Archive for category Industry
Patching Is So 2001
Posted by Scott Jennings in Darkfall, Industry, _ on July 7th, 2009
There seems to be a somewhat disturbing trend in MMOs – that simple ‘patches’ are becoming obsolete. Well, calling them that, anyway.
Take Darkfall, which today announced a new ‘expansion’. This being in air quotes since the primary features of this expansion are what you’d normally see in a, well, patch, such as balance changes and new equipment. A few other features, such as housing, obviously fall under the heading of ’stuff we were supposed to get in by release but then our schedule slipped’. Well, hell, put it in a patch and call it a ‘free expansion!’
Darkfall isn’t the first to do this, of course, although their announcing an ‘expansion’ 3 months after releasing the original game (which they may want to update their web site about at some point) must count as some sort of record. But they’re not the first. Mythic pioneered the “make a really big patch and call it an expansion pack” trend with Dark Age of Camelot (full disclosure: I worked there at the time, and was part of the team that made them). Beginning with Foundations, which introduced player housing, and continuing with New Frontiers, which revamped the realm vs realm endgame – both of these were fairly major additions to the game, with new zones and game systems, but probably not enough to sell in a box. So put it in a really big download file and call it an expansion! The lines start to blur starting around Darkness Rising, which was distributed like the ‘free’ expansions but was one you had to pay for. Today all expansions, both free and paid, appear together in one happy list. And ironically, to further confuse the distinction, every expansion that was sold in a box in stores can now be downloaded for free off the website.
Mythic continued the tradition with Warhammer Online, yet confused the issue still further. Shortly after Warhammer’s release, Mythic announced the Call to Arms expansion, which promised the classes that were pulled from the game’s release at the last minute as well as new content and rebalancing and… well, you know. Things you’d see in a patch. And… you did see them in a patch. Or series of patches. Call to Arms was released over a period of roughly four months – the first patch introducing 2 classes in March (the other two being patched in the previous November) and the second patch introducing a new high level zone in June, and a third patch introducing promised class balance features yet to appear. The difference between patches and expansions in this case appears to be.. well, they called this collection of patches an expansion!
Other games do this as well. Eve Online has released several mega-patch downloadable “expansions“. Lineage 2 calls every patch a “chronicle” or expansion. City of Heroes calls them “issues“. Does anyone reserve the term “expansion” for a ton of content in a box and “patch” somewhat less but still significant content in a download, and still make a profit?
Not That The Timing Is Meaningful Or Anything
Posted by Scott Jennings in Industry, _ on June 26th, 2009
Sanya Weathers on MMOs and the cult of celebrity.
38 Studios Gets Big And Huge
Posted by Scott Jennings in Industry, _ on May 27th, 2009
Good news considering scuttlebutt had the BHG studio closing after layoffs last month.
Well, I Been Workin’ In The Pixel Mine, Goin’ Down Down, Workin’ In The Pixel Mine, Whew! About To Slip Down!
Posted by Scott Jennings in Industry, Quality of Life, _ on April 6th, 2009
Apparently GDC was the spot for all sorts of well-mannered discourse – as seen on Greg Costikyan’s blog (via Zen of Design), a studio head at Epic Games declared that there were no EA spouses there!
Mike Capps, head of Epic, and a former member of the board of directors of the International Game Developers Association, during the IGDA Leadership Forum in late 08, spoke at a panel entitled Studio Heads on the Hot Seat, in which, among other things, he claimed that working 60+ hours was expected at Epic, that they purposefully hired people they anticipated would work those kinds of hours, that this had nothing to do with exploitation of talent by management but was instead a part of “corporate culture,” and implied that the idea that people would work a mere 40 hours was kind of absurd.
Now, of course, the idea that a studio head, which Capps is, would have such notions is highly plausible; but he was, at the time, a board member of the IGDA, an organization the ostensible purpose of which is to support game developers. Not, you know, to support management dickheads.
To be fair, some game developers are also management dickheads! That being said, this taps into quite a bit of pre-existing discussion, both about the IGDA and whether or not it’s actually of any relevancy at all (Adam Martin and Darius Kazemi both have had a few things to say about that) and the long-running discussion over whether long overtime (“crunch”) is a workable model for game development.
My views on the former are simple: meh. My views on the latter are also pretty simple.
