LegitHyperbole said:
I watched the creator of Fallout talk about why games are taking so long to create. He said it's the devs themselves padding time estimates and having too many meetings. He's noticed in the last 10 years. I know it's only one example and not indicative of the industry as a whole but he may be onto something, too much hummin and hawing over what to do and if decision paralysis and not enough time to get stuff done. He had one example where he pitched a couple of lines of code to be altered and was given an estimate of 4 weeks on a job he thought would be an hour and finally managed to get the devs down to 2 weeks.
|
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.
