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Suits In The Gaming Industry Are Not Villains
Dexter2010
Member UncommonPosts: 244
Everyone paints financial powers as evil; claims are made that they stifle innovation and manipulate or even limit creativity. What people overlook is, they drive progress and ensure results. They act as anchors to keep devs grounded and realistic. With the popularity of ks rising, devs continue to assert that corporate suits act as obstacles to realizing their dreams, while the public further condemns them as they lose themselves in exaggerated promises of the impossible being attainable.
How many times have you heard “We had to launch 6 months before we were ready”? People forget resources are finite, and it’s the corporate people that ensure games get released. Over the recent years, all I’ve read is ‘We reluctantly took our game in that direction because the suits upstairs made us’. ‘Activision is only concerned with the bottom line’, devs are too but they’d never admit it. ‘We don’t want that money, they’ll make us duplicate WoW’, investors assess situations diligently and probably concluded the game would be too niche to be profitable with its proposed features. Mmo’s don’t exist without profit, that’s why f2p and p2p games alike have cash shops. Players pay beyond server costs because devs want money too. There are instances where designs are negotiated, not because financial powers want to be creative barriers but because they wish to reach a wider audience. Devs have been known to lose sight of this and believe the entire world will surely partake as their vision is utter perfection.
Regardless of the position you take in the gaming industry, unless you can finance your own dreams, you are going to have someone to answer to; everyone has a boss. In a ks campaign, investors take the form of backers. They often forget their role and proclaim themselves as loyal supporters until ventures are abandoned and reality sets in. That’s when people cry “Fraud!” and exclaim ks starters scammed them of their money with no consolation or little recourse. They too have expectations, they expect promises to be fulfilled and milestones reached in a timely manner.
It's rare that dev teams account for their shortcomings or overreaching designs, there is a tendency to pass the buck. Countless designers complain that they are never given enough time to complete their vision; features had to be compromised and games were rushed to launch without polish. With this declaration, gamers share their disappointment in what could have been and further blame publishers. Sometimes, there's just no money for 6 more months. Numerous games and ideas would go on forever, perpetually improving with improbable success in reaching perfection without repeated nudges from publishers. The world runs on commerce, and a project that never concludes is a money sink; no reasonable person would continually throw money at those endeavors indefinitely.
Imagine the reaction if a dev team repeatedly extends deadlines and financial goals without offering tangible results. Ks backers finance campaigns because they want a completed playable product, while corporate financers seek profit, regardless of their personal interest in the project. Everyone expects progress reports to be released regularly. It is unreasonable for devs to demand decade long deadlines while being paid premium wages for that duration. Furthermore, it is egregious to expect the public to wait forever for a playable game.
Investors and publishers should be considered from a different perspective rather than condemned as villains. Devs and gamers need to acknowledge games for the business enterprises that they really are. People don’t do things for free, not the creative minds behind endeavors, nor the programmers that realize visions. To believe otherwise would be naïve.
Edit:
I was wrong! They are indeed villainous shits!
Comments
I respectfully disagree. "Suits" turned MMOs into a business, instead of entertainment.
When your top priority is "the bottom line", then creativity (aka: risk) goes away.
On game release: Who cares when they release if the game is a crappy, incomplete, bugfest? "Release Dates" should be a guideline, not set in stone. But when the "money" gets low, the suits get nervous and step in and say, "Realease it now.", no matter what state it is in. (It does not help that message boards are filled with whiny players saying, "Release it noooooww!")
There is a huge difference between making money (keeping the business profitable) and MAKING MONEY (affording investors their new 100 foot yacht).
If the devs released a good game with minimal bugs, I do not care. I do realize I am kind of odd in this attitude and yes, there would most likely be massive crying and whining on message boards by "kids" that just can not wait for the new game.
I my opinion, a "Project Manager" is much different from a "Suit." Usually, a Project Manager is the go between for the Suits and Developers.
Anyone whose primary motivation is making the most they can while investing as little as possible can never be seen "in a good perspective" for me.
"Suits", to me, are evil. They suck the life out of what they touch, kind of like a succubus
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
Company Owner
MMO Interactive
Heaven forbid the people paying your salaries have a voice in how you do it...
Whether you are an individual, an indie developer, or a conglomerate... you still have to deal with the bottom line... and dead lines.
Reality check, but you don't have an infinite amount of money nor time to do anything... there is a point at which there is no return.
You said you would be done in 3 months... 9 months have gone by... you said you only needed 5 people to do this... you now have a team of 50... you said that it would only require X amount of money to complete it... you surpassed that mark 10 fold... you said that it would have this feature and that feature... you scrapped them because they didn't work... you said it would play on all platforms... turns out it doesn't play on any platform... you say all you need is a little more time, money, manpower, technology....
