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“What Went Right and What Went Wrong”: Analysis of 155 Postmortems from Gamedev

research.microsoft.com

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Re: “What Went Right and What Went Wrong”: Analysis of 155 Postmortems from Gamedev

#41

Post by pandaman »

hythloday wrote: post #19
jblow wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your friend was not very senior (10+ years experience), I would not believe what he says, since he probably did not have enough experience to judge the situation. I think the idea that the game industry is "behind" other fields is kind of comical, given that games are some of the most complex software in the world, and big game teams have only a few hundred people on them, and meanwhile something relatively trivia…

I was in the games industry from 1999 to 2012 (and then left to go to Twitter!) and I think his friend is absolutely right, the games industry shoots itself in the foot repeatedly by believing that it's a special snowflake full of "hard problems" that no-one else tackles and continually (and badly) tries to reinvent the wheel. The universal culture of deathmarches and the denigration of mainstream software engineerin…

If only game studios could raise money on negative profit margins instead of being forced to deliver milestones to be able to run regular operations... Every day I'd be writing unit tests and doing standups in between code reviews and updating my GitHub profile.

Re: “What Went Right and What Went Wrong”: Analysis of 155 Postmortems from Gamedev

#42

Post by true_religion »

JabavuAdams wrote: post #35
enjo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes more sense when you're working with old legacy code and you want to add features to it. No!! Testing is not merely about future proofing (although it's a really nice benefit), it's about proving that your code actually works now . By writing tests and verifying that they pass you can be sure that the code actually does what you think it does. Furthermore you can ensure that when other parts of the code chang…

Unit testing makes a lot of sense for game engine code, but less so for game-logic code, which tends to be highly volatile and specified only qualitatively.

A lot of bugs in games involve asking if state is X,Y,Z ... does A actually execute.

Re: “What Went Right and What Went Wrong”: Analysis of 155 Postmortems from Gamedev

#43

Post by hythloday »

pandaman wrote: post #41
hythloday wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was in the games industry from 1999 to 2012 (and then left to go to Twitter!) and I think his friend is absolutely right, the games industry shoots itself in the foot repeatedly by believing that it's a special snowflake full of "hard problems" that no-one else tackles and continually (and badly) tries to reinvent the wheel. The universal culture of deathmarches and the denigration of mainstream software engineerin…

If only game studios could raise money on negative profit margins instead of being forced to deliver milestones to be able to run regular operations... Every day I'd be writing unit tests and doing standups in between code reviews and updating my GitHub profile.

If you're comparing them to VC-funded startups, games studios run on negative profit margins until the game is released!

Re: “What Went Right and What Went Wrong”: Analysis of 155 Postmortems from Gamedev

#44

Post by pandaman »

hythloday wrote: post #43
pandaman wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only game studios could raise money on negative profit margins instead of being forced to deliver milestones to be able to run regular operations... Every day I'd be writing unit tests and doing standups in between code reviews and updating my GitHub profile.

If you're comparing them to VC-funded startups, games studios run on negative profit margins until the game is released!

Some might, but it's not a common business model. Most game studios work for publishers and they sell the game continuously in form of milestones. Even a studio owned by publisher has to continuously deliver or it will be shut down. Twitter, which I am comparing to, just gets money on the promise of the future profits. Correct me if I am wrong, but I don't believe it has any software deliverables it has to meet every quarter in order to make payroll.

Re: “What Went Right and What Went Wrong”: Analysis of 155 Postmortems from Gamedev

#45

Post by hythloday »

pandaman wrote: post #44
hythloday wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're comparing them to VC-funded startups, games studios run on negative profit margins until the game is released!

Some might, but it's not a common business model. Most game studios work for publishers and they sell the game continuously in form of milestones. Even a studio owned by publisher has to continuously deliver or it will be shut down. Twitter, which I am comparing to, just gets money on the promise of the future profits. Correct me if I am wrong, but I don't believe it has any software deliverables it has to meet every…

Twitter, now, sells advertising, which is 90% of its revenue. While it was VC-funded, which is really what you should be comparing it to as it's the prevalent stage of an startup, it raised money from VC funds by hitting non-contractual milestones in terms of MAU/DAU increases. I don't think that's particularly different to the milestone model that's prevalent in games - a third party pours money incrementally into the development of a product contingent on the mutually agreeable evolution of the product.

Unless you're in the habit of delivering RC-quality milestones (which is afaik unheard of in AAA development), the marginal value of a milestone is negative right up until the last one.

