TurtleFish

That's the thing though - barring a viral hit out of nowhere (see Palworld), the thing that Spencer could have at least tried to do (depending on internal Microsoft politics - Cloud really is the tail wagging the dog) is insulate studios from the economic cycle so they have the time to develop in-house talent to increase the odds of a massive hit (or at least something that has enough buzz to be a system seller.) Everybody thought that's what Spencer was trying to do -- but, instead, it looks like he's following the EA playbook. And we all know how well THAT ended up working out in the end.

Game dev takes time and game development expertise doesn't just appear on trees. One of the most damning stupid things about the current gaming lifecycle is that people with years, decades of experience, are walking out the door and the studios have nothing to show for it.

At the very least, Spencer could have bought Blizzard another year of dev time on the new game. In a world where Microsoft desperately needs new IP, they blew up a project that had 4 years of clock time on it. Even if it was a mess, you try to salvage something from the wreckage. You don't just blow everything up and start over again as soon as you get the keys.

It has an immediate positive impact on revenue, but it's a terrible long term decision -- which is corporate America in a nutshell. But just because everybody else is jumping off the cliff doesn't mean you have to jump off the cliff as well.

To be fair, he's probably hamstrung by internal Microsoft politics. God knows the infighting at the C-suite level is pretty damn vicious, esp. if you have aspirations to a CEO role. But man, don't make promises you can't keep.

The Blizzard layoff was the real surprise to me. Microsoft has like several bajillion dollars in cash reserves. If there's anybody that I thought would have the balls to actually take a big bet on a new IP, it would have been them. Phil Spencer seemed to have the authority to actually try some crazy stuff and the understanding that they HAD to try some crazy stuff for the future of the gaming division -- man, why the hell would you buy Activision Blizzard and then gut Blizzard? It feels like something EA would do, and that's not a comparison you want made.

I just finished Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. If you liked The Martian, I think you would like this one too -- this is a little too reductive, but it's The Martian with a little more speculative science and much higher stakes.

I really enjoyed it -- I don't consider it a "deep" novel, but, it was a nice relaxing read and compelling enough that I finished it in a single night.

First off, I have no idea how specifically the GB back end is setup. But, having worked on website engineering for a very long time, there could be a myriad of reasons why something is busted, especially when they're operating at scale. Old libraries that don't work anymore, reference to an old server, lack of documentation means nobody actually understands what's going on, etc. Running a website these days is way more than grabbing a bunch of source code and throwing it on a server, especially when you're operating at scale, and especially when you're serving media at scale.

So, in other words, there are potentially hundreds of valid technical reasons why a website video player won't work, and a lot of them aren't easily fixed. Doubly so if you don't have resources in terms of engineering talent or time.

Not excusing things here -- the legacy of GB is in its video archives, and knowing that one day a lot of that legacy is going to go POOF makes me sad. Just pointing out that, if it was an easy fix, they probably would have done it already.

The two formats have different objectives, different purposes for me. I'll watch short format stuff when I'm trying to figure out what's up with a game. But I'll watch longer format stuff when I'm interested in watching how the people playing the game are reacting to the game.

Picking only 3 doesn't seem to be possible given what a dumpster fire of a year it's been in the game industry. Man, everybody thought the pandemic years were going to be the nadir, and the first year where things are mostly back to normal, that's when the balloon pops and everything REALLY goes to hell.

I feel so sorry for all the people who got screwed over in various ways this year.

@judaspete said:

Don't underestimate the complexity of Nintendo games. Just because something isn't as graphically complicated doesn't create dependencies in other areas -- in fact, one could argue that the resources that are spent in graphical fidelity are spent in other areas with Nintendo games. Most Nintendo platformers have the most polished controls of that game type. Tears of the Kingdom's build system and physics is a sight to behold, and hideously complicated. But the average gamer doesn't see it, because of the polish.

It's the contradiction of making in general -- the better you do it, the harder it is, but the easier it looks to somebody from outside the field.

Why does Nintendo do consistently well? Here's my opinion, without any inside knowledge (my uncle does NOT work at Nintendo), but, based on experience in the software development field.

Nintendo's polish, starts with the fact they're a single platform developer as others have pointed out. Multi-platform development is HARD. And so time that other companies have to spend on multi-platform, Nintendo can spend on features and polish. The relative lack of power is a factor (as I said above, if you're not making / rigging textures in 4K and dealing with the ramifications thereof, you've got time to work on other things), but not having to worry about potential compatibility problems between drivers, hardware, etc, is a huge time saver.