This is why suits exist... love em or hate em... but successful businesses don't function without them.
Ah but more would probably say how they wish they would have stayed at the AAA dev because their indie venture fell flat and now they are struggling to get by.
http://www.gamesbrief.com/2013/08/confessions-of-a-failed-indie-developer/
The suits are just doing their jobs.
I respect your point but if devs fail to meet the initial schedule, they either lack assertiveness or have overestimated their abilities. If the game sucks at the deadline, it's the devs' fault, the suits just expected a functional game as contracted for. Where would additional money come from? When the well runs dry, the team rarely press on, it dissolves because it costs to live.
IMO those who bash the suits don't fully comprehend what a "job" is.
+1, it's all about balance. Yes, games are a business and, yes, suits are business men and women whose agenda is specifically to make money. However, that's a double-edged sword. You can't ship a horrible game and have it be successful, unless it's a franchise that already has an established fan base. Even that damages the franchises reputation, though. However, you also can't wait for the game to be everything the devs want and the quality will never be 100%, it's just not possible. Their job is to determine at which point, between scope and quality, they have the best opportunity to maximize their dollar, knowing they are also able to push maintenance updates out later on, too.
So, yeah, suits aren't evil, they just have an agenda that is generally contradictory than what most gamers are looking for.
Crazkanuk
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I don't care about investors, shareholders, or corporate mumbo jumbo. I care about gaming as an art form.
MMO's are no longer being made as an art form and you can thank the suits for that.
The "decline" of games lies not with those at the top, but with those at the bottom that continue to lap up whatever dribbles down.
"If MMORPG players were around when God said, "Let their be light" they'd have called the light gay, and plunged the universe back into darkness by squatting their nutsacks over it."
-Luke McKinney, The 7 Biggest Dick Moves in the History of Online Gaming
"In the end, SWG may have been more potential and promise than fulfilled expectation. But I'd rather work on something with great potential than on fulfilling a promise of mediocrity."
-Raph Koster
+1, it's all about balance. Yes, games are a business and, yes, suits are business men and women whose agenda is specifically to make money. However, that's a double-edged sword. You can't ship a horrible game and have it be successful, unless it's a franchise that already has an established fan base. Even that damages the franchises reputation, though. However, you also can't wait for the game to be everything the devs want and the quality will never be 100%, it's just not possible. Their job is to determine at which point, between scope and quality, they have the best opportunity to maximize their dollar, knowing they are also able to push maintenance updates out later on, too.
So, yeah, suits aren't evil, they just have an agenda that is generally contradictory than what most gamers are looking for.
You're right; it is about balance. However, it's interesting you mentioned established fan bases for franchises, as lately that has been the gamers hit hardest by the greed of suits. There's a reason the majority of releases accompanying motion picture releases are garbage. There's a reason AC:Unity was buggy to the point of being unplayable from a studio who has proven an ability to release quality games. That reason is the "suits."
Unfortunately, investors are becoming so risk averse that they would rather release a mediocre or underwhelming game with an IP that ensures first day sales than they would an inspired idea or great concept without Spider-Man or Assassin's Creed of Call of Duty or Transformers on the box to reap the cash of the jaded fan base that's hoping the next one will be better than the last.
The devs are the Villains imo. They are the ones selling their souls to crank out garbage. If every Dev refused to make another empty WoW clone we would have zero problems.
You couldn't pay a top chef enough to serve a can of chef boyardee in their restaurant so why are top developers serving proverbial chef boyardee to us gamers? Have a little dignity.
What is the discussion about? "Corporate suites" good or bad? That's just too black or white thinking.
“We had to launch 6 months before we were ready”?
What does that really mean?
In the IT industry you will usually pin down some game features, requirements and the overall theme before actually starting any coding. The ideas get elaborated to a certain degree. Then some architectural and design decisions, technology decisions, programming style decisions have to be made which will have a huge (and long term) impact on the realization of the software/ game. Before you start to code there will be an effort to make a roadmap of how long development will take. In most projects you'll only be able to make an educated guess at how long things will take. It's different if you do a very similar project to the projects you have worked on before (but that's rare).
“We had to launch 6 months before we were ready”?
This simply means your guessed roadmap didn't stand the test of time. You have several options.
- Do a more conservative estimation next time and consider buffers (regarding both finaces, time, staff, etc.). E.g. technological realities might put some obstacles on the way, newly hired staff might need some time before they reach their full potential and existing staff will have to share their knowledge, staff will have vacations or get sick, staff will change jobs/ quit, hardware might need to be replaced, software needs to be updated and licensed, there might be some dependencies on contractors or 3rd parties, etc.
