This is a classic forest for the trees problem. It's easy to get caught up in the minutiae of day to day management, but if you take off your Glasses of Player Viewpoint at any point, you're going to forget critical pieces that will either torpedo your dev schedule, or the success of your game.

I don't think it needs to necessarily be universally defined throughout the industry, but it most definitely helps for it to be defined within a given company. One of the key growth sectors for the industry is managed processes. With the rather meteoric rise in development costs over the last decade or so it is critical for gaming to adapt and adopt as many tenets of sound project management as possible. Some companies have done this successfully, some have done it unsuccessfully, and others haven't even tried. I could go on for ages about the benefits of sound project management in just about every industry, but that won't do any good.

Suffice to say that I believe a commitment to quality project management is a key factor for long-term success in the gaming industry.

Garth, Jason, and Mark - excellent points that all come together and aim at the same "impossible" fact: successful products, built upon long-term strategies (for sequels, expansion packs, and downloadable content) require quality management, from top to bottom, at the studio, project, and team management levels, as well as with self-management.

None of this is new, of course, and this need for a near-industry-wide operational make-over (complex to some and straight-forward to others) is born of longevity: (1) do individuals or companies, in this business, wish to make short-burst, low-overhead profit, where they can start-stop-and-re-open at a moment's notice, or (2) do they wish to build and commit to their operations for long-term profit, involving numbers of employees and other moving parts?

Each approach can achieve its own version of "success" but, (1) while one tends to function more like a fleet-of-foot marketing-manufacturing-and-distribution process, with a premium on getting "the product" out into the right markets and retail channels, (2) the other approach functions much more as an all-inclusive product-and-company building pathway . . . to which marketing, manufacturing, and distribution can be added in equal doses in support of product quality; not necessarily in spite of it.

These general approaches fall apart, of course, unless you have the proven, reliable management staff to guide them into place, and, in the case of a long-term establishment, you need those managers to uphold the perceived important components of both approaches: product quality (upon which everything else is steadily built) and introduction of products to the buying masses (marketing, manufacturing, and distribution).

In any event, this article is loosely associated with an older Gamasutra opinion piece to which I responded-in-detail on my site - http://www.emscharf.com/genuinearticle/genuinearticle_2008/genuinearticle_2008_0
5_01.htm.

If the level of intelligence, perception and clarity in this editorial typifies the content of Game Developer magazine, then I think I've just been persuaded to subscribe to that publication.

The most crucial observation in this editorial, I think, is that non-designers are interfering far too often in game design. Not only does that prevent designers/directors from doing what they were hired to do, the time a producer spends on such interference is time that -- as described in the editorial -- would be better spent managing the overall development process.

And by "manage the process," I mean working diligently to remove every impediment to creative people coordinating their efforts to build the best possible product within the necessary constraints of schedule and budget.

A producer (or one of the innumerable VPs at a game publishing company) who's dictating content, rather than setting budgets and high-level schedules, is guilty of making it harder for a development team to succeed in building a great game.

Is something like a structural revolution in the business of commercial game development going to be required to get out from under this paradigm of interference? Assuming digital distribution gets opened up to smaller (but quality) developers, are there marketing houses who'll work for a percentage of the revenues, thus negating the two main reasons for working with a big publisher who'll demand creative control?

Sometimes I'm an idealist. :) At any rate, this was an excellent editorial.

This is a great article. General job descriptions or responsibility are not define clearly in game industry or software development. When managers and leads are tripping over each others toes not only causing friction but also communication breakdown. At the end of the day, digital game industry only existed for not more than 50 years?? Lack of engineering the standards and processes are deadly to the entire game industry.

I also agree with Eric, companies has to step up and look at long term development of the company(1) instead of the individual project(2).

Good article Gamasutra.

That' really neat!
I've read a lot of articles about postmortems. I also found project management is a common and fatal problem.
To this article, I think maybe there is a misunderstanding of producer's job description. In some companies, producer is in charge of production and game direction. The schedule and managment is the responsibility of project manager (PM). In some other compnies, producer needs to be in charge of both production and project managment.
I think the most important thing is to clarify the job description, find right person to do right work. No matter "Producer+PM" or "Director+Producer", if we make it clear before pre-production, the mistake can be avoided better...

Yea in response to Garth I do think that standardizing roles is tricky because the nature of games vary so much and team sizes and requirements.

As a producer / developer myself it's difficult to not get involved with game assets and caught in development itself because I work with small teams and often bring other skills to the table besides managing the game. However because the teams I’ve been in are smaller, it’s easier to “switch hats” and lend a hand.

