| Squilliam said: Put yourself in the position of a very good software engineer. You're making games because you're in it for the love and not so much the money as you could probably do uninteresting non gaming development and earn at least twice the salary with better hours. Publishers and managers only have so much sway on you because the chances of being unemployed for more than a couple of weeks between jobs is pretty slim. This is the challenge of managing a talented employee base which has mobile skills and a real willingness to walk if they don't get what they want. You have two major options, either you maintain old code and port the Wii U or you can work on completely new architectures and take on new challenges so which one do you pick? Remembering that you're in it for the love and not the money so unless you have a specific love for Nintendo you're probably going to pick the latter. Now multiply this effect by X number of engineers spread over Y number of development houses and you have the answer as to why Z numbers multiplatform ports aren't coming Nintendo's way. So there we have it, a repeat of the last generation where 3rd party developers pretty much only develop for the Nintendo console because they 'have to' and any developer with a choice exercises it generally and develops for other systems. Nintendo was simply unwilling to do what the top level developers wanted and hence they don't get the support from the top level developers, had the Wii U been more powerful it would have been a lot more interesting to developers or had it come say in 2010 there wouldn't have been the option for these developers to simply move onto new systems. TLDR: Top level developers would have no problem supporting the Wii U but they just don't want to and managers can't tell them what to do. |
This entire post is confused, but especially the last line.
The only people that might fall into this category can be counted on, maybe, ten fingers (e.g. Ken Levine, the Houser Bros., etc.), as far as Western devs are concerned. Everyone else is going to do *exactly* what management tells them do to because THEY WORK FOR MANAGEMENT and management is PAYING THE BILLS. Software engineers do not get to pick what they work on. Period. I'm not even sure why you would suggest such a fanciful notion.
And lol at the notion of tens (let alone hundreds) of game devs walking from their jobs in this economy because they refuse to work on 'x' console! Have you been paying attention to the game dev job market lately? I have because I work in it, and let me tell ya, it ain't pretty. Right now everyone is moving onto "nextgen" dev (be it U, NextBox, PS4), but this also means that more money is being spent on fewer games, which means fewer jobs since they will always try to squeeze as much blood from a particular employee as possible. This, at least in part, explains why independent dev studios have been dropping like flies for the past 2-years--there simply isn't enough work to go around. (I can almost promise you this is exactly what happened at Eurocom--they got caught in the vise of wrapping up a current gen project and had nothing at all lined up after that because the work just isn't there.) And anyone that is at an independent game dev studio right now is probably just happy to have a job making console games--that's certainly been my experience when talking to the non-Levines of the gaming world, which outnumber the rockstars 1000-to-1 or more.)
(I hope everyone enjoyed the dev holocaust of the past 5-years, because by the end of the nextgen, you'll probably have five big pubs with internal teams, and a vanishingly small handful of dev studios that actually still make console titles, and a *ton* of contractors, be it here or in the Far East/India.)
(I'm actually one of those people that can 'choose' what they work on but not because I'm somebody--it's because I'm freelance/contract-based, so I work on what I want (unless I really need the money then, like eveyrone else, I take whatever is on the table), but that's hardly the same thing as working for EA and demaning they make "Software Engineer: The Reckoning" or you're going to leave--they will *laugh* at you.)
