[Gaming] Tim Schafer shits on the video game industry over layoffs - also is awesome.

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Frank

Frank

http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2012/10/lionhead-layoffs/

“One of the most frustrating things about the games industry is that teams of people come together to make a game, and maybe they struggle and make mistakes along the way, but by the end of the game they’ve learned a lot — and this is usually when they are disbanded,” says Schafer, president of San Francisco developer Double Fine Productions.
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“After Psychonauts, we could have laid off half our team so that we’d have more money and time to sign Brütal Legend,” he said. “But doing so would have meant breaking up a team that had just learned how to work well together. And what message would that have sent to our employees? It would say that we’re not loyal to them, and that we don’t care.”
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Tim Schafer is the man.
 
Necronic

Necronic

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It's seems like a bad way to run a business, but it's in no way unique to the gaming industry. Any "project-centric" company runs this way. Which makes me think that there are good reasons for it.
 
Adam

Adam

Echoing what Necronic is saying, why do programmers think they're any different from the construction industry? Jobs ends, you get laid off, you get hired on to the next job. Just because they think they're special doesn't mean that the economy is going to rebuild itself around them. Create a Programmer Procurement Company, keep a bunch of them on staff at low wages, hire them out to companies that need experienced teams to come in.
 
Necronic

Necronic

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One of the closest industries to compare to video games may be the movie industry, and the only way they have even a semblance of job stability from movie to movie is through hardcore unions. Those of course would never work for video games because they are made all over the place instead of just one little corner of California.

Edit: I do agree that the idea of "Crunch" time followed by immediate layoffs sounds horrifying.
 
Azurephoenix

Azurephoenix

Engineering projects work similar to video games (in terms of people working together) and I've been part of teams that have gotten strong over multiple projects. It's awesome when you are with people that you know how they work and you can deliever a quality product ahead of schedule and under budget. There are always industry corrections though (in the engineering field here anyways), whether it's the economy taking a dump or it just costing too much to keep all the talent together something ineveitably breaks everyone up and disperses them to different companies.
 
Gared

Gared

This is why project managers exist. Good ones can get the most out of a team no matter how little experience they have working together, so long as the individual members are mostly competent.
 
Azurephoenix

Azurephoenix

Gared said:
This is why project managers exist. Good ones can get the most out of a team no matter how little experience they have working together, so long as the individual members are mostly competent.
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True... but good god have I ever experienced a LOT of terrible project managers.
 
Gared

Gared

Oh, no doubt. And nothing can fuck up a project quite as thoroughly, decisively, and quickly as a bad PM. Especially a bad PM who's weak-willed enough to allow feature creep and not stand up for their team against really horrible deadlines.
 
Adam

Adam

Gared said:
Oh, no doubt. And nothing can fuck up a project quite as thoroughly, decisively, and quickly as a bad PM. Especially a bad PM who's weak-willed enough to allow feature creep and not stand up for their team against really horrible deadlines.
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By those criteria, I haven't met a good PM.
 
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