Comment by spacelizard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spacelizard | Hacker News Reader

This will continue to be the norm in industries where the marketing cycles are so short and high-stakes. Firms get burned by picking the wrong contractors. Contractors get burned by spending a lot of time bidding on the wrong projects. These problems will continue to get worse as the stakes rise, as there will be even less time to make decisions properly. The project management debt they mention doesn't go away, it increases exponentially.

The article suggests industry shifts more towards project-based economies as they progress, but I think this is wrong. The examples of Hollywood and video gaming are both outliers, because both of these industries have put up huge resistance to lengthened product cycles. In part they perceive it as reducing competition. And it's true, but personally I am starting to wonder what all this competition is actually getting us. Prices for customers are dropping, however we seem to get a lot of sequels and recycled content in the name of cost-cutting, and then a lot of extraneous fighting over who gets to release what on what platform just to push royalty charges up. And what do we have to show for it? A lifetime of fickle and perpetually unhappy customers? Please make it stop.

The only solace that I have is that a lot of this is still driven by the hardware arms race. This won't end, but we will start to see more consolidation as the industry continues to mature.

a lot of this is still driven by the hardware arms race

Only a handful of AAA games are in the "HW arms race". By sheer numbers, the overwhelming vast majority of games sold are casual games downloaded on mobile devices.

The game industry is driven by people's short attention spans. It doesn't matter how fast you upgrade the technology, people get bored of playing the same game in the same way they get bored of watching the same movie even if you upgrade it to super-purple-ray-3D-smellivision. You already know the plot.

The industry is in a weird space these days. If you build for mobile the best bets are either focusing on a small handful of free-to-play micro transaction games or focusing on many bite-sized, $1.99 or ad-supported games. Those who build for consoles and are backed by a publisher go for big next-gen spectacle that takes teams of hundreds to develop, so when its time for the next project they are pushed to work on a few sequels that reuse assets and their engine over trying something new and different (which is ironically what probably gave them success in the first place). Franchises have been a thing for a long time, but the scope of them is now huge, to the point where some release something new every year to stay relevant. If you want to build something original its best to stick with a medium-sized team backed through Kickstarter, which has its own set of problems in terms of constantly needing to keep up with PR and paying out all of the promised rewards. I've always been interested in joining the industry because I love the medium for its potential, but I think I'll stick to hobby projects for the foreseeable future considering all of those options.

Kickstarter also has the issue of possibly not raising enough money to get the job done too. Shovel Knight, for instance, burned through all of their Kickstarter money and the team had to work without any income for five months to get the game out the door:

"We ended up operating for five months without money or payments to the team here," the post reads. "It was a difficult period, where some of us were awkwardly standing in front of cashiers having our credit cards declined, drawing from any possible savings, and borrowing money from our friends and family. But we made it to the other side!"

Source: http://www.polygon.com/2014/8/6/5974557/shovel-knight-sales-...

Would you work for anyone for five months with no paycheck? I couldn't afford to even if I wanted to.

Granted, Shovel Knight has seen huge success since its release, and I'm sure they made all of their lost wages and then some, but still, that project could have potentially died before it got released, and many more lower profile Kickstarted video games never get released.

You completely missed the whole AA and smaller market which has significantly grown due to wide availability of online stores - especially Steam. A lot of midsized publishers are building excellent games in that space.

I think contract work is common in these industries because most work is project based and often different in essence. A comedy and a thriller likely needs different creative talent. It's also very much based on personal networks, so a producer or director may bring with them a core of people.

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