By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
SvennoJ on 14 October 2024
Edit Thread
LegitHyperbole said:
SvennoJ said:

That's pretty recognizable. The bigger the teams, the more bosses, the more people want to have a say in every little detail.

When I started work we were a team of two to four. Half hour to max and hour meeting once a week.

Ffwd a few decades, company grown to over 1,000 people, different teams working together on the same projects. Daily meetings, sometimes multiple a day, any changes need to be submitted and pushed up the chain for approval. Every change/fix make a risk assessment, review, notes for test department and a whole lot of email traffic.

What was once a quick easy fix, now could be even be postponed for after release if it was within 2 months of the next release window.
We went to the extreme in the beginning though, re-compiling the code after literally making last minute changes and burning a new disc while the boss was holding up the courier, who was waiting for the disc, to be rushed to the manufacturer to be mass duplicated.


More cooks in the kitchen doesn't necessarily make the work go faster.

Problem is no one has a full overview of all the code anymore. It's too much nowadays for one person to say, this might affect that component. Like using some more memory or CPU cycles in one place could break something else.

And of course, more people, harder to reach agreement over everything. Maybe games need to follow the movie industry more, one director, basically a dictator instead of working by committee. And then you get unique games like Death Stranding and Detroit become Human. (And also TLG that took forever to come out as the director's vision was too ambitious for the ps3, no compromise, postpone until the HW can run it) Those games are polarizing though, and the industry wants to make money from all, so making games by committee for all gamers is the directive from the share holders. And then we end up with jack of all trades, master of none, padded games.


Dud ya grow that yourself or were you just in early? 4 to 1000 is pretty epic. 

And aye, I can't imagine what the beurocracy of these companies like Rockstar with 2000+ people and like you said the risk analysis and checking in with every department for problems, no one wants to be the fuck up who fucked up half the teams work. Sony seems to be able to run fairly large teams effectively though and Nintendo too, perhaps they've figured it out. 

I wish lol. I was in early, the 7th to join the company in the 90s (we did have more than one project!) and we later merged with Psion, Netherlands division. Harold Goddijn who was head of Psion in the Netherlands at the time, grew the company to where it is now (TomTom). Great boss, true visionary. His wife was part of the management of Palmtop Software before he took over.

It is quite an epic success story, glad to have been part of it :)

Also the bigger it gets, the more damaging any negative press will get. Early fuck ups went unnoticed, yet once big enough, every little problem is blown up out of proportion. Hence so much trepidation about any changes later on.

Early on we had to do a recall early on as the distributor had mixed up the CDs, Spanish music in the cases instead of our software. Nobody really noticed, heck the internet wasn't even properly up yet. Before that we were so small we did the distribution ourselves. We were mostly making software for Psion devices and at a release all came to the office to mass duplicate SD cards to put in the boxes to send out to stores. From mom and pop shop to mega firm. Quite a journey!