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Amy Hennig: "Triple-A development an arms race that is unwinnable"

vonAchdorf

Arcane
Joined
Sep 20, 2014
Messages
13,465
Still, I wonder possibilities on certain departments like if marketing CGI is done in-house. Some videos I have seen certainly have looked like way more effort was put in them than could be expected. Either marketing budget is huge which begs the question why make it in-house to begin with, or people were trying to build their portfolio, to get foothold on some other areas like advertising agencies, perhaps films or TV?

Isn't a lot of the really good CGI done by third-party studios (Blur, Platige, Digic)?
 

Drakron

Arcane
Joined
May 19, 2005
Messages
6,326
I didn't mean on a personal level. I mean how she got that far peddling her SJW bullshit. How can you not know there is no money on that shit? I'm not buying those people only care about money, sorry. The ideology runs rampant among the elites and the financiers.

She got that "far" because there was a gamble in the Ghostbusters movie of using a specific marketing narrative, that is if you didnt like the movie was because you were a misogynist, this extended to everyone involved in the movie because that was the marketing push.

It failed, I doubt that was the only reason and more likely due to the leaks, she became a liability and I would not be surprised at all if the SJW marketing was her idea in a attempt to make Sony renew her contract since it expired on March 2015, at that point she already made many enemies due to the leaks and Sony and was more a liability for Sony.
 

pippin

Guest
I didn't mean on a personal level. I mean how she got that far peddling her SJW bullshit. How can you not know there is no money on that shit? I'm not buying those people only care about money, sorry. The ideology runs rampant among the elites and the financiers.

Name companies where their success was explained by their ideologies, or at least they received a direct and notorious benefit because of being ideological.
 

Lyric Suite

Converting to Islam
Joined
Mar 23, 2006
Messages
56,166
I said they are genuinely ideological. I didn't say they are ideological for the purpose of gaining from it. Talk about having a one track mind.
 

Severian Silk

Guest
IIRC, Vault Dweller's kids died because he did not get home in time to feed them.

Also, are the workers out in the poppy fields able to just quit their jobs cold turkey? Or do they suffer withdrawal?
 
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Lyric Suite

Converting to Islam
Joined
Mar 23, 2006
Messages
56,166
You can't, then. I'm not surprised though.

I can't name you companies where their success was explained by their ideologies if my argument is that those companies are doing things that go against their interest because they have an ideology now, can i?

I mean, dear God, how many commercials have we seen where companies promote diversity or racial mixing or anything like that. You think they are pushing that shit because they really believe it helps sell whatever product they are peddling?

Look at this shit:



You think Italian men are going to flock to buy this car after seeing this? How is this not totally ideological at the expense of possible profits?
 

pippin

Guest
You think they are pushing that shit because they really believe it helps sell whatever product they are peddling?

Yes.
Haven't you learned anything in the last two years? Why suddenly everyone seems to be so accepting and friendly when it comes to multicultural shit, as long as shitskins are kept away from me?
Marketing is a really tricky science. It's more important to do some "virtue signaling" (as you internet kiddies say) rather than do the thing you're saying. This is nothing new by the way, being double-faced is as old as the oldest job in the world. The only difference between then and now is that we are showcasing our private lives via the internet, so it's easier to find discrepancies.
As I said, it all becomes a little clearer when you are put in a position which makes you manage things and people. What I was trying to say with my questioning is that ideology itself isn't money, but it can create it. It's more like a deviation of the market, because you have too many people in the competition, so you have to look for something which helps you stand out from the others, and in that sense, anything goes. Like saying you are sexist if you won't see the new Ghostbusters movie. Sometimes companies are that desperate.
 

Lyric Suite

Converting to Islam
Joined
Mar 23, 2006
Messages
56,166
Sorry, but the easier explanation is those people are ideologically convinced, instead of 4D pandimentional marketing thinking.
 

Drakron

Arcane
Joined
May 19, 2005
Messages
6,326
I dont know if we need a Tinfoil or a Lyric Suit emote because damn, I mean DAMN ...
 

Soulcucker

Savant
Joined
Jul 22, 2015
Messages
235
Clearly the arms race is winnable in terms of ROI as seen by Activision's performance for the last decade. I don't see AAA ratcheting down anytime soon, there are still a lot of costs that can be cut. Most of the major publishers have been acquiring in house engine tech and developing content pipelines to Eastern Europe and China to cut down on development costs. The bargaining ability of developers and artists will be reduced even further as these pipelines continue to improve and as engines become more versatile. On the plus side these developments will create spillover that independent studios will also be able to exploit.
 