Crunch doesn’t work. You simply don’t gain more productivity by applying a 1.5 multiplier to everyone’s work hours. More likely, you start to introduce failure into the system as people get sloppy and careless as a best case scenario, and as a worst case scenario people start to flip you the virtual finger and spend their hours at their cubicle playing World of Warcraft instead. (I’ve seen both.) This is not a problem unique to game development, and there have been literally hundreds of studies that show that the productivity gained from crunching is minimal at best. It should be noted that the management consultant who originally came up with the 40 hour work week was Henry Ford, who was anything but a soft humanist.
Quality of Life is a choice. I’ve been lucky in my game development career to work on teams (Mythic, our team at NCsoft, Webwars, and my current Player To Be Named Later) which agree that part of keeping the best team members is in offering a work environment conducive to, well, being a well-rounded human being. I, and my peers, are older now. We have families, friends, and lives outside of work, and that helps shape who we are. Effective managers understand this. Ineffective managers don’t ship good games.
60 hour work weeks usually aren’t. Although there are exceptions (such as the weeks before a milestone or a big demo or if your entire production timeline has fallen apart) generally keeping people in the office for their waking hours does not mean they are actually working. What you are doing is instead creating a very efficient subculture of slacking. People will watch online videos, post to their blogs about how abused they are for never leaving the office, killing each other in this week’s shooter of choice, and have a Naxx raid going on the other monitor. Some companies fight back by aggressive firewalling and system monitoring. Those companies find out how easy it is to bypass those systems. If you treat your employees like enemy children, you’ll find that they can throw a lot of stones at you.
Note to the game industry: the economy collapsed. Maybe I’m pointing out the extreme obvious here, but this is not a good time to go on a tear about working conditions given that there are quite a few of out-of-work people quite willing to put up with whatever horrible pixel mine conditions exist, over and above the usual “holy-crap-I-can-work-on-games-and-come-to-work-at-10″ college kid talent intake, thank you very much. Of course from an ethical standpoint, that shouldn’t matter. Yes. And from an ethical standpoint unicorns have pretty flowers in their manes, and that’s about as relevant and realistic. You pick your battlegrounds, and this isn’t a terribly good one.
Crom Was Not Happy
Posted by Scott Jennings in Age of Conan, Funcom, Industry, _ on February 23rd, 2009
Shortly after Age of Conan launched, Funcom saw subscriber levels of 400,000, which rocketed up to 700,000 within a few months.
While Funcom’s cash position remains robust at USD 39.4 million, the company reported a full-year net loss of USD 33.8 million. According to estimates by DnB NOR Markets, subscriber levels for Age of Conan are below 100,000, reports E24.
However, revenues in the fourth quarter of 2008 rose to USD 8.7 million, up from USD 1.2 million year-on-year, due to subscription revenues from the MMO.
I Didn’t Make Any Of This Up
Posted by Scott Jennings in EA, Industry, John Riccitiello, Recession, _ on February 20th, 2009
Making Games, By EA’s John Riccitiello:
- Recessions are cool, because they put our competitors out of business.
- We will spend this year cutting headcount, closing facilities, and minimizing risk.
- Cutting headcount, closing facilities, and minimizing risk is a bad idea.
Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello says the current economic climate is “a blessing in disguise,” because it will force the industry to rethink stagnant attitudes and methods — and lead to “clearing away” some of the “junk” that currently fills gaming retail shelves.
“Junk is hard to compete with,” said Riccitiello frankly.
“I’m not pro-recession,” EA’s Riccitiello was quick to add, “but to quote Rahm Emanuel: never waste a crisis.”
“We did get fat in too many places. It seemed like anyone who could draw a guy with a gun with a crayon could get funded.”
But Riccitiello cautioned the audience of game industry execs against simply cutting head counts, closing facilities, and reducing risk. “That’s a recipe that you follow at your peril,” he said.
Electronic Arts: We Create Irony.
I’m Just A Poor Mid Level Line Producer Whose Intentions Are Good
Posted by Scott Jennings in Ethics, Industry, Recession, _ on February 11th, 2009
Only in 2009 can you have the intersection of game balance kvetching, business ethics, and charts about the Great Recession. And believe it or not, this time it’s not even me!
