4 ms·

I have suspected for some time that, at the present rate of churn, game dev is increasingly moving to a movie-like model, where a given crew assembles for one p

• pandaman 12y ago
  It makes sense in the movies to hire a crew of contractors just for the shooting because shooting takes few weeks, months tops. A game production can take anywhere from a year to several years, contractors usually don't want to commit for such long terms so it will take a while just to staff your project. Then, as you have shipped, you let go all your contractors and immediately start hiring new ones for the next slated project? Makes very little sense. The churn you are seeing now is the effect of the poor financial state of the industry. A lot of studios are spending more money to make the games than the games bring back. Such studios eventually have to get out of business either through bankruptcy or through being shuttered by its holding company. As a studio is nearing the inevitable end people employed there are leaving and the studio starts hiring, sometimes this is amplified by the management trying to "fix" the expensive production problem by expanding. Since the stable and profitable studios do not hire much, especially among people without industry experience, most of the new hires go into the studios that are already circling the drain and will be laid off in a year if not a month. This is what's creating the impression of the high churn IMO.