When a project gets larger in scale, the producer really must be vigilant to insure that production does not experience the kind of issues mentioned in this article. Of course the unexpected happens and this is just the nature of a creative process. Also, there are plenty of games that experience problems of an acceptable nature. Most games tend to explore some new concept or gameplay mechanism or more which tends to mean that there is research and development and this cannot be easily quantized or measured.

I’ve never ran a major project like guitar hero or many of the other AAA title issues. Regardless, why problems like this reoccur, the first person to be looked at should be the producer. After all, just like the director of a movie or other such role, it’s a title that lends itself to certain prestige. While my projects are much smaller budget projects, it’s me who deals with “The powers that be” and when things go wrong, it’s my role to prevent, fix and maintain the issues that might come up to keep the project on track. When these projects fail, the producer should be held responsible. With great responsibility comes great reward and sometimes great consequences.

I think these issues keep happening because to some degree, people are not held accountable. It’s similar to why post mortems can sometimes be censored because no one wants to hurt anyone’s feelings and of course everyone justifies their own actions so if party A says something about the shortcomings of party B, B would go after A… and to some degree this is true.

The game industry like any other is about relationships and such… “you don’t call me on my stuff and I don’t call you on yours” and then no one can be blamed but ultimately the project suffers and no one is at the wheel so no one gets blamed… in fact the main thing I see is that people are more than happy to admin “they” failed miserably or terribly etc because no one is going to say.. “you know what, you did fail horribly.. you’re fired.”… instead each game comes out over and over with more oversights and more blunders that increase the projects bottom line…

I see a ton of comments came after the first 2 posts which I was responding too.. yea the short term / long term question is a big one. I think the nature of games tend to favor the short term.

To be fair to the industry, short term is really more feasible than long term. there are so many games out there that few will have enough "legs" to be viable for long term.. plus with so many games out there, the industry couldn't support every game to assume to have the strength and popularity for more, regardless of how good the game is. The resources required to plan for a project to be scalable, longer term and well managed often adds resources that a startup and or new idea doesn’t have the funding to incorporate.

Regardless of that, strong project management practices should be adopted and preached more. It will take companies with the vision and willpower to adopt practices like this coupled with strong success to show how valuable this is. Currently it's self evident that games that make it despite development catastrophes will continue as long as they make a profit... if all of these major titles failed in the marketplace we'd see change happen much faster... no one wants to be there when that happens. Perhaps this current economy will help foster / inspire smarter development for the future as companies lay off and some companies have a chance to “reset” their business practices and priorities.

Also, absolutely dead on about outside influences such as publishers and marketers interfering with development would be nice. Ideally a project should be defined from the start and not change that scope / focus. Of course, if the publisher is more or less the "client" (read, has the money) then developers must bow. This is unfortunate, but until a developer either is self funded or gets away from the publisher middleman structure, it’s just how things work. I hope that more options like Steam, the Apple Store gain traction to allow more direct to consumer approaches.

whoa.. ok next topic :)

A load of great comments here!

Eric, I had a chance to read your article and I found it very informative and well thought out. You make mention of some of the key advantages of solid management, from talent retention to limited scope creep to asset pipeline efficiency, etc. I do think it will take a shift in the industry mindset to realize that the "Wild West" days of development are coming to an end. Gaming has become too popular and too expensive to be a fringe industry. As general software development has (somewhat) learned over the last few decades, long term viability depends on stable environments, decreased risk, and increased value to consumers. As the gaming audience becomes more sophisticated our process for developing their products needs to keep up. A few of the points in your article remind me of comments from the recent articles about Ensemble studios, especially making a good environment to work first, and quality products second. It's no surprise so many excellent products came out of that studio. We really need to keep hammering away at the industry to get their heads wrapped around the importance of good management.

@Caleb : You may have misunderstood the nature of the "long term" or "big picture" argument. The point is not necessarily to ride out the profit or viability of any single project over a longer period of time, it is to position the company to succeed in the long term. Eric expostulates on this more in his article. The premise is that a long term focus for a company entails a much more planned and detailed business model that looks beyond the current project. A successful long term business needs good management to create an environment that rewards the hard work of developers while mitigating current and future project risk, facilitating long term relationships with outside vendors, managing the future of the company (next project or two or three), anticipating the needs of developers on an expanded timeline (training and skill development, career pathing, etc), reading and reacting to changing market conditions... in essence managing and not developing. Recent articles have pointed out that while the overall revenue in the gaming industry has been growing rapidly, profit has been flat or in decline. Another recent article pointed to one study that showed up to 60% of a game project's development cost comes from reworks and rewrites. Those two seem to go hand in hand. I think this is a solid indication that the industry lacks quality project management on a large scale, and I don't think we can keep up our growth until we start to tackle that issue. You mentioned you were working as a producer so keep up the good work and show everyone just how much of a positive impact a quality producer can have on development.