- Staff will report back how long they really needed for cerrtain activities/ tasks and then you adapt your roadmap to it, reallocate resources, identify organisational bottlenecks, etc.
- Postpone or cancel certain features to reduce the amount of work.
This has nothing to do with suites vs. staff. It's just how you manage software development projects.People are different. So are "corporate suites". People that manage a project/ team don't really need to know how to code. But they have to make decisions which impact everything. There is a danger that they might not see the big problems coming when they lack certain knowledge. Often they have moved to another project before the problems come to the surface. That's why the "corporate suites" have a bad reputation.
First, let me just say that painting anything as 'evil' or 'the villain' tends to be from a very narrow / closed mindset. Very few things are that black & white.
That said, if you want to imply that 'suits' (aka publishers & financiers) don't have a negative impact on games (and really most creative endeavors), then you are very much mistaken.
The bottom line of a publisher / financier is different from the bottom line of a good developer. Most publishers / financiers want a game to be profitable. They don't necessarily care if the game is good, just that it makes money. That's how business works. Developers, on the other hand, want to make a good game. They want to try out new and interesting mechanics, explore new ideas. It is their reputation and careers that get dragged through the mud when a suit pulls the plug, or does not give them an appropriate deadline.
- Now, this does go back to the 'nothing is black & white' statement. These are all people, and people make mistakes. The fault can often lie on both sides of the isle. Moving on:
The reality of the situation becomes as follows:
The larger the budget of the project, the more likely it is that the financiers (via the publishers) are going to drive the direction of parts of the game. It no longer becomes an issue of 'you had X dollars, and spent them all'. It becomes a situation of 'you want to do this, but we need you to do this instead, because that's what sells'. This happens quite often, especially at larger studios.
Remember:
Business thrives with the known, with taking minimal / calculated risks.
Creativity thrives with the unknown, with exploring new ideas and taking risks.
They are inherently at odds, but creativity has value (even though it often gets overlooked).
What sells copies, sadly is not paralleled to what makes for a good video game. When you have a businessman overseeing a creative project they will almost always opt for the option that yields the most revenue, instead of the option that yields less revenue but a superior game.
Wrong. The suits didn't make games "big business".
YOU did, together with all the other customers.
nah ...
a) entertainment *is* business. They are not mutually exclusive.
b) creativity != risk. And who says risks goes away? There are plenty of risky moves in big entertainment from the Lone Ranger, John Carter in movies, to TOR in video games.
In fact, the bottomline encourages competition, and when your business is not working, innovate or die.
You're under the impression that these games don't bring in a tidy sum even if they are half-baked. If there was zero chance of profit, it never would go out the door. There is a profit. The return may not have been as great as they wanted it to be, but there was a return none the less.
Titan was scrapped. They ate the development costs... well, actually we did, because they tap into all revenues to recoup their losses. So you see, even if the game isn't made, you did pay for it if you buy any of their titles.
I don´t like games publishers who center their entire product and marketing around the concept of profit.
They want to have more money than it costs to make and support the game. What they earn only goes partially back into the actual game, it goes to Ferraris and luxury apartments. There is the problem of suits. They have turned videogames into a profit oriented industry that shows the finger to the gamers, as they are nothing but brainless cash cows to them. That´s why I prefer indie games.
except the bulk of the "development" cost of these AAA is advertising not the actual development of the game. The suits set a deadline with little regard for the state of the game at any point(they even hide game breaking problems behind things like lvl capped open betas, and minimal ui information) then cash in with box sales based on the hype of the game....not the actual game itself. the costs dissolves when money spent on advertising = maximum number of customers. then subscription games after the initial sale the game goes on life support---->followed by sales of box cost ------->followed by F2P cash grab, while the f2p games make there shops slowly more predatory over time. its all a formula for maximized profit.
The suits get the most amount of money they can as quick as they can.....they don't care about the entertainment value of the game....they are selling a MMO product not an MMO service. which a service was the expectation back in the MMO industry's infancy and what many gamers what from an mmo today(but obviously dont get)....the suits changed the dynamic and why they are ultimately to blame for gamers low opinion of game publishers.
Lol. If only life were that simple.
Often the choice is 'make this sub par game', or don't pay your bills. Don't eat, don't provide for your family. Very few people have the luxury to make the choice you are describing. Especially if we're looking at AAA game budgets. Sadly, game design is one of those disciplines that everyone thinks they can do. It's rarely valued properly. As a result, it's rare that a dev would have the same amount of clout as a 5 star chef.