When PlayStation’s chief architect, Mark Cerny, hints that game development durations will soon surpass the time it takes to conceptualize and design an entire console, it’s clear that the industry is on the brink of implosion.
And then they will need to adapt the new game to both the older and newer platforms, adding more time to development process in order to get a simultaneous release.
Out of curiosity I researched the Gears franchise. You can't even buy remastered remakes of 2 and 3 for the PC. Only the first is available. What are these people even doing.
Tim Cain (of Fallout 1&2 fame) has a story he told on his YouTube about work he had done more recently and how inefficient it was. He wanted to test something and needed a very basic ai, something he said could easily be done in a few hours. The team told him "3 weeks." He eventually got them down to 2 weeks, but that is the kind of productivity these places have, turning a a 3 hour job into a 3 week job; no wonder things take so long.
Tbf, i can easily believe longer times because of upper management bullshit. It's wild how often this stuff comes up irl now, and ends up with spending more time in meetings about a thing than just doing it.
That too. Unironically, the push towards making dev time billable internally vs being a resource that's just there all the time leads to having to unnecessarily justify shit and it makes everyone unhappy.
An example, if you need a report (that's all built on the back end, hooked into all sorts of things) changed, it goes from a simple request to "we need a sign off"
To add 3 lines of code he already wrote to 3 different functions that already exist, that would have taken him 30 minutes to do himself, but would have caused office politics, chaos, drama, and emotions to explode, that would have led to him losing his job if he just did it and didn't respect his juniors.
This is probably the biggest take-away:
And then they will need to adapt the new game to both the older and newer platforms, adding more time to development process in order to get a simultaneous release.
Out of curiosity I researched the Gears franchise. You can't even buy remastered remakes of 2 and 3 for the PC. Only the first is available. What are these people even doing.
Tim Cain (of Fallout 1&2 fame) has a story he told on his YouTube about work he had done more recently and how inefficient it was. He wanted to test something and needed a very basic ai, something he said could easily be done in a few hours. The team told him "3 weeks." He eventually got them down to 2 weeks, but that is the kind of productivity these places have, turning a a 3 hour job into a 3 week job; no wonder things take so long.
Tbf, i can easily believe longer times because of upper management bullshit. It's wild how often this stuff comes up irl now, and ends up with spending more time in meetings about a thing than just doing it.
Some jobs take about 3 hours, too bad that there's only one guy allowed to do it and he's booked with 3 hour jobs for the next 3 weeks.
That too. Unironically, the push towards making dev time billable internally vs being a resource that's just there all the time leads to having to unnecessarily justify shit and it makes everyone unhappy.
An example, if you need a report (that's all built on the back end, hooked into all sorts of things) changed, it goes from a simple request to "we need a sign off"
The mythical man month.
To add 3 lines of code he already wrote to 3 different functions that already exist, that would have taken him 30 minutes to do himself, but would have caused office politics, chaos, drama, and emotions to explode, that would have led to him losing his job if he just did it and didn't respect his juniors.