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This seems to be a common thing in "disruptive technology". The companies see it like "OMG we build this amazing environment, we can't wait for you to use it" b

This seems to be a common thing in "disruptive technology". The companies see it like "OMG we build this amazing environment, we can't wait for you to use it" but company policies see little to no value in actually adopting it themselves. Sometimes this works if some niche will adopt it and let the system grow with them but it's very rare

josephg 3y ago
Yeah. There’s a story I heard from the launch of Zelda: Breath of the wild (the last one). After what I assume was a flurry of work and crazy deadlines, they sent everyone on the development team home for 2 weeks to rest, and maybe just enjoy playing the game they had made with their family before it launched. After coming back in to the office, needless to say everyone had little things they personally wanted to tidy up or fix before the launch. So they did. This seems like an obvious thing to do, but I’ve never heard of anyone else doing it. If your game is amazing, why isn’t your team taking the time to enjoy playing it?
- jheriko 3y ago
  some game developers do want to do this. i've gone out of my way in the past, even as a junior, to make efforts in offices to encourage developers to play their own game, and preferably with audio on and for more than 2 seconds at a time... and on the target platform instead of your turbocharged dev pc. this can be as simple as a high score competition (imagine making a game with scoring mechanisms and no leaderboards, yes thats you Codemasters!) i am still absolutely dumbfounded when i meet devs who do not play their own games, let alone play them thoroughly. modern game development is mostly pretty brain dead, and nintendo and their first party studios tend to be exceptional, some of the very best out there.
  - Nemrod67 3y ago
    I worked in a medium-sized Racing Games studio, and we were only 5 players out of 100. When I asked for testing time and space with the team, management shut me down. It's like selling a good product is secondary XD
    - jheriko 3y ago
      don't ask for forgiveness, or permission. take your lunch time to send an e-mail that makes it inevitable.
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      It's the gamedev version of Agile. Release early, patch often.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > This seems like an obvious thing to do, but I’ve never heard of anyone else doing it. There was a day when this sort of thing was pretty common. Close to standard practice.
- jfengel 3y ago
  The answer to your question, I'm afraid, is "time". Zelda was heavily pre-ordered, and they had a deadline to hit. The fact that they could take two weeks off and still hit the window is a testament to their good planning. (And the fact that they had already announced a delay a year earlier.) But software is notoriously hard to plan, and a lot of things could easily have turned that two week time off into two weeks of 100-hour crunch time. It sounds as if they planned a generous schedule, which is another great thing. Triple-A game studios are notorious for doing the Silicon Valley thing: make optimistic announcements and insist that everybody work unpaid overtime to make it happen. Artists, QA, and other "little people" often take the brunt of the hit there, and sure don't get rich off of it. Taking the time to develop a product well, without killing your team, seems anathema to a lot of CEOs.
  - Digit-Al 3y ago
    I worked in a small software development team within a large engineering (not software) company for quite a long time. We had an occasional change of manager, and I always remember one manager coming in; in his introductory meeting he said that in his opinion if any of his team were having to work overtime then he wasn't doing his job properly. That is the sort of management I like!
sgift 3y ago
Not only for disruptive technologies. Or even "new" things, but the main product. I've seen far too many companies which produce something and then you look at their own processes and not only do they not use it, whatever they use is clearly inferior, but .. it's just there. And no one will pull the switch and say "okay, that's it. We now use our own things. End of story."

josephg 3y ago

Yeah. There’s a story I heard from the launch of Zelda: Breath of the wild (the last one). After what I assume was a flurry of work and crazy deadlines, they sent everyone on the development team home for 2 weeks to rest, and maybe just enjoy playing the game they had made with their family before it launched. After coming back in to the office, needless to say everyone had little things they personally wanted to tidy up or fix before the launch. So they did. This seems like an obvious thing to do, but I’ve never heard of anyone else doing it. If your game is amazing, why isn’t your team taking the time to enjoy playing it?

jheriko 3y ago
some game developers do want to do this. i've gone out of my way in the past, even as a junior, to make efforts in offices to encourage developers to play their own game, and preferably with audio on and for more than 2 seconds at a time... and on the target platform instead of your turbocharged dev pc. this can be as simple as a high score competition (imagine making a game with scoring mechanisms and no leaderboards, yes thats you Codemasters!) i am still absolutely dumbfounded when i meet devs who do not play their own games, let alone play them thoroughly. modern game development is mostly pretty brain dead, and nintendo and their first party studios tend to be exceptional, some of the very best out there.
- Nemrod67 3y ago
  I worked in a medium-sized Racing Games studio, and we were only 5 players out of 100. When I asked for testing time and space with the team, management shut me down. It's like selling a good product is secondary XD
  - jheriko 3y ago
    don't ask for forgiveness, or permission. take your lunch time to send an e-mail that makes it inevitable.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    It's the gamedev version of Agile. Release early, patch often.
JohnFen 3y ago
> This seems like an obvious thing to do, but I’ve never heard of anyone else doing it. There was a day when this sort of thing was pretty common. Close to standard practice.
jfengel 3y ago
The answer to your question, I'm afraid, is "time". Zelda was heavily pre-ordered, and they had a deadline to hit. The fact that they could take two weeks off and still hit the window is a testament to their good planning. (And the fact that they had already announced a delay a year earlier.) But software is notoriously hard to plan, and a lot of things could easily have turned that two week time off into two weeks of 100-hour crunch time. It sounds as if they planned a generous schedule, which is another great thing. Triple-A game studios are notorious for doing the Silicon Valley thing: make optimistic announcements and insist that everybody work unpaid overtime to make it happen. Artists, QA, and other "little people" often take the brunt of the hit there, and sure don't get rich off of it. Taking the time to develop a product well, without killing your team, seems anathema to a lot of CEOs.
- Digit-Al 3y ago
  I worked in a small software development team within a large engineering (not software) company for quite a long time. We had an occasional change of manager, and I always remember one manager coming in; in his introductory meeting he said that in his opinion if any of his team were having to work overtime then he wasn't doing his job properly. That is the sort of management I like!

sgift 3y ago

Not only for disruptive technologies. Or even "new" things, but the main product. I've seen far too many companies which produce something and then you look at their own processes and not only do they not use it, whatever they use is clearly inferior, but .. it's just there. And no one will pull the switch and say "okay, that's it. We now use our own things. End of story."