Surviving the economical desert
Recently I’ve came across tons of news concerning layoffs across Europe and US in famous game development studios due to the financial crisis. I fear that the economical situation is also the perfect excuse for big publishers to start fire more people than they usually do. I’m also quite sure that we only see the top of the iceberg and less known studios are being hit by the job cuts too. Being recently in the situation but not for the same reasons, we, at Fishing Cactus, would like to give our support to the fellow developers out there who are looking for a job.
After thinking a little bit about the cause, it is logical that the current economic trend leads to such situations. Let me explain: game development on next gen consoles or massively multiplayer games requires hundred of talents and nearly 3 to 4 years to complete a project which is not 100% guarantee to be a commercial success.
In big teams, at a certain point, there are so many people involved to communicate from the top management to the person who actually produce the smallest bit of the game that it takes simply age to pass the info. Due to the ever changing nature of game development, the info currently in the pipe can be already obsolete when it arrives to the end of the communication chain. This means that some resources are clearly redundant and are drastically affecting the productivity of the whole team. And when it’s time to reduce costs, odly enough, that’s not always where the managers look. By the way, SCRUM is a great management tool to reduce intermediaries.
I talked about big teams, but how does a small game studio like us survive to the crisis? Despite being new, Fishing Cactus has an unconventional business model and growth plan which relies more on securing partnerships with other studios and to build a flexible game creation pipeline to cope with the ever changing nature of game development.
In fact it will never be a good strategic plan to hire someone to fire him at the end of the project because we would have to pay him for a few “empty” months between projects. Following the same path as Streamline Studios, we think there are other ways to produce games. All managers will say that growing internally is always better than outsourcing if possible, but at a certain point, outsourcing and partnerships offer the flexibility that is not possible internally. Graphic novel publishers and the film industry have already adopted this way of working.
In our industry, this way of working will only be viable when outsourcing companies will stop to work as short term providers but instead as long term partners building trust relationships to deliver quality and share a common pipeline.
Hi,
I just wanted to say that I sympathize with Fishing Cactus greatly! I’ve heard of developers spending years on finishing a game and this economic crisis is only slowing them down. How common is it for developers to spend many years on making a video game anyway? Do you have any thoughts on how this new business model will help those developers still making games after many years?
Thanks for your input and I wish you all the best!
Sincerely,
Anethea
Hi Anethea,
Thanks for the comment.
Answering your question: for next gen consoles and more specifically AAA games with original IPs, working for years is not common, it is simply unavoidable. Between the tech researches, pipelines to setup, tools to create, team to build, game to design and art assets to produce (but I don’t teach you something I think) all this often leads to years of development.
This alternative model can give breath to developers so they do not need to overgrow teams unless they really want to. As a matter of fact the biggest publishers and game developers have some kind of cycle where they get a lot of people on a game and, at the end of the project, and if there’s no new project available, part of the team gets simply fired. This creates a very sinusoidal and wave like effect which tends to make the very best talents leave the industry for more stable jobs.
On the other side, the model we try to follow tend to give more stability to the industry relying on dedicated and regular partners for limited time missions. Highly specialized in their field and building a common and shared pipeline will not guarantee a cheap cost but will guarantee a very efficient one. Some studios sometimes oversees the time and cost to build knowledge internally. Following the principles of partners gives more flexibility to game developers and more diversity of clients.
There can even be mutual interests in the case of a co-funded development which isn’t a new practice but not a very common one.
Hi Bruno,
Thanks for giving me your feedback! I do come across the same story from other developers and it’s always good to have the insight of the people themselves, those who are in the industry, do the jobs, and know what’s going on.
All the best,
Anethea