This was brought to my attention by a hit on my referral logs from my earlier primal scream about the omnipresent spectre of the gaming industry collapsing into a Schwarzchild radius of incompetency; namely that I’m a big whiny baby pounding at the keyboard with my hamfists.
If there is a product to work on today, the employee will have his salary. Tomorrow is another day. If there is no need for so many workers, they will no longer be employed. It’s that simple. Obviously if there will be need for some workers, the company tries to keep the better ones, fireing the underperformers. It’s obvious self-interest.
If the employee thought of his employer as a friend, his coworkers as a group of friends, he will feel betrayed. But whose fault it is? Actually I’ve never heard any company’s slogan to be “We are here to make our employees feel good”. They usually say “we are here to serve our customers” and mean “we are here to serve our customer’s money to our owners”. No one, ever offered the employee a “freindly helpfull group of peeps”.
Well, if your coworkers aren’t a subset of your group of friends, it may well be because you are an antisocial package of chemicals that everyone installed IM at work for specifically so they could make lunch plans without you overhearing. Most of us that have moved past the point in life where we have to wear nametags and hairnets when going to work, and now work in ‘teams’. Teams of like-minded individuals, selected in part due to personal compatibility. A key part of any employment interview process, after all, is “can we work with this person?”, which should appear closely behind “can this person actually do the job we’re looking to fill”. Both, after all, are important.
But beyond that, there is a small matter of business ethics to consider. There are some, like Mr. Greedy Gecko, er Goblin, who consider the only responsibility of a company to be its bottom line. Profit uber alles, and devil take the hindmost. It’s a fairly common viewpoint – who needs ethics when simple mathematics determines the victor!
But of course, there are other factors, or should be in a world that people not goblins may want to live in. Profit is all well and good and necessary, but at some point, someone may figure out that it’s cost-effective to dilute your milk with, say, I don’t know, something wacky like plastic. Of course long term, killing off your customers may hinder your bottom line. There are long term considerations.
One of those considerations involves the welfare of your employees. These are people who have engaged in a very clear bargain with you – for a given amount of money per week, they will spend that time helping you collect wealth. It’s a standard economic transaction, on the face of it. And for lower level employees, that’s also where it stops. Someone else pays you more, you move on. Shrug.
But past the point where you wear name tags and hair nets, it becomes incumbent on you to treat your assets as assets – and your team members are definitely assets. Because when the economy isn’t busy melting down into goo, they do have options – they can move elsewhere, say to places that don’t treat them as industrial cogs. So there is a certain level of capitalist self-interest there – you keep your assets happy, your assets stay with you and don’t become someone else’s.
But that’s not all of it, at least for most of us. Most effective managers see themselves as responsible for their team. Their team members rely on them to keep the engines running so that the explicit part of the bargain – come to work daily, get paid bi-weekly – continues to happen. That carries with it responsibility. The effective managers make sure their teams, and their projects, are successful, not only because it’s part of their job description to run a successful project and generate wealth, but also because your team members are relying on you to steer that ship through icebergs. Effective managers worry about this. Effective managers lose a lot of sleep about this — and I guarantee you, it’s not because they might deliver 22% less profit to the Mothership. It’s because they’re ethical.
This is not something you’d think would have to be explained in such grueling detail, but you’d be wrong. You’d be wrong because apparently the latest craze in Pinhead Public Company Management 101 involves divesting yourself of as many employees as you can before earnings reports so that your balance sheet looks good – regardless of whether or not you’re actually making a profit. Which is disturbing enough, but then you get apologetics like this who think that there’s nothing at all wrong with throwing your ‘assets’ over the side, and invalidating your implicit contract with them, solely to make a bar on a chart move from 43 to 48. You see – it’s really your fault.
However most of us get into situations when incompetent managers order us to do something obviously stupid and harmful to the company. Creating a malfunctioning product is not a crime unless it is dangerous to people’s health, yet it is stupid. The punishment for stupidity is market loss and the subsequent layoffs.
While employees acted as instruments of managers, this “instrument state” do not relieve them from the responsibility of their actions. They could write a memo to the higher management or simply say that “this management is stupid, I quit and find another job”. While it was a strong ape-subroutine that made them obey, they had free will to act differently. The fact that the managers would deserve layoffs more than the employees, does not change that the employees deserve it too.