Secondly, they have the money (and, therefore, the time) to do it right if they want. The old project management triangle goes "quick, good, cheap" - pick two. Most software companies have to pick 'quick and cheap' because they don't have the cash reserves to spend on polish. At some point, they have to ship, because they NEED revenue coming in. Nintendo, because first party is literally all in-house, have the cash reserves to take as long as they want. A normal game company delaying a game for a year could be life or death for that company. Nintendo delaying a game for a year is business as usual, because they're sitting on massive cash reserves, and they're willing to use them for game development.

And thirdly (and probably most importantly), their leadership isn't so concerned about short term bottom line to maximize short term revenue at the expense of everything else. There's still a group at Nintendo that wants to make really good games, and they've got enough buy-in from the C-suite to get the resources and the time.

Problem is, this type of frame rate demand doesn't account for the type of game or how you want to enjoy it. There are a lot of games that are perfectly fine at 30fps, and, especially for smaller development houses, I'd rather they put resources into other areas than pure frame rate optimization if it's a game that doesn't need 30 fps.

You don't just snap your fingers and get 60fps - even with modern hardware, you need to do a fair bit of optimization, and there's a lot of not-modern hardware out there that you have to deal with.

I would vote for Unity simply because, regardless of why they did it, it's a massive own goal. The more that comes out about it, the more it sounds like a comedy show as opposed to trying to run a legitimate business. Like, in a single day, they've manged to turn every brand champion and their entire user base against them, and they still can't get their messaging and details straight. Doubly damning for something that anybody with a brain could have predicted would create a firestorm.

Regardless of whether you think they were justified from a business perspective, the fact that they're making the terms retroactive is a real dick move. Anybody still using Unity after Jan 1 2024 under these licensing terms are either a) making so much money that they don't care or b) they're so far along in their project they can't switch in time. I also suspect that a LOT of games might also stop being sold after Jan 2024 too, to limit the developers exposure to potential future fees, especially in a world where anything can go viral at any time.

And to top it off, they've poisoned the well -- if you know a company might change licensing terms at any time for capricious reasons, why would you commit to a lifetime relationship to that company? As a game engine company at least, they're done, even if they backpedal. They changed the terms of the deal - pray they don't change them further.

This has been going on for a while. Look at the number of Ubisoft studios involved in Ubisoft games, even as far back as the early 2010s. (I don't know if Vinny's baby video when Rex was born is still accessible, but my memory says there are some comments in there from Vinny on the length of credits for Rayman origins while giving the thousand yard stare into the camera.)

Project management is a dark art once things get beyond a certain size no matter what the industry -- we just don't see it/don't pay attention to it. And software development in general is especially fraught with peril because at massive scale -- when you're dealing with hundreds of thousands of unique objects and actions that can all interact with each other in weird ways, you can't test it all, and you can't fall back on institutional knowledge / previous experience for every interaction. Something unexpected is going to get through and there's nothing you can do about it.

When you reach a point when a single individual can't keep all the details in their head -- in other words, once your application, game, house, research lab, power plant, highway network reaches a certain size -- you need help, and your chance of something going wrong goes up exponentially to the number of people involved.

Masahiro Sakurai has on Youtube a series about his life/experiences creating games in short bits, including a bunch of stuff on bugs and why bugs get in there. Worth checking out for an insider perspective. (I don't work in games, but I do work in software development, and I've been all up and down the chain.)

And one final note that some others have alluded to -- it's true 5 top-notch developers can do more work than 30 mediocre developers, but only up to a certain point. You can't play American football with 5 star players - you need to suit up 53. Similarly, if your project runs at any sort of scale, you're going to need to throw more people at it if you want to meet schedules. If nothing else, there are only 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week... and if you're pushing your top developers with EA developer schedules to try and accommodate a lack of coders, they're not going to be top developers for very long.

Project management on the HR side isn't about getting the best performance from your top people -- it's about getting adequate performance from everybody else. Finding something useful they can do and letting them do it, and putting in place the framework and structures to assign, guide and correct their work while working to a large design that's constantly shifting.

To summarize: I don't think size of a development team is a real measure of success or failure. Small games can be good or bad, big games can be good or bad. If anything, if larger games are worse, it's not because there's a large number of people behind it, it's because if you can afford to hire a large number of people, you probably have a certain type of corporate culture that makes it hard to produce good games. EA is probably the most obvious poster child for this.