That's the Sound of the Men Working on the Games

March 7, 2006 1:15 PM

Stuart Roch is a producer at developer Treyarch (Ultimate Spider-Man) who runs a site called A Producer's Point of View on which he posts various thoughts about games and the games industry. Most recently, he reflects on a D.I.C.E. session given by Fumito Ueda and Kenji Kaido, the director and producer of the excellent Ico (PS2) and Shadow of the Colossus (PS2). Roch notes that each of those two games was in production for a full four years, definitely a longer than average development cycle for the industry. He wonders if giving teams the possibility of staying in development that long might lead to better games. Ueda has also noted in that past that his teams for Ico and Shadow were very small, both because he prefers working with a closer-knit team, and also because his standards for his team members are so high. Ico was developed by about twenty people, with some ten or so added for Shadow of the Colossus. Roch admits that there is clearly no simple correlation between longer development times and higher quality games, but he does suggest that if games were less likely to be pushed out to meet, for example, a particular fiscal quarter, the overall quality of games in the industry might rise, which might in the end lead to higher profitability.

I realize business concerns must trump all others if stock prices are to continue to soar, but the gamer purist in me wonders if the industry as a whole would grow and therefore be more profitable if we focused on innovation and quality in more cases. Emotionally I hate the feeling that as a business we're more consistently staffing larger and larger teams to do mad crunches to the finish line over smaller teams who have more time to do proper pre-production, prototype, be creative and iterate.
Might it be more preferable to have a 50 person team working on a game for three years than a 100+ person team working on the same game for a year and a half?

For whatever reason, Japanese publishers seem more likely to give their teams leniency on development time. For both Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, Sony allowed Ueda's team the resources and time they needed to create their games--and yet, that was Ueda's first game for Sony, and only his second overall. Previously, he had worked as an animator on a Saturn title. Nintendo operates in a similar way, separating its marketing teams from its development teams until projects are completed. On the other hand, when Western game developers have extremely long development cycles (and end up shipping successful games) it tends to be in the case of studios with enough cash in the bank to self-fund the games, such as Valve. Publishers seem to be less willing to fund such long term projects, at least knowingly.

Like any other entertainment form, some games are proposed mainly to drive revenue, and some are proposed with other motives in mind on the part of the developer. Obviously, a licensed title is mainly seen as a market-driven product, and it makes sense that such titles are developed under tight development times in order to keep the product relevant to whatever license is in question. However, many developers also aim to make games that, even if they clearly still want the games to sell well, do not have profits as the absolute number one goal. Everyone wants to make money with what they do in their chosen profession, but for many people working in creative fields that is a secondary objective. In many of those cases, publishers still feel they can make worthwhile money off such products if marketed correctly, otherwise games such as Ico would never have been allocated budgets in the first place. However, as Roch points out at the end of his post, it may be in a publisher's best interest to differentiate between the games that are largely profit-driven and the games that have that as a secondary goal. Nobody wants buggy games, but if the team that worked on the Simpsons game didn't get in all of their dream features, in all honesty it probably isn't going to impact the bottom line all that much when the game is released.

On the other hand, if a game that is the culmination of something a designer has strived his whole life to get the chance to create is shipped six months early to meet the holiday season, that may very well have a huge impact on the game's long term financial success. If the game has a lot of potential for appeal, but is not easily marketable, it probably has to survive based on the strength of good reviews and word of mouth. If there is not license to push or no hot topic to piss off politicians or get on magazine covers, the game absolutely must be of a certain level of quality or it simply will not generate the buzz it needs. This can, will, and has killed great games that had the potential to make a lot more money. Games can sell very well over long periods of time or to markets that are not being addressed by the explosive day-one sellers, but if they shipped before they can reach a certain level of quality or polish, the potential for those games to make a name for themselves is severely reduced. Again, not every game needs this. Roch "calls for more publishers to establish better balance" between those two development attitudes. Everyone wants their games to make money, but not every game is going to make money the same way.