I read things like this, complete with pseudo-scientific references to “ape subroutines”, and wonder if 50 years ago this guy would have been on the Warsaw Judenrat. There’s apologetics, and then there’s disturbing apologetics. (And hey, he went all Godwin first, with a somewhat disturbing equation of dissenting employees and the Nuremburg trials. I’m just finishing the neuron loop!)
Of course, many of us aren’t in the position exhorted by this blogger and MMO bloggers everywhere, namely that if you disagree with the direction of the company/design decisions/overuse of the color brown you should hand in your walking papers forthwith. As pointed out by a commenter to his blog:
I don’t know if you have a family that relies on you for its income, but tell me again that I’m free to quit a job at any time with 2 kids and a wife relying no me as the sole support of income.
To which the blogger responded:
Kids are investment to the future, cost a lot today but pay back well later. However a wife is a grown person who shall be able to support herself AND half of the kids. If YOU made the choice of supporting a grown person than it’s you who have to live with the consequences.
Hey, he’s got a point. I recommend octuplets. Better return on investment, donchaknow.
I realize this entire long blog post was the rhetorical equivalent of punching a baby, but business ethics has been something on my mind lately for fairly obvious reasons. Said blogger’s image of me as a caterwauling child ramming the keyboard with my forehead aside, I have been in the position of my failures as a team member and manager being in some way responsible for people losing their jobs. Interestingly enough, the fact that it was an eminently justifiable business decision – and in one memorable case, one I personally recommended – did nothing to help me sleep that week. Because I failed. Despite the fact that recommending a course of action that resulted in layoffs was, in a business sense the right decision – that was a failure.
And the rampant, smug self justification that we’re seeing with this year’s model of layoffs and cutbacks and corporate jets and stimulus explosions is telling me that there’s quite a few people who have no problem whatsoever sleeping. And that bothers me.
Enough to slam the keyboard with my hamfists.
Betcha You Can Guess #1
Posted by Scott Jennings in China, Industry, _ on February 2nd, 2009
Via GigaOM, DFC Intelligence’s top 10 global list of MMOs – by income generated.
Takeaways:
1: OMGCHINA. It’s not broken down in the figures, but my suspicion is China is a pretty hefty portion of World of Warcraft’s revenue stream as well, despite the revenue per user being significantly lower. The Chinese MMO market dwarfs the Western market, both in subscriber numbers, and more importantly in revenue. China’s the new Korea. It’s tempting to say that “someplace else will soon be the new China”, but it’s difficult to imagine unless all of Europe becomes obsessed with Diablo 3 or something. It also means that the Chinese market is very vulnerable to collapse if that audience moves to something else (again, see Korea, where many users have moved on to FPS games).
2: Installable client is still the king in terms of revenue, which is somewhat surprising – and promising, it means that much of this market is still being driven by the “hard core” willing to download gigabytes of data to try out a game. As web installs catch up this could open the market still further.
3: This may be an artifact of DFC tossing up their hands and going “I dunno” at trying to guesstimate income figures, but recent high profiles have all interestingly fallen into the same “tier” of $50-150m annual income. LOTRO = AoC = WAR = Runescape. Note: one of these had a somewhat lower budget than the others…
Perspectives
Posted by Scott Jennings in Industry, NCsoft, Navelgazing, Tabula Rasa, _ on January 16th, 2009
“You’re leaving here… for NCsoft? You *know* Tabula Rasa is going to crash and burn, right?”
– heard from someone when I announced my plans to leave Mythic, a year and a half before Tabula Rasa shipped
Adam Martin, formerly CTO of NCsoft Europe, has posted his own …post-mortem isn’t a good word, more of a memoir of his peripheral experiences with Tabula Rasa’s launch. It’s a good read – and you should go read it now. As his posting title puts it, “We need to talk about Tabula Rasa; when will we talk about Tabula Rasa?”
Well, Adam’s a bit safer in that he’s on a whole other continent. Here in Austin game development, it’s hard to find someone who isn’t, at a maximum, one degree removed from someone who was involved, at one point or another, with TR. It was a massive project, it employed a great many people over its lifetime, and at least half of the resumes currently sitting in my email are from people involved, at one point or another, with TR. Combine that with Midway’s long-running explosion and you have most of the Austin game development community polishing resumes.
