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It depends on the industry. Video games are still sold at retails stores (Target, Best Buy, ...). Those stores have to coordinate what is going to be on their
by nox101 3y ago
It depends on the industry.
Video games are still sold at retails stores (Target, Best Buy, ...). Those stores have to coordinate what is going to be on their shelves months in advance (6+)? So you promise your game will be ready and in a package and at their loading dock by November 15th. If you miss the deadline their shelf is empty of product since its spot was reserved for you.
Other customer electronics have similar issues. Promises are made to coordinate. They're generally made before the product is actually finished. Now a deadline exists. It's not trivial to change it.
The same is true for ads or was (TV ads in particular). They have to be scheduled well in advance. You pay for ads to run 6 months in advance because if you don't buy them in advance all the time slots will be sold out, no ads for you. But now you've added a deadline. If your product is not ready to buy when the ads run you've just wasted a bunch of money.
I agree that for many standard IT projects, deadlines can be kind of BS but I can also see why they tend to exist in retail products.
A solution could be, don't even start negotiating for shelf space before the product is 100% finished. Unfortunately few if any companies seem to be able to do this. For one, they need the money from the orders to make payroll. For another, if they waited until the product is done, then order ads and shelf space which won't be available for 6 months, what do they're employees do during those 6 months? They have no customers to fix bugs for yet. If the switch off the product to the next product there will be a big cost to pay to try to switch back the previous product they stopped working on 6 months previously when it actually ships and they need to actually support it.
- earthling8118 3y agoYou dismiss that these are arbitrary, but I'm not seeing a whole lot in your examples that aren't also arbitrary. Sure, this is how a lot, if not all, companies work. That does nothing to disprove that this is arbitrary at the cost of mental health.
- elevatedastalt 3y agoWhat is your point? We are not isolates who just subsist by ourselves. The modern world is a massively complex interconnected and interdependent system and we rely on the glue of capitalism to ensure that everyone still looks out for themselves but makes it all work for the system. Were the massive chip shortages causing a massive reduction in car availability and increase in prices "arbitrary"? Was the Suez canal blockage causing weeks of shipping delays "arbitrary"? If companies promise to pay for a stall at the next expo, but then don't actually make it because they don't ship their products in time, and now the expo loses revenue because they can't fill the stall at the last moment, is that also "arbitrary"?
- TheOtherHobbes 3y agoCrunch culture will fix none of those problems. Especially not the first two. What's your exchange rate for expo revenue loss vs employee physical and mental health?
- krimskrams 3y agoWhat do you think about the other side of the video game industry where games are distributed digitally? Most PC games nowadays are distributed this way and even consoles are moving in this direction too. There is so much more to it than just aligning marketing and distribution with the development cycle. Time and time again, news breaks out about terrible working conditions and crunch culture being so ingrained and standard in this industry. Many cases come from studios that mainly distribute their games digitally. So many AAA titles nowadays are released half-finished, broken and rushed for the sake of meeting next quarter's quotas at the expense of the company's employees mental health (Ubisoft for instance), and in some cases, their lives (Activision Blizzard). The fact that some developers are unjustly taking heat, blame and pressure from their own playerbase is not the saddest part. Video game journalists are disincentivised from talking about it from fear of being blacklisted. I find that looking at it from the traditional brick-and-mortar perspective misses a dark side of this industry that is often entirely ignored, or treated as an open secret. Crunch can be avoided. Nintendo and Mojang have delayed releases to avoid crunch, yet one of the two also deals with physical retail copies. This is a management/investor pressure/culture/people issue.
- filleduchaos 3y ago> What do you think about the other side of the video game industry where games are distributed digitally? As someone that has done work for indie studios, you very much still have to align marketing and distribution with the development cycle with online marketplaces. Shelf-space and shelf-life aren't any less real because they are virtual - if anything, they're scarcer resources. Anyone who's actually sold things online can attest to this; customers' patience and attention spans are horrendously short. Not making it into the first page of results can be a straight-up death sentence for a project.
- shultays 3y agoFor video games there are also holiday seasons that you may not want to miss. So even if you are using digital stores, there are deadlines that might matter
- throwaway5959 3y agoI know this was just an example, but in the case of video game sales, they’re all going to be digital in the next console generation (if not, in the one after that). Then all of that retail space will be reclaimed for other purposes.
- willcipriano 3y ago> months in advance Finish it, then 6 months later you release.
- _aavaa_ 3y agoDay 1 patches are increasingly a thing specifically to help with this. Ship a "release" version of the game so that it can be made physical and distributed and then continue working on it so that on day 1 users plop their disk in an download a patch for everything that didn't make it on the disk.
- JohnFen 3y agoThis is a horrible practice that is very unfriendly to customers. It is tolerable as an occasional thing to recover from some sort of development disaster, but not as a standard practice.