Re: “What Went Right and What Went Wrong”: Analysis of 155 Postmortems from Gamedev

#46

Post by pandaman »

hythloday wrote: post #45
pandaman wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some might, but it's not a common business model. Most game studios work for publishers and they sell the game continuously in form of milestones. Even a studio owned by publisher has to continuously deliver or it will be shut down. Twitter, which I am comparing to, just gets money on the promise of the future profits. Correct me if I am wrong, but I don't believe it has any software deliverables it has to meet every…

Twitter, now, sells advertising, which is 90% of its revenue. While it was VC-funded, which is really what you should be comparing it to as it's the prevalent stage of an startup, it raised money from VC funds by hitting non-contractual milestones in terms of MAU/DAU increases. I don't think that's particularly different to the milestone model that's prevalent in games - a third party pours money incrementally into t…

I am sorry, it seems that my point is completely lost behind snark. Let me put it straight then.

The argument in this thread is that games industry is somehow behind times and not using the best practices used at places such as Twitter. The question is - how do you know your practices are the best and not the other way around?

Game studios go out of business if they don't deliver quality software on time and on budget. I know it first hand since I have been through several studio closures. The practices game studios use are tested through natural selection - if they fail at delivering software they are out of business. To make things more interesting there is also competition: a good game decimates sales of the worse games released around the same time. And if the sales go below the projected ROI - it's the game over. So it's not enough to be good enough to survive, you need to be better than the competition.

Trendy web companies don't sell software. They sell services and the quality of software they use is secondary. E.g. if I wrote a Facebook's clone but 100 times faster, using 10 times less memory and with 1/1000th of Facebook's staff it would not threaten Facebook. People would not close their accounts and move to my network just because I have better software. A web company is fine as long as their website runs semi-reliably.

So how come the battle-tested practices of the games industry are so bad compared to the practices of the industry, which mostly sells advertisement? What are the criteria you use to compare?

Re: “What Went Right and What Went Wrong”: Analysis of 155 Postmortems from Gamedev

#47

Post by [deleted] »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #23
hluska wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a symptom of a fear of "I don't know." If I could change one thing in dev cultures, I would instill a healthy respect for the sentence: "I don't know, but here's $how_I'll_find_out and here's $when_I'll_have_an_answer."

Exactly right. Too often I've seen people commit to a schedule where the milestones were of unknown difficulty. When cutting through a new jungle, you have no idea what is between you and your goal, so really all you can say is that the best you can hope for is X if this jungle happens to be like previous ones. This is especially true in startup situations where you are learning technologies that may themselves not b…

[deleted]

Re: “What Went Right and What Went Wrong”: Analysis of 155 Postmortems from Gamedev

#48

Post by erikbc »

hythloday wrote: post #29
tslug wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best approach is to apprentice with someone who knows not to make them. If you can't do that, check in with someone regularly who: 1. Won't sugar coat feedback, 2. Has shipped games, 3. Has a healthy sense of humility, and 3. Is genuinely concerned about your success. I really like sitting on advisory boards in this role, but my secret to being good at it is that I regularly ask for feedback from others who are s…

Something about your last paragraph rubbed me the wrong way. Sorry. > about 10X the competition Steam added 1500 games in the first 7 months of 2015. Crunchbase had over 8000 investments in 2015. So I don't think that's true, even accounting for a Christmas peak. > juggling massive game assets Lots of data goes into games, lots of data comes out of websites. The difference to my eyes is that the industry has multiple…

"Let's not pretend that banging out something in Cg is PhD-level shit."

Almost everything you implement in CG is "PhD-level shit". Implementing techniques from SIGGRAPH papers in your game engine are usually non-trivial. Game engines/games are some of the most complex systems in software engineering, the complexity can't be compared to web apps at all.

Re: “What Went Right and What Went Wrong”: Analysis of 155 Postmortems from Gamedev

#49

Post by ekianjo »

Kristine1975 wrote: post #6
ekianjo wrote: post #4

The recommendations at the end of the pdf seem to be written by captain Obvious. They are so generic they can apply to about ANY project even non gamedev related.

>The recommendations at the end of the pdf seem to be written by captain Obvious. Doesn't that simply mean that this research confirms other people's experience/gut feeling?

It simply means the research is not insightful.

Re: “What Went Right and What Went Wrong”: Analysis of 155 Postmortems from Gamedev

#50

Post by emelef »

pandaman wrote: post #46
hythloday wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter, now, sells advertising, which is 90% of its revenue. While it was VC-funded, which is really what you should be comparing it to as it's the prevalent stage of an startup, it raised money from VC funds by hitting non-contractual milestones in terms of MAU/DAU increases. I don't think that's particularly different to the milestone model that's prevalent in games - a third party pours money incrementally into t…

I am sorry, it seems that my point is completely lost behind snark. Let me put it straight then. The argument in this thread is that games industry is somehow behind times and not using the best practices used at places such as Twitter. The question is - how do you know your practices are the best and not the other way around? Game studios go out of business if they don't deliver quality software on time and on budge…

Games are more like web products than you think, I'd say. If you come up with a game-stack: 3d engine, netcode, the works, that vastly outperforms a game like League of Legends, that does nothing to threaten them either.

I'm not siding with this notion that Twitter (or webdev in general) is ahead, mind you, but it's fair to say that neither websites nor games are about selling software. They're more about entertainment.

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