So what happened?
My take is pretty similar to Adam’s, actually. I was considerably closer geographically, but not that much closer from a development perspective. To mirror Adam’s “who is this guy and why is he pontificating, again?” bona fides, I…
- …was a designer on another, smaller project at NCsoft Austin’s office (hired as system designer, eventually promoted to lead designer)
- …wasn’t on the TR dev team
- …am not much for FPS games, am pretty sad at them, and usually die horribly in Team Fortress 2
- …used that as an excuse for staying as far away from TR discussions as possible
- …it was a pretty weak excuse, yeah.
- …was on the same mailing lists Adam was (save the cool management ones he was privy to, which was probably for the best) and heard much the same angst, cheerleading, and general “holy crap what now” gestalt.
Gathering Feedback, Putting It Into A Box, Never Speaking Of It Again
As TR moved closer to release, company wide, we were *ordered* to start particpating in weekly playtests. As I mentioned, I wasn’t really fond of shooters, and clung to that Get Out Of Jail Free card fiercely. I mean, being one of the most obnoxiously opinionated persons on internal email lists, along with the whole ranting on the web for a decade thing, having an excuse *not* to have an opinion on That Thing Looming Over All Of Us was pretty sweet.
But closer to release, we were told to play the game and give feedback. Which I did. I think my overall feedback was “it wasn’t THAT bad” (for those at Mythic who remember the blistering we-should-probably-fire-your-ass-right-now-for-that-very-unhelpful-email feedback I fired off about Imperator prior to its final E3, that may raise an eyebrow or three). It *wasn’t* that bad. The tutorial was kind of meh, then got kind of cool, then you wandered around and shot things. It wasn’t World of Warcraft, which I considered a plus. I didn’t really enjoy playing it, but it wasn’t for me.
(I’m sure my somewhat constant resentment over Tabula Rasa being the twelve thousand pound gorilla which had dozens of programmers and a floor full of artists while our project was flailing about wildly for just one concept artist and maybe a server programmer or two had nothing to do with it. But I digress. For now, We’ll get back to that somewhat constant resentment in a bit.)
The calendar moved forward inexorably, and TR went into marketing beta – you know, where anyone can play it so they get ALL excited and make guilds and get ready for release and… yeah, that didn’t happen. People downloaded the game, had varying degrees of the “it’s not THAT bad” reaction, and didn’t play it again.
This was noted. One of the mantras that went around production discussions after Auto Assault’s launch square into the pavement was that if you can’t get people to play the beta for free, you have serious, serious issues. Tabula Rasa had those issues. Not as bad as Auto Assault – there were people doggedly playing every night and presumably enjoying themselves, and metrics were duly assembled to measure every movement those testers took. But it was pretty clear, at least from my completely disassociated and busy with my own thing viewpoint, that there wasn’t a lot of excitement.
So, as Adam mentioned, a survey was sent out shortly before the game was scheduled to release, anonymously asking, among other things, if the game should be delayed. I put that it should, based on the Auto Assault beta-not-lit-on-fire thing and the general principle that if you have to ask if it should be delayed, it probably should be. But I didn’t feel very passionately about it one way or the other. (I’m told later that most of the team DID feel pretty passionately about it and made it known so.)
The survey’s results weren’t announced. Internal rumors swept pretty widely (I know, because if they got to my end of the building, they were pretty wide) that the results were almost unanimously for a delay.
There was no delay.
Whoops.
You’re The Next Contestant On The Game Is Wrong
All during this time, I was pretty busy. Our game was trying to move into full production. We were the next product scheduled for shipment after Tabula Rasa. We were scrambling to fill some pretty key hires, justify an ambitious/insane production schedule, and generally get our shit into gear.
Right about then, the following things happened:
- We were faced with some pretty key technical issues (I can’t go into any further detail, just assume for the moment they made us look like complete blithering idiots and go from there)
- Tabula Rasa shipped, promptly flopped, and everyone went “uh… What the hell?”
- Everyone in management decided that was *not* going to happen again, and most had their own theories on how that would be prevented.
- The poster child for making sure it was *not* going to happen again became… us.
