7 ms·

I agree with what you said with my limited experience. I hope it's anecdotal nature is good enough. I worked in a company that went from doing software gigs in

I agree with what you said with my limited experience. I hope it's anecdotal nature is good enough. I worked in a company that went from doing software gigs in general to be full mobile gaming company. Before it was quite standard Agile style company: Scrum, code reviews, TDD, cross-functional teams (front end devs knew how servers works in general), focus on quality over quantity (one dev, rotated weekly or biweekly, focusing on fixing bugs), separate concerns. After going full game-oriented, company hired couple of people from gaming industry into higher positions - tech leads, project managers etc. Over couple of months, people with many years of experience in those big companies dismantled what was standard for me, using combination of two arguments: - big names don't do it, so it must be wrong - it's a waste of time Before I quit, there were no longer code reviews (waste of time), all testing was to be handled by QA team (waste of valuable dev time), ship with issues (waste of time to fix minor bugs when can add features), single system responsibility (one dev to write code for client server protocols, one dev for UI, one dev for assets etc, that's gow big names do it). At one of the last talks with "industry veteran", when I mentioned those things - and how negative, in my opinion, those changes are, his response was "so you are saying that whole gaming industry dev practice is wrong". At that point I thought he's right and I sound full of crap, now I believe that yes, AAA companies are simply bad development practises shops. My guess as to why is because AAA is very strongly driven by deadlines and marketing, where you cannot simply delay release (Christmas shopping spree is coming). This idea I saw articulated on HN first and I agree with it.

pandaman 12y ago
If the AAA practices had been so bad then, by now, we had Agile-TDD-etc shops taking their lunch and driving them out of business. As of now there is just one studio practicing Agile, Blizzard. If it is not known, Blizzard is also famous for incredibly long projects and missing deadlines. I had personally observed collapse of two Agile AAA studios, who, while doing pretty well by the industry standards, did not have the super-profitable titles to hold them up during 5+ years of development cycle. So I believe we have the AAA practices not because game programmers are stupid but because studios that don't use them are not around for long.
- ryanobjc 12y ago
  The answer is fairly simple here, is that software quality is not everything in this space. The systems are not mission critical, and PR, marketing, money and a good "property" (eg: star wars) can pave over quality issues. For example, look at Assassin's Creed - will the bad launch cause people to avoid AC in the future? Maybe, but probably not.
- NeverEnough 12y ago
  there isn't any reason to suspect that a small company doing one thing better will walk all over AAA, that's hyperbole. AAA's culture is good enough and their other large advantages give them their market share.
  - pandaman 12y ago
    What are the advantages AAA studios have? There are no patents or secret know-hows, there is only reputation they have built themselves. If you have a superior process why cannot you do the same? For example, a small company id Software started developing games in C when everyone else had been doing Assembler and pretty soon not just established itself as a AAA studio but effected everyone else to switch to C as well. This is how a superior process works in the games industry.
    - eropple 12y ago
      > What are the advantages AAA studios have? Shitloads of money. Massive institutional knowledge of public relations and marketing. Direct lines to Sony and Microsoft. Every kind of benefit of economy of scale you could want.
      - pandaman 12y ago
        You seem to be confusing publishers and studios. If you are so good with development practices you can sign the same contract other AAA studios do and get the same access to the benefits of economy of scale you attributed to studios.

pandaman 12y ago

If the AAA practices had been so bad then, by now, we had Agile-TDD-etc shops taking their lunch and driving them out of business. As of now there is just one studio practicing Agile, Blizzard. If it is not known, Blizzard is also famous for incredibly long projects and missing deadlines. I had personally observed collapse of two Agile AAA studios, who, while doing pretty well by the industry standards, did not have the super-profitable titles to hold them up during 5+ years of development cycle. So I believe we have the AAA practices not because game programmers are stupid but because studios that don't use them are not around for long.

ryanobjc 12y ago
The answer is fairly simple here, is that software quality is not everything in this space. The systems are not mission critical, and PR, marketing, money and a good "property" (eg: star wars) can pave over quality issues. For example, look at Assassin's Creed - will the bad launch cause people to avoid AC in the future? Maybe, but probably not.
NeverEnough 12y ago
there isn't any reason to suspect that a small company doing one thing better will walk all over AAA, that's hyperbole. AAA's culture is good enough and their other large advantages give them their market share.
- pandaman 12y ago
  What are the advantages AAA studios have? There are no patents or secret know-hows, there is only reputation they have built themselves. If you have a superior process why cannot you do the same? For example, a small company id Software started developing games in C when everyone else had been doing Assembler and pretty soon not just established itself as a AAA studio but effected everyone else to switch to C as well. This is how a superior process works in the games industry.
  - eropple 12y ago
    > What are the advantages AAA studios have? Shitloads of money. Massive institutional knowledge of public relations and marketing. Direct lines to Sony and Microsoft. Every kind of benefit of economy of scale you could want.
    - pandaman 12y ago
      You seem to be confusing publishers and studios. If you are so good with development practices you can sign the same contract other AAA studios do and get the same access to the benefits of economy of scale you attributed to studios.