The beginning of the article offers analysis as to what the rest of it might be.
Not too long ago, I had coffee with a video-game developer who told me that work was slow and that they’d been spending half of their days watching Netflix.
For a second I was stunned — this person worked for a major corporation worth billions of dollars — until I remembered how many times I’d heard similar stories.
There was the developer who couldn’t work because the game’s tools weren’t ready. There was the team that had to drop everything they were doing because the creative director had played Breath of the Wild over the weekend and came away with some Great Ideas. There were the artists who were blocked from working as they waited for a colleague to finish a design.
In other words, it’s not uncommon for professional video-game makers to find themselves spinning their wheels for prolonged periods, during which they get paid to do very little work.
So their solution to bad team coordination (which I would mostly consider a management problem) is to hire more people into their studios? I am not sure I am getting the link here.
It may explain longer development times, but bigger studios?
My read on it is that they hire enough people to optimistically get everything done when no one is blocked, but you can’t predict the future, like when you have a problem with your middleware that throws a wrench in the works, and a series of problems prevents other teams from getting their work done.
The beginning of the article offers analysis as to what the rest of it might be.
So their solution to bad team coordination (which I would mostly consider a management problem) is to hire more people into their studios? I am not sure I am getting the link here.
It may explain longer development times, but bigger studios?
My read on it is that they hire enough people to optimistically get everything done when no one is blocked, but you can’t predict the future, like when you have a problem with your middleware that throws a wrench in the works, and a series of problems prevents other teams from getting their work done.