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Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

> The reason games have these launch problems is that publishers got away with it for too long. Having users who already paid for the game do the beta testing is much, much cheaper and more efficient than in-house testing.

I'd say the main reason is that video games companies are usually run by a bunch of amateurs who are good at a few particular things (coding, design, creativity, and maybe even "hyping" things) but have shortcomings when it comes to engineering and delivering consistent, solid quality. Many companies dont have regular processes, and rely on employees forsaking weekends in order to deliver things on time.

I know it's usually not popular here to talk about the necessity of Project Managers, but the Video Games Industry is a pretty good example of an situation where more (i.e. better) management could help make things better compared to the current mess.

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I do not think that games need more project management, but more people who share the lessons we've also learned in business and system programming.

For instance, we've had articles here about how beautiful the Quake 2 and Doom 3 codebases were. It's not that John Carmack isn't an amazing programmer (I am sure he is far better than me), but the techniques for readability and maintainability that he used in those games are just what anyone writing in a large codebase should be doing. The style he used is exactly what we demand when interviewing senior devs. But then game programmers look at it as if he had discovered cold fusion. But when all you see is games, that are written expecting that once the game is shipped, nobody is going to touch your code again, standards go down. Very different from what we do in business programming, where we know some systems might end up living 15+ years, so we have to write things planning for the system to keep evolving for decades.

If anything, online games and MMOs should be written better, precisely because they are far long lived, and will be edited more, than a throwaway that will just see a few patches if users complain.

You never saw a games company from the inside did you? Major game studios are just as much entrenched in their software development processes as any other company that size. Also, there is no single 'typical' game company. You have EA or Ubisoft which put 600 people on a single project, and on the extreme other end you have the one-man-army indie developer, and everything inbetween.

In the current game dev industry, there is no longer anything "in-between". The days of the medium sized games are long gone. It is either big winner takes all or very small indie under the radar.

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