|
 Features
What's Wrong with the Games Industry (And How to Make It Right)
 People
But the King Cause is simply this: Most game development management is pretty incompetent.
Companies that don't have a plan for down time, any flexibility, any clear and consistent goals or any focus are incompetent. Companies that make quick promises, adopt the latest buzzword phrases (scrumm, innovation, original IP, casual, etcetera) without following through, never seem to say no, always deliver GDDs of mighty poundage and written in marketing Greek are incompetent. Companies that are always re-negotiating their milestone commitments are incompetent.
Like so many other areas of the technology and entertainment industries, bad management didn’t really matter when times were good, but as the situation worsened its failings caused companies to die. As the generation shifts have continued, the dramatic swings from prosperity to penury shake out more bad apples, and eventually even the star developers of yesteryear become has-beens.
Many companies have become adept at hiding their flaws, but their future is not bright. Bad management has led to bad decisions, bad practises and ultimately to a badly structured kind of company. As most or all of the mid- and large-sized companies have been constructed by these same people, it follows that the company structure itself may be at fault.
The Game Production Company
While conventional wisdom holds that many of the above practises are survivable, the holders of this wisdom simply haven't run up against hard enough times yet. Hard times show the real mettle of any company, and most developers prove sorely lacking.
The problems inherent in game development are basically a function of the way that game developers think and operate. It is a mentality based on those formative years of the early 90s and on the practises that emerged from that time. A surprising number of people in the industry still believe that those practises were sound despite the wealth of evidence to the contrary, and they also believe that the current chaos will pass.
Well, no, it won't. What will happen is that they will die. While some head off in the direction of the internet to seek their fortune in service games, ad-based games and other innovative business models, there will still be a market for games to be made for the consoles, PCs and handhelds. While publishers dally with their campus-style operations for a little while, they are simply incubating the same problems that kill developers, but on a larger scale. Smart publishers will realise this, and start to look outside themselves for talent again. Enter the game production company.
A game production company is completely different from a game development company because it is based entirely on just one goal:
- Make one profitable game at a time
Everything else is tailored toward ensuring that this goal is reached.
How?
The Pitch
Game production companies do not maintain multiple offices or a large staff. In its down time, a game production company consists of 3-5 key people, mostly executive producers with significant experience in concrete disciplines in a small office. This is because projects can take months or even years to get off the ground.
The pitching and idea development phase of down time is very important, because it helps the company really focus in on the kind of product that it is best suited to deliver. Rather than run as an afterthought, production companies always have multiple concepts in various stages of development. Rather than tender on work for hire that they are ill-suited to develop, they focus on the genre that they know they are good at. As many companies that work in entertainment do it, game production companies find what it is that they do well and they stick to it.
The pitch is not just a flimsy document with bullet-point sales items that they can't back up. A production company examines viability of ideas, benefits of inclusion, available technologies and so on. Rather than bluffing, a production company spends money on its pitches, invests in them. Each one is like a seed that they will one day turn into a full-fledged product, though that process may take five years.
|
|
|
|
|
Previous