot long survive if a project finishes with no follow-on, or worse, is cancelled early. In that sense, VIS were just another amongst many studios which died – Visual Science, DC Studios, and so many more across the UK and beyond.

Arguably had projects been cancelled or different decisions been taken things would have played out differently, maybe better, maybe worse. But it seems to me that even if a studio played a perfect game and made no wrong moves, they would still be only a small amount of bad luck away from failure. That for me is a symptom of a troubled industry, and is something I hope will improve. Certainly we all need to work smarter, not harder, to keep costs low enough that making games is profitable.

It’s right handed. Get over it. It is an arbitrary decision, but so what? Everyone has their own preference for how they visualise things (I for example interpret +z as forwards/into the screen, and +y is up, and don’t really care about x), in the same way that everyone visualises the flow of time differently. The maths is no easier or harder either way, but it’s a real pain to convert between them when people make different assumptions. DirectX doesn’t insist on left handed (no matter what anyone has told you – it provides left and right handed versions of all the view/projection functions that care), OpenGL assumes right handed, all the big modelling tools use right-handed. The majority have spoken already on this, but every single developer that chooses to buck the trend makes the rest of our lives more painful.

And if I ever have to debug another handed-ness related problem, I think I’m going to cut off my right hand and replace it with a sharpened set of axes, then go round visiting all the games studios in the land, slashing and gouging all those who want to argue about it.

The particular bit of software that has inspired this rant is the software for this:

my new phone, the O2 Ice. Hardware wise I can’t fault it – sleek, light, good build quality. Software wise, it’s awful. More than awful, its so bad I find myself shaking it in the air and cursing, trying to resit the urge to bash it off the table in frustration. Almost everything in the user interface runs contrary to even basic usability principles. Buttons change function radically as you move between screens, resulting in a single extra accidental button press (of a button that you need to press), will wipe out a laboriously crafted message, without saving it anywhere, or more crucially prompting if you are sure. Conversely, when you are sure about an operation, for example deleting messages, it prompts you, then, just to make you grind your teeth, prompts you to press okay on a screen that says only ‘deleted successfully’. Why do I need to click okay on a message telling me that you’ve done what I asked you (twice) to do. Sure, tell me if it fails, but don’t tell me if it succeeds. I assume it will succeed!

Worst of all though is the behaviour when a new message comes in – I pull the phone from my pocket and see the message prompt displayed on the screen. Great, all good. But because its not a clamshell design, I habitually lock the keypad before putting it into my pocket. And the act of unlocking the phone causes the message prompt to disappear, and I have to go search through three levels of menus to go find the message that’s arrived. And that’s only for SMS messages, if a multi-media message comes in, pressing any key just freezes the display on the animated message icon – no feedback, nothing. Eventually I found out that holding the power key will free things up again, but that was one of the “don’t throw it across the room, it’s the only phone you have” moments.

Fact is, user interface problems aren’t generally hard to solve. Some of them are tricky because you have design constraints (say only being able to use a one button mouse, or limited feedback options. But in general bad user interfaces are down to bad designers, and there is no excuse for it. The end-user does not care, in the slightest, about how good your software is underneath; if it feels like crap to use, then they will hate it, and you have failed.

Games are normally a bit better in this regard, partly because the limited control mechanisms force us to spend more time thinking about input mechanics, but also because a game that doesn’t feel easy to control will drive players away in droves. Even still, it still makes me curse in frustration every time I use a tool that was chucked out of the door with a sub-standard UI, and everyone is stuck with it just because there are no alternatives on the market. (Rational Rose I’m looking at you…)

Its been quiet on the posting front recently, mostly because I’ve been working overtime on my contract role, with various planning and build automation things occupying the extra time. But I’m taking some well deserved time back in the home office this week, and tackling the pile of paperwork that has accumulated in my absence. Double curses to the inland revenue now that I have to deal with VAT returns as well as payroll and corporation tax. When the CBI are complaining about the massive tax burden the UK industry is bearing, they’re talking not just about the amount of tax, but the sheer size of the administration required to keep up with all the obscure rules.

Anyway, enough ranting. I’m feeling ill enough this morning without dwelling on depressing subjects. I blame the hot sweaty venues I was in over the weekend watching the Festival preview shows. Some good, some bad – I’d definitely recommend Jason Byrne though.

