Thanks for the insight. It's a tough subject. On one hand we see beautiful and brilliant games, but we rarely get a look behind the curtains. This is a breath of fresh air. On the other hand we hear publishers cry about rising costs and the need to maintain high sales, which led to this situation. I hope things relax a bit in the future, but that's probably just wishful thinking.

You know what we're wondering, but I understand if you can't divulge that information.

I've been doxxed before, so if the question is "what games have you worked on", I'm afraid I can't say.

I'd love to see gamer's reactions to a developer strike. PD get criticised all the time for being slow to deliver. I have no idea how the crunch situation is there, yet dare to take more than 2 years to make another release and gamers already start complaining.

But true, the film industry has learned to time manage projects, why can't game development studios learn. I've been there too, and with a group of passionate people it's always, let's try to get this in too, let's do this a bit different, etc, until it's too late and the list of issues that still need to be fixed has grown out of hand. Someone needs to step in and say cut, stick to the original script, don't promiss anything else, good enough.

Well, Hennig's right... I did hear Hajime Tabata was sleeping around 5 hours per night because of FFXV's development...

Gaming is different to making a film, the programming alone can be a mountain of a task with that alone having as many issues possibly more as you would find making an entire film. Problems from how the hardware reacts to each line of code to how do we execute this idea in the game's concept to engine conflicts to overcoming hardware limitations and this is just one aspect mind you, game assets like character models as well as animation are other areas that are time consuming and remember they all have to come together like a jigsaw puzzle and the hardware has to be able to play that puzzle.

Someone stepping in and restricting freedom can remove clutter but it's a double edge sword as some influential features have come from people adding things a prime example is the multiplayer in Goldeneye, that launched consoles as a serious platform for shooters before Halo came along and cemented it. Had someone been there to make them stick to the original idea the game would never have had that mode.

Publishers should make longer time frame for developers. 3 years isn't enough for AAA games, graphics are the ones taking more time.

Don't underestimate the work that goes into making a big movie, which also involves a lot of programming nowadays to get the cgi done. At least with games you don't have to deal with the weather. For example filming of The revenant had to be completed in Argentina due to lack of snow in Canada. The difference is, movies aren't shown 2 years in advance as the next big thing promising all locations and what not beforehand.

Hardware limitations are specific to games true, yet those are known constants. The push for ever better graphics has become a liability. Adding an unplanned multiplayer mode, move control scheme, ps4 pro enhancements, psvr additions, is it really worth the crunch? Adding things late in production always causes headaches. It turned out great with Goldeneye, yet it was still irresponsible and set a precedent for bad development style.

That's a big difference between movies and games. With movies the creative phase comes first, script, storyboarding, then executing. With games it's all going through eachother. Uncharted 3 started as a bunch of set pieces with the script tying them together pretty much coming last. No wonder time management is a big mess in games development. Ofcourse you can still run into problems with a strong script and vision as TLG simply could not be executed. Best is to stop showing off games way before they are ready and either cut or delay.

Well unlike the film industry, not every problem is solvable with time and money. Sometimes a game feature is too ambititious and too innovative, and there's just no way to make it work within the hardware constraints if they can make it work at all. Sometimes a gameplay mechanic that the game was based around is plain isn't fun no matter how much is tweaked. There are unsolvable problems where the only real solution is to not do them, and to fundamentally replace them with something else that may or may not solve the problem as well. Sometimes it's a very cuttable feature like an extra game mode or an optional setting, or weapon. Sometimes its super critical and then you're fucked, and your whole project is fucked, and there is no saving it.

The only time the film industry really faces such similar problems like that is when actors die, and even then they can get around it most of the time, especially with CGI - even terrible CGI is a solution no matter how bad it is.. There's no "CGI bandaid" that can fix, say, a climbing pathfinding mechanic that doesn't actually bring the player where they intend on going 80% of the time because of a fundamental flaw in its design. You can't "good enough" that without your game still looking like a buggy, unpolished piece of shit.

There's only so much planning you can do before a project quite literally

It baffles me that when we now developers are closing down because of the costs that someone would suggest that the best solution is to reduce the time they work and raise their paycheck.