There was a company meeting about then, which was designed to boost the company morale. Chris Chung had just taken over from Robert Garriott, people were scared about their future, and we were tasked, as a key part of our presentation, to show how kickass we were.
We failed.
We had no game systems to show, because we had no functioning game server beyond a prototype that we had migrated away from months prior. We showed a depressing landscape of twisted trees and rocks, and our lead designer, who normally is one of the most inspirational speakers I’ve heard in the industry, understandably wilted under the stress of YOU MUST SAVE OUR COMPANY NOW and gave a pretty depressed speech about the game’s fiction that didn’t match much of what was shown onscreen. The internal response was brutal to the point of sadism, and in a failing of management was made known to the leads along with who gave the comments. Most of whom were… on Tabula Rasa.
This was not helpful to morale, to put it mildly.
Things got worse. An executive from Korea came to check on our progress, and was surprised that we were working on an MMO. (I wish I was joking.) We were told that our jobs weren’t in danger, really. It’s FINE. You’re good for at least a few months or so.
Meanwhile, Tabula Rasa chugged on.
We soldiered on, moved inexorably towards our first playable demo. It was a really kick-assed zone, our artists (which we finally had) outdid themselves, our programmers (which we finally had) did awesome work, I had taken over lead design duties due to the former lead being promoted onward and upward at his own request (his vision of the game long before eviscerated by budget cuts) and we were gonna kick ass, it was gonna be great, everything was finally firing on all cylinders, we were going to show everyone at the company that we could follow through on our promises and our ninjitsu was superior and and and the first team playtest we did on the new server failed completely.
The team meeting following that was unpleasant. I imagine the same “it was your fault no it was your fault no you” conversation took place at Tabula Rasa more than once.
Shortly thereafter the project was cancelled. Not one of the highlights of my career, especially since I was one of the folks who had to man up and tell our superiors that no, we were not going to be able to deliver a playable demo on schedule and yes, we knew what that meant. Our team shrunk by 2/3rds as we swiftly moved to working on a new prototype to justify our continued existence.
Meanwhile, Tabula Rasa chugged on.
There was another company meeting, which was designed to boost company morale. We were told that we were eminently replacable in general (which I’m told later was a wildly, wildly misconstrued statement, but to put it mildly, did not boost company morale) and that our team in specific was a “distraction” from NCsoft’s core business model. Everyone, including me, immediately began looking for work.
When we were finally let go a month later, it wasn’t a surprise, and most of us already had offer letters in hand elsewhere. (I was given the option to transfer to another NCsoft studio, but declined, as we had put down roots here in Austin.) At this point, my personal perspective came to an end, since I, well, didn’t work there any more.
Meanwhile, Tabula Rasa chugged on.
What Would Snarky Bloggers Do?
So, I don’t have any magic solutions for what should have been done differently. My personal view on Tabula Rasa is that it was a project in search of reasons – the original design was “let’s make a game both Korea and the US will go for”, and when that failed, it became “let’s make a game both shooter fans and MMO fans will go for”. Not being a full shooter and not being a full MMO, it didn’t do well at attracting either. But that’s from the outside looking in – any armchair designer could figure that out.
To quote Adam:
When the organization disempowers you, and nothing you do seems able to make a diference, but – in your opinion – the impending event is an “extinction-level” disaster, is resignation the only valid response? Surely not?
Our response was to keep our heads down and do the best that we could at our jobs. From what I gathered from hallway conversations with others, that was a fairly universal take. It’s what you CAN do.
Unfortunately it wasn’t enough, for our project, and ultimately, for Tabula Rasa as well. There’s nothing that you can point to and say “here was the big mistake”. There were a lot of tiny mistakes, and they built up.
Would delaying Tabula Rasa’s open beta have saved it? Probably not.
Would delaying Tabula Rasa’s release have saved it? Probably not.
In the end, some games – most games, actually – just fail. Tabula Rasa was one of those. There wasn’t anything obvious or magical to it. It just wasn’t a game that very many people got passionate about. The biggest failing, though, was that it was in development about twice as long and spent twice as much as it had any right to. And that’s what promotes it, in this snarky outside blogger’s view, from understandable failure to extinction-level company-slaying train wreck. That took precedence over any design failure or engineering failure or art vision or whatever your personal opinion on why it failed might be.
It just. took. too. much. money.
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