Hollywood
17/09/09 18:47 Filed in: Industry
Back in the old days when the original playstation was a super computer, and to make a game on it you needed a vast team of six or more people working for more than a year, instead of two guys and a couple of months, I thought that the industry would eventually mirror film production.
I imagined a time when so many people would work on a game that there would be no use fro generalists, just legions of specialists, tiny cogs in a production machine and I decided that the only place for a generalist would be at the top, someone who understood game making across multiple disciplines.
But two things had to change:
First, we had to stop reinventing the wheel every project. I imagined that people would begin to make game making engines; general tools that the industry would use to make development easier and allow new team members not to have to start from square one each time they changed studios.
I even tried to make one myself with Galleon.
Things have come a long way in this area with middleware such as the Unreal engine, and I think we are close to having some platforms that will become the equivalent of a stock film camera for making games.
Secondly we had to learn how to scale up and down efficiently during production.
Movies commonly gestate for ten years or more before everything is prepared, the green light goes on and hundreds of millions of dollars flow through a team that never even existed a week earlier.
Teams of people are hired and let go in waves as the production moves through rapid layered phases. Experts assemble, work together and then disband, their jobs done, knowing that if the production is a success, they will enjoy royalties for years to come.
The games industry works nothing like that. Instead it sits in an awkward middle ground. It employs much of its staff as though they are permanent, when in fact, they know that they will lay most of them off when production ramps down retaining only a slim group for the next preproduction phase.
Without exception, (as far as I’m aware) those who are let go lose any rights to future royalties or bonuses after having spent the last X months in crunch.
It’s a bit nasty isn’t it? In fact I think you could call it almost dishonest.
Luckily some people have realised that the industry is moving towards freelancers, and have struck out on their own, offering developers a more honest outsourcing alternative to the hiring and firing cycle.
A couple of them contacted me after reading my comments on the web.
Fireproof games provide full in game environments to clients, while Darkside Game Studios offer a wide range of services all the way up to full game design and production.
Concept artists and musicians have successfully worked freelance in the games industry for years. How long before the rest of us can?
What do you think? Will the games industry ever mature enough to really leave this bloated home-brew stage?
I imagined a time when so many people would work on a game that there would be no use fro generalists, just legions of specialists, tiny cogs in a production machine and I decided that the only place for a generalist would be at the top, someone who understood game making across multiple disciplines.
But two things had to change:
First, we had to stop reinventing the wheel every project. I imagined that people would begin to make game making engines; general tools that the industry would use to make development easier and allow new team members not to have to start from square one each time they changed studios.
I even tried to make one myself with Galleon.
Things have come a long way in this area with middleware such as the Unreal engine, and I think we are close to having some platforms that will become the equivalent of a stock film camera for making games.
Secondly we had to learn how to scale up and down efficiently during production.
Movies commonly gestate for ten years or more before everything is prepared, the green light goes on and hundreds of millions of dollars flow through a team that never even existed a week earlier.
Teams of people are hired and let go in waves as the production moves through rapid layered phases. Experts assemble, work together and then disband, their jobs done, knowing that if the production is a success, they will enjoy royalties for years to come.
The games industry works nothing like that. Instead it sits in an awkward middle ground. It employs much of its staff as though they are permanent, when in fact, they know that they will lay most of them off when production ramps down retaining only a slim group for the next preproduction phase.
Without exception, (as far as I’m aware) those who are let go lose any rights to future royalties or bonuses after having spent the last X months in crunch.
It’s a bit nasty isn’t it? In fact I think you could call it almost dishonest.
Luckily some people have realised that the industry is moving towards freelancers, and have struck out on their own, offering developers a more honest outsourcing alternative to the hiring and firing cycle.
A couple of them contacted me after reading my comments on the web.
Fireproof games provide full in game environments to clients, while Darkside Game Studios offer a wide range of services all the way up to full game design and production.
Concept artists and musicians have successfully worked freelance in the games industry for years. How long before the rest of us can?
What do you think? Will the games industry ever mature enough to really leave this bloated home-brew stage?
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