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 Features
What's Wrong with the Games Industry (And How to Make It Right)
 "You know what's wrong with the industry?"
So begins just about every conversation that I have around the water cooler, in the work kitchen, in the pub, at friends' houses. This conversation arises whenever two people who work in game development get together, particularly if one or both works in a small or mid-sized developer.
It borders on cliché to talk about the problems affecting development, the problems of developer studios having to merge or close, or the inflexibility of the whole industry system. A whole host of causes get blamed from publishers to management, economic conditions, brain drain to other industries, incompetent designers, the second hand market, lack of professional methods, hardware manufacturers, media coverage, you name it. And then we all get drunk and reassure each other that if we had our way, all would be better.
While these are all lovely rationalisations, and some of them surely are symptoms of the real problem, they are not the cause. The actual causes are simple:
- Dev companies cannot handle down time
- They are not flexible
- They have diverse and often incompatible goals
- Their focus is wrong.
- People problems
Eventually it is a combination of these five pressures that bring companies great and small to their knees.
Downtime
Developers don't know what to do with staff once a project winds down because the nature of the industry is such that nobody can guarantee constant work. When working in a low-cost market such as 16-bit development, this problem existed as it does today, but the negative weight of it was relatively insignificant. Yet as costs and contract issues and the seriousness of the industry has grown, the problems of having fifty or a hundred people doing nothing for an extended period of time have multiplied that negative weight, to the point that it kills companies.
Some developers have opted for using limited term contracts (employees explicitly only hired for the term of the project) but this results in experienced staff shying away from those developers unless they also offer very high wages to compensate. As a result, the experience ratio in these companies tend to be quite low, the ability to recruit for a project is limited, and the limited contracts structure ultimately saves very little.
The fact that you have employees on limited term contracts does nothing to counteract other business expenses, namely office rental, equipment and other material costs. These still cost a lot of resources to maintain regardless of whether they are filled.
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