On a more games related note, I’ll be attending the EIEF this coming 21st/22nd of August, on the grounds that any opportunities to get us noticed and more business is good! Some more interesting talks there, and the fact that its about 10 minutes from my front door is just an added bonus for my lazy self.

Yesterday was Pete and my first visit to the IC CAVE office in Dundee – they are involved in our new project, so we’ll probably be spending a bit of time there over the next six months. Very nice office, although the building itself gave me flashbacks to University. No exams to pass any more though, just games to make.No news from Brave NTSC as yet, although I’m told it’ll be at Sony America in California today. Oh, and as a final note, we are no. 1 in Google, with a page ranking of 3/10! Take that Lionhead.

The gist of the reply was ‘No, people are going to have to be smart, reduce costs, and take advantage of new markets’. That to me says everything is not going well. That to me says that we have a set of developers all scrabbling to develop on the next-generation of consoles, despite the fact that they have a tiny market share compared to the current generation, despite the fact that the games cost many times more to make, and despite the fact that the technology is totally untested. That to me says that the remaining big developers are betting heavily on the next generation, and everyone’s just playing a big game of chicken. No-one wants to say: “actually, we can’t afford to continue like this”, because they’re hoping someone else will say it first, and reduce market congestion, or something else that will save them. And most of all, that says to me that Sony knows they (and Microsoft) are pushing onwards too quickly, and that some developers and publishers are going to die in the transition.

Call me old fashioned, but I’d like to run a company based on something more than just enthusiasm for the new crop of technology. It doesn’t matter if its new and trendy, if it doesn’t sell enough product to make back the cost of developing for it, then its worth nothing.

Unfortunately, that was the last question of the session, and apart from some people talking to me about it as everyone was getting up, there wasn’t much debate about it. I hope at least I did something to damp everyone’s enthusiasm a bit, and get a bit of realism back. My goodness, aren’t I a miserable b&*%ard.

1. Letting your staff work an extra month when you know you don’t have the money to pay them is totally, flat out, unacceptable. At least VIS had the courtesy to tell us at the start of the month so we didn’t work any days for free.
2. The way the Edinburgh staff were treated was shocking – being flat out lied to so that they’d migrate the equipment and incur travel expenses that had no itention of being reimbursed is just shoddy management.
3. Letting your company run down all its money and go bankrupt, then when it goes into liquidation immediately starting up a phoenix company with none of the debt and scavenging all the assets for cheap is, frankly, tantamount to fraud in my book. How you expect to hire back developers onto such a team after seeing the way the previous company went is beyond me. Unless of course its all just a temporary thing so the maximum amount of blood can be sweated out of the assets before abandoning everyone to their own fates (again).
4. Damn – thats 3 out of the 4 big Scottish players out of business in less than 14 months; leaving Rockstar North and Real Time Worlds as the only large employers.

I must admit to being a little selfish in this matter – as I mostly want other Scottish games companies to survive so I can poach their good staff when I get the opportunity. But with the liquidations going on, more and more talent is migrating south of the border (where there’s a drought of good people), and there’s little to tempt them back up. And then, there is a hurdle to any new developer wanting to set up shop in Scotland – the fact that talent would have to be relocated in to get it going.

Its small wonder so many good people are leaving the industry – they’re being offered no stability, no decent prospects, and companies which want to offer them opportunities and build are being priced out of the market.

Anyway – my condolences to those people out of work because of this, although from those I talked to on Wednesday while there, I think it might be better off redundant than continuing to work there!

Some talk over on The Chaos Engine about the forecasted crash of the games industry (due to rising costs), and asking why the big publishers (EA, Activision, Ubisoft) aren’t doing anything about it. For example, trying to rein in the relentless next-gen march, even when it massively inflates costs. The general consensus is the upcoming problems are real, and largely inevitable; but that publishers aren’t doing anything now because they’re still making money.

Massively short-sighted in my opinion – its like we’re a big Katamari ball rolling down a mountain; the outlying bits (the developers and smaller publishers) are being smashed off along the way, but the inner core is just keeping its head tucked in and hoping it will be left at the bottom. Even collecting new bits along the way (as the smaller publishers/developers reform and try again) won’t help in the long run, not to mention the carnage that its causing along the way (in the form of massive venture capital losses). It will only take one bad experience investing in a developer/publisher that falls apart under the current development conditions for a big VC to swear off the games industry for good – making it even harder for new developers to form and build.

