|
 Features
What's Wrong with the Games Industry (And How to Make It Right)
 Flexibility
Most development companies have inflexible structures for when projects start to go wrong. As is so often the case, developers make promises that they cannot keep in order to get a contract (which publishers all too willingly lap up). They end up committing to bad processes, such as the obsolete and counterproductive use of the GDD, negative milestone cycles, and approval phases that last forever. They also commit to top-heavy management structures that don't respond well to the trouble on the ground, tend toward drilling down to maintain the illusion of control, and tend to fall back on immediate solutions to satisfy the next milestone and the nervous publisher than actually adopting a strategy.
A lot of developers find themselves trapped into the milestone cycle of tail chasing before they really know where they are, and this is always a bad place to be. Lacking the flexibility to negotiate sanely, poor practises continue to propagate until projects eventually die.
Goals
Most of the remaining development companies believe that they can make money if they can only get into the franchise game, without really knowing what a franchise is or how one is made. Lots of developers believe that they need to maintain a code-base because it actually represents a valuable intellectual property that they will be able to license to someone someday. For a very few companies who were positioned in the right place at the right time this was true, but for most that boat sailed years ago. Lots of companies believe that if they can get into prime position on whatever the hot new format is that they can develop a brand without stopping to think what a brand actually is and what it might take to make one.
The worst sin, however, is that most developers are trying to pursue all of these goals at the same time in a kind of corporate game of round robin, and the truth is that diverse goals kill companies. Even when times are great, diverse goals drain away resources that eventually end up becoming millstones when the recessions eventually come. Diverse goals are born out of not knowing why the company is in business in the first place and what being in business in game creation actually means.
With diverse goals in mind, lots of hidden costs creep into development companies, such as an unnecessary level of business development (to develop those franchises that you will never have), technology investment (for that code-base that you'll never license), image consultancy (for that brand that carries no weight) etcetera. These factors all add to the down-time drain and ultimately end up producing a net loss in the company that grows from investment spike to generation shifts until it eventually kills them.
Focus
Successful companies have a focus and they make that focus their life’s blood. Whether their focus is to create platform games, handheld computers, kinky underwear, whatever, a focused company with a clear strategy is far more likely to succeed than a company which is in business "to make games because games are cool". Focus provides clarity. Lack of focus creates opportunities for vagueness, and traditional development companies are very much unfocussed creations that have no overall strategy.
It's not really an issue of "if" for many dev companies. Many of the smart ones that survived the last round of culling in the PS2 generation did so by being pretty smart and managing to develop at least some relationships and product line relationships with publishers that staved off the worst of the trouble. This is a stalling tactic, however, because all it does is help reduce the hemorrhaging. A lack of a clear strategy results in companies that set up studios hither and thither, or get into half a dozen sections of the market at once making a diverse range of games. These are companies which don't know their business any more than to say that they are in the games industry. They rely on tactics rather than strategy, which eventually kill them.
|
|
|
|
|
Previous