Drakron

Arcane
Joined
May 19, 2005
Messages
6,326
The issue is not costs per say, its development time and costs.

Take Fallout, it used sprites ... now look at Fallout 4 that uses meshes, it takes longer and even if you can increase development teams at one point you reach a stopgap were raising the number of people will not decrease time, things are more and more technically complex that takes longer and longer.

I think this is were the "crunch time" comes into play, they want to release 2016 games with 2002 timetables were games were technically simpler and thus taken less time, this pushes people into working longer and longer to meet deadlines.
 

abija

Prophet
Joined
May 21, 2011
Messages
2,893
No. Crunch is a mellow wording for exploiting employees. And the reason it happens is simple: because they CAN. They're not fighting to stay alive, just trying to maximize already enormous profits.
 

bylam

Funcom
Developer
Joined
Oct 30, 2006
Messages
707
The problem is where the line between passion and forced overtime is drawn. I work a lot of hours but nobody forces me to. I just happen to want to make the projects I work on something that I can be proud of. And it goes up and down anyway. In pre production on a project, there is less grindstone type work, and more discussion and design. Towards the end of projects, you're smacking down all the unexpected bugs that you couldn't predict or just trying to make that one small change that you think will improve the communication of a feature. No design is perfect and seeing them in action is often the only way to make tangible improvements.
I doubt it is any different for indie companies - they must be working a shit load of hours on their passion projects. Is it any different for novelists?

But Norway is a different beast to the USA in terms of workers rights - mandatory 3 months notice for layoffs unless special circumstances (for example bankruptcy). Firing people is serious business.
 

Severian Silk

Guest
Is there no game developer union these folks can join, or what?

There are unions in film and probably television. Why not game development?
 

Mozg

Arcane
Joined
Oct 20, 2015
Messages
2,033
Almost all of the US film and TV guilds and unions were founded in the late 1930s right after the National Labor Relations Act was signed. Private sector American union membership has been dropping like a rock for decades from lawyers and legislators nibbling away at it to help capital so there is a huge 80-year gulf to cross for AAA game industry workers.
 

Lyric Suite

Converting to Islam
Joined
Mar 23, 2006
Messages
56,166
Passion, heh.

I think there's one thing missing from this argument, and that's the fact that without pressure developers turn into lazy fucks. Not defending industry practices but i think generally speaking the discipline and ethic that comes with working for a real company doesn't hurt.
 

abija

Prophet
Joined
May 21, 2011
Messages
2,893
Passion, heh.

I think there's one thing missing from this argument, and that's the fact that without pressure developers turn into lazy fucks. Not defending industry practices but i think generally speaking the discipline and ethic that comes with working for a real company doesn't hurt.
You kinda talk out of your ass right? Passion is abundant and the reason this abuse works so well.
The delayed projects are usually the fault of some higher up changing his "vision" or not having a clue when to feature freeze. Or outsourcing parts of the project to random 4th world sweatshops and then having to rewrite them from scratch while management keeps sending emails reminding everyone how far behind the project is.
Or the very common one when deadlines are blurted out by someone without any information regarding the status of the project.
 
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Grimlorn

Arcane
Joined
Jun 1, 2011
Messages
10,248
Is there no game developer union these folks can join, or what?

There are unions in film and probably television. Why not game development?
There's a lot of people who want to work in the game industry so there's a lot of competition. There's also high turnover rate at many studios. Devs that did try to organize a union would have to get most devs in the entire industry on board. And if they failed, they would see their careers ruined and themselves blacklisted from the industry.

Also I suspect gamers don't really care and/or are completely ignorant of the situation. They just care about their next AAA game fix.
 

DragoFireheart

all caps, rainbow colors, SOMETHING.
Joined
Jun 16, 2007
Messages
23,731
"I pretty much worked seven days a week, at least 12 hours a day"

And this is why I dodged the video game industry as a career choice. One of the best decisions I made in my life.

Devs/Pubs need to consider making smaller games and/or less graphically demanding ones. Games from 1984, even with their crappy graphics, still have excellent gameplay.

Imagine if someone took the Daggerfall game, used it as a base format, made a new FP-role playing game, sharpened the graphics, tweaks the controls but filled in all of the empty space and tripled the size of the world AND all of that was done in such a way that it'd take less time than making a typical AAA-game with bloom-shade pretty graphics.

Imagine the amount of extra gameplay that can be achieved by focusing less on graphics.
 
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