Accountants and FTEs have killed innovation

[SymbolicFrank]

If you want to make something new and better, it's a project and you need motivated people who think big. That's how it worked in the past.

If you do that a few times successfully, the motivated people have lots of money and lose their drive. As most of the other people are accountants, administrative workers and secretaries, they take over.

Everyone knows that you need to follow The American Way to be successful. And while those accountants know nothing about anything except bookkeeping, they treat people management the same way. People belong on the balance sheet, just like all the other resources.

To do that, you need Human Resource Managers, who handle those Full-Time Equivalents. Which are numbered, cost a certain amount of money each month, and create other resources. Like, 3D models, textures, levels and game engines.


So, you just have to break that project down into the right amount of FTEs required, hire the people who fill them to produce the required resources, and great games are created Return On Investment happens!

So, the accountants who run the company are happy, because they can make a nice balance sheet they can all believe in. They have the mathematical proof it is correct!


Although there is a slight frustration.

Strangely enough, when the FTEs deliver their new resources, the bundling and selling of them needed to generate revenue, causes many incomprehensible errors! What a weird problem!

The problem (creating a game) is sufficiently analyzed, broken up into all the components required, the required FTEs are acquired and have delivered all those components required. So it should be a simple matter of packaging into the required product ("computer game"), distributed and sold. With the projected ROI being the result. Just like the balance sheet shows.

That's how manufacturing works!

 

[yes plz]

are you from Uruguay cuz you are gay

 

[hello friend]

That's right, there you go. Get it all out. Corporations, eh? Can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em. Better a bird in the hand than 10 in the bush. Teach a man to build a fire, and you warm him for a day. Set a man on fire, and you warm him for a lifetime. Live fast, die hard. Gotta spend money to make money.

 

[Hoaxmetal]

It is what it is, ne?

 

[an Administrator]

What is this thread about

 

[laclongquan]

It's why game making is considered artsy, not hard science, not some thing you can put down to number~

 

[Beastro]

Everyone knows that you need to follow The American Way to be successful.

True or not, you've been on here long enough to know that's poking the bear up the urethra saying something like that.

 

[Brancaleone]

Everyone knows that you need to follow The American Way to be successful.

True or not, you've been on here long enough to know that's poking the bear up the urethra saying something like that.

I'm sure that was a separate statement meant for the "Trigger the codex with a statement" thread (a likely winner, I'd say), which got inexplicably mixed up with the post on accountants and FTE's.

 

[SymbolicFrank]

It's the main reason why AAA games are all

But perhaps gamasutra is a better place for these kind of threads.

 

[SymbolicFrank]

If we make it a bit broader than just RPG games, I would simply say that the size of the project (in money invested) is the inverse of the chance it succeeds.

Yes, games are artistic, but that goes for just about all projects: they all want to do something new. They all require creativity and motivation to succeed. Which are the things that FTEs are designed to remove. Everyone is exactly the same to everyone else in the same FTE bracket. Or job, as we called them in the past.

The thing is, that two great visionairs that are totally comparable in the sense of age, education and salary, will definitely create vastly different games when they get the means to do so.


And that doesn't only goes for games. But companies that recognize that are extremely rare. Mostly because the HR manager has the power.