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It's worth reading this even if you're not interested in games or the industry that makes them. The game industry is one of the most mature industries in softwa

It's worth reading this even if you're not interested in games or the industry that makes them. The game industry is one of the most mature industries in software and it offers a possible future for YOUR corner of the software world. Besides being one of the longest running industries in software, it iterates teams and products rapidly. Because of this it has performed a gradient decent more than any other software industry, and I would argue it is is sitting at a local minimum. From that perspective it's very interesting to study.

angrycoder 15y ago
Unless your definition of mature is old, I'm not sure what you are talking about. At the large publishers stuff like unpaid overtime is built into the budget from day 1, game developers are typically paid quite a bit less than their counterparts in the business sector, and agile development practices are rare. They build very expensive, monolithic pieces of software. It is pretty much the exact opposite of where software development has been going for the past 10 years.
- acgourley 15y ago
  Earlier in the history of the industry games were ligher weight, more iterative and more exploratory. Over time that changed. Sure thats changing back again with indie games, but that's still a small part of the market. I'm just wondering out loud, could your corner of the world be moving in that direction?
kabdib 15y ago
Most games are trainwrecks inside. They are /just good enough to ship/ and often no better. They are fragile, fickle things that for the most part have a market lifetime much shorter than the time it took to develop the title. You get your money back -- if you do -- in the first few months of sales. Games are pragmatic and hard, cheap bastards that chew up teams and spit them out. It's fun. :-)
- fferen 15y ago
  This is what I've been suspecting after reading dozens of tutorials and examples on all manner of game-related APIs and libraries. It seems like game programmers as a whole care less about code organization, style, and all the other values that are exalted in other fields.
  - Silhouette 15y ago
    You're probably being unfair there. The programmers who work on games are often very smart, very capable people who genuinely want to make a good product. A lot of so-called professional programmers could learn a thing or two from games developers about everything from writing high performance code to co-ordinating large development teams via the value of developing in-house tools to make development work more efficient. But the games programmers are screwed by the simple fact that the market will accept games that are buggy/require insane hardware/etc. and pay for them, will usually not attempt to return them if they simply don't work but will rip them apart in on-line commentary if the game sucks, and will rip them off at the first opportunity if the game is cracked. That means the business guys who are, quite rightly, calling the shots, are interested in basically the first few days after launch and nothing else. That in turn means there is no need to bother with things like code quality and long-term maintenance. Better to spend the money on a cinematic trailer and DRM that takes one more day to crack. This will continue as long as people continue to accept buggy games, dubious policies like shipping incomplete games and then filling in the blanks with paid-for DLC, and so on. And right now, while there are clearly plenty of people like me who would spend a lot on good games that worked properly and didn't come with pseudo-malware attached, it seems there are plenty more people who just don't care. You want them to write games for people like me. (Thanks! :-)) Unfortunately, most of the big games shops are going to follow the money.
    - chulipuli 15y ago
      Such is the reason the only game I play is a Quake clone (Urban Terror). It is mostly bug free, runs on cheap hardware, and most importantly: it is very fun (due to the great gameplay.) It also has a great community (with a lot of hackers/nerd types.
chaostheory 15y ago
I think what's sad when you compare the games industry to others like finance or telecommunications, (based on my experience) a typical (large) game company does way way more testing than say a big bank or telco.

angrycoder 15y ago

Unless your definition of mature is old, I'm not sure what you are talking about. At the large publishers stuff like unpaid overtime is built into the budget from day 1, game developers are typically paid quite a bit less than their counterparts in the business sector, and agile development practices are rare. They build very expensive, monolithic pieces of software. It is pretty much the exact opposite of where software development has been going for the past 10 years.

acgourley 15y ago
Earlier in the history of the industry games were ligher weight, more iterative and more exploratory. Over time that changed. Sure thats changing back again with indie games, but that's still a small part of the market. I'm just wondering out loud, could your corner of the world be moving in that direction?

kabdib 15y ago

Most games are trainwrecks inside. They are /just good enough to ship/ and often no better. They are fragile, fickle things that for the most part have a market lifetime much shorter than the time it took to develop the title. You get your money back -- if you do -- in the first few months of sales. Games are pragmatic and hard, cheap bastards that chew up teams and spit them out. It's fun. :-)

fferen 15y ago
This is what I've been suspecting after reading dozens of tutorials and examples on all manner of game-related APIs and libraries. It seems like game programmers as a whole care less about code organization, style, and all the other values that are exalted in other fields.
- Silhouette 15y ago
  You're probably being unfair there. The programmers who work on games are often very smart, very capable people who genuinely want to make a good product. A lot of so-called professional programmers could learn a thing or two from games developers about everything from writing high performance code to co-ordinating large development teams via the value of developing in-house tools to make development work more efficient. But the games programmers are screwed by the simple fact that the market will accept games that are buggy/require insane hardware/etc. and pay for them, will usually not attempt to return them if they simply don't work but will rip them apart in on-line commentary if the game sucks, and will rip them off at the first opportunity if the game is cracked. That means the business guys who are, quite rightly, calling the shots, are interested in basically the first few days after launch and nothing else. That in turn means there is no need to bother with things like code quality and long-term maintenance. Better to spend the money on a cinematic trailer and DRM that takes one more day to crack. This will continue as long as people continue to accept buggy games, dubious policies like shipping incomplete games and then filling in the blanks with paid-for DLC, and so on. And right now, while there are clearly plenty of people like me who would spend a lot on good games that worked properly and didn't come with pseudo-malware attached, it seems there are plenty more people who just don't care. You want them to write games for people like me. (Thanks! :-)) Unfortunately, most of the big games shops are going to follow the money.
  - chulipuli 15y ago
    Such is the reason the only game I play is a Quake clone (Urban Terror). It is mostly bug free, runs on cheap hardware, and most importantly: it is very fun (due to the great gameplay.) It also has a great community (with a lot of hackers/nerd types.

chaostheory 15y ago

I think what's sad when you compare the games industry to others like finance or telecommunications, (based on my experience) a typical (large) game company does way way more testing than say a big bank or telco.