Eh, I think you’d be surprised. It really takes a lot of time to get someone from new hire to productive member of a team. Even with the money to just shotgun hire new people and keep good fits it still takes time for them to understand the vision, tech stack, workflow, and culture. I honestly think software is an environment where finding and investing in good people matters more than money and that no amount of venture capital will fix that
Highly motivated developers with passion projects will always exist (Minecraft, Stardew Valley, Undertale, Dwarf Fortress). However producing high quality art in a corporate environment is possible, repeatable, and scalable if you acknowledge the inherent reality of creative development
I was thinking of things like gamefreak, where they’ve been chronically understaffed to the point where they simply can’t get enough work done on the timelines they need to meet. I’d imagine that something like “model and animate 1000 pokemon” is the kind thing that can fairly easily be sped up by having a larger body of people doing the work, and the time spent bringing them all up to speed would pay off over the totality of games they end up working on.
Depends on how under staffed. You have to teach all the new people how to work there. That takes time, then once they know what to do, but now you have a bottleneck on approval and addressing questions. You can’t hire more for that, because it takes in depth knowledge of what the art needs to be.
Eh, I think you’d be surprised. It really takes a lot of time to get someone from new hire to productive member of a team. Even with the money to just shotgun hire new people and keep good fits it still takes time for them to understand the vision, tech stack, workflow, and culture. I honestly think software is an environment where finding and investing in good people matters more than money and that no amount of venture capital will fix that
Highly motivated developers with passion projects will always exist (Minecraft, Stardew Valley, Undertale, Dwarf Fortress). However producing high quality art in a corporate environment is possible, repeatable, and scalable if you acknowledge the inherent reality of creative development
Agreed.
Including a shitty or just bad or incomplete on-boarding for the business processes just extends to time by a good margin.
I was thinking of things like gamefreak, where they’ve been chronically understaffed to the point where they simply can’t get enough work done on the timelines they need to meet. I’d imagine that something like “model and animate 1000 pokemon” is the kind thing that can fairly easily be sped up by having a larger body of people doing the work, and the time spent bringing them all up to speed would pay off over the totality of games they end up working on.
Depends on how under staffed. You have to teach all the new people how to work there. That takes time, then once they know what to do, but now you have a bottleneck on approval and addressing questions. You can’t hire more for that, because it takes in depth knowledge of what the art needs to be.