In other news – more rumblings about the future US release of Brave, for which I’ve been doing a little bit of work. More details as and when I can…

The increase in complexity is certainly reducing the accessibility of games – the recent report of “teenagers playing less games than their parents” may back this up, but it’s probably mostly down to the amount of other distractions for them. YouTube, Google Video etc…

One thing that I realised recently, and I am annoyed at myself for not ‘getting’ it sooner, is that Nintendo is very clever, MS are fairly on the ball, but Sony are very … very dumb. Notice that even since the days of the SNES, all of N’s hardware were clearly below the technical levels that were possible at the times, but always above the invisible ‘this looks shit’ border?

Nintendo clearly appreciate that games are getting more expensive to produce and less accessible due to increasing technical demands – this is what the Revolution, and to a lesser extent the DS, seem to be all about. Lower specs than the rest, innovative controller to bring in new audiences, and a back catalog of classic games to recapture the jaded players.

Even MS has pretty much got it right, although I’m highly confused that they switched to PowerPC as Apple went Intel. The backwards compatibility list is somewhat underwhelming, but then the Xbox didn’t have any killer apps anyway.

And isn’t Geometry Wars the Xbox 360′s biggest seller, and what is it, a $15 Live title that was cooked up in someone’s spare time? That’s gotta have some people (mainly artists) crying and shitting their pants as their current AAA project slips. “What, we’ve been wasting how many years of our lives drawing gloss maps? We could have been billionaires already!”

Sony developers are certainly going to have fun trying to simultaneously exploit 7 CELL processors and whatever else crap the PS3 has installed, while Revolution coders will already be very familiar with their environment. Xbox 360 chaps will be happy with their DirectX.

Sony just don’t get it. Even the PSP is a shit to develop for, and from what I’ve heard, comparatively the DS is a breeze, just like the GBA.

But I’d love to get a game of my own on Xbox Live though. A man can dream… *sigh*

But my point is, twenty years ago you could make a game with a team of one or two developers (be they programmers or artists). You’d be developing on the NES, Spectrum or Commodore, and your games probably retail for 15-20 pounds sterling. Skip forward to 1991, and you’re developing for the SNES or MegaDrive – your team is around 8-10 people, and your games probably retail for about 40 pounds. Then on to 97 – you have the Playstation and N64, by now your team is around 20 people, and your games are probably retailing for about 40 pounds still. 2002, you’re on the PlayStation 2 or XBox, your team is now 40 or so people, and your game is still retailing for 40 pounds. 2006, you’re starting on a PS3 or XBox360, average team size is now pushing 100 people.

To pluck a cost figure from the air a team of 40 or so people developing on PS2 resulted in a cost of between 1m and 2m pounds per title. Looking over develop‘s top 100 list this year, there are many, many games on the top studio’s books that aren’t making back half a million pounds. Okay, so thats just from the UK market, and the US market is much larger, but you see my point that margins are getting tighter and tighter.

The games industry is being led along a growth path where revenue is rising fairly linearly (10% a year is a generous figure), but costs are rising exponentially! The old system where publishers used the massive revenues from the titles that sold well to underwrite the cost of the games that flop is falling apart, solely down to the diminished profits they can make from successful titles. The increasing fragility of both developers and publishers is, in my opinion, just a worrying symptom of the underlying problem. As we let costs spiral out of control, we start to price ourselves out of business.

Even an established and successful studio can be crippled by more than one bad title or deal in a row, because the costs involved in getting even a poor title close to market are growing rapidly massive. Much as I’d like to blame the publishers for the problem (for attempting to keep their costs down by mistreating developers rather than encouraging efficiency), I think in the end the issue lies with the hardware manufacturers. We are moving onto the next generation of hardware, when we’re not limited by technology, but by the level of complexity the market is willing to pay for. Sure, if the consumers were happy to pay double for twice the complexity, or if twice as many units sold when the technology improved, then it would be sustainable, but its not.

Roughly the same consumers who bought the current generation of console will buy the next generation; when they buy games they expect them to be at the same 40-50 pound price point, because they don’t see enough value to justify paying any more for the games. So in the end, the games industry tries to make more complex, expensive games, for the same revenue as before, just so they don’t get left behind.

So what’s my proposed solution? Well, for console games, I don’t think I have one, apart from maybe to keep producing quality games for PS2 for as long as possible. For PC games I think its clear – make games at the same level of costs as now, and try to make use of better technology and middleware to improve the quality, rather than trying to increase complexity to match what the hardware is capable of.

Console timeline cribbed from here.