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- A Major Games Industry Publisher
Closes Multiple Development Studios: Business as Usual or
Warning for the Future?
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- It was announced today, on
Gamasutra.com, that THQ, one of the major games industry publishers,
has shuttered a number of its internal game development studios. The following is
a response. Click
HERE to read the original article.
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- December 10,
2008
- By Eric M. Scharf
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- The news of multiple studio closings
from THQ, the recent EA layoff announcement, and other similar
stories of the past couple months, objectively speaking, are all
collective proof that the great stock and trade magazine reports of
how wonderfully the games industry is performing are half-truths. When stories only refer to bottom-line sales, without discussing the
status of the "machine" responsible for generating those sales (all
the heavy investment, personnel, development hardware and software,
marketing, manufacturing, distribution, and other non-glamorous
important mechanisms), it is easy to drink the Kool-Aid . . . unless you are, of course, involved with the inner workings of the
machine.
It may, in fact, be this series of closings, or re-administering of
resources, that brings the games industry to the final, global
solution people have been discussing for years: a majority pool of
contractors versus teams upon teams of in-house employees. No, I do
not believe the long-and-quietly-debated workers union will arise
from this. Sure, contractors make more immediate money without the
specter of benefits and monthly tax withholding, but employers
"benefit through no benefits."
In any event, it will be interesting to see how much longer even the
large publishers wish to continue starting new studios, realizing
the results of 1-3 projects, shutting down those studios, and, then,
starting up more studios to take the place of those which were
originally shut down.
It would probably be unwise for anyone to fool themselves into
thinking the timing of these closures is exclusive to the lousy
state of the U.S. economy (not the stock market, silly, the
economy), nor the global economy for that matter.
These types of "seemingly major" shutdowns have been happening, in
smaller doses, over the past decade, at least. And this is just in
regards to the closings that are made public, versus many of the
internal R&D studios that support gaming hardware, such as
Microsoft's Xbox 360, Sony's PS3, and Nintendo's Wii. These hardware
manufacturers would not dare close down their R&D teams, would they? Maybe not, but downsizing and keeping certain key personnel on
retainer is never out of the question. Again, as General Motors
would be quick to remind everyone, employee benefits can quickly
become the enemy, whether or not you have been attempting to sell
garbage products for decades or not.
This THQ story, however, is still part of a cyclical process, no
matter the poor timing for employees, or the true depth of the
financial over-leveraging that may have started the ball rolling
downhill in the first place (and, in this case, a studio closure is
to an unemployed game developer as a rolling stone is to moss, and
the moss is gathering with increasing speed).
The day may be coming, using a little imagination, when many
studios, even the well-known operations, no matter how successful,
are shuttered when even one project, whether during pre-production,
full-production, QA, or on store shelves, goes in the wrong
direction (e.g. suffers from average-to-poor sales, major management
and personnel issues, blown deadlines, QA disasters, marketing
disasters, manufacturing mishaps, and everything in between).
If there is anything "chilling" about this story, it is that the
majority of game development projects, both blockbusters and small
potatoes alike, run into these problems every day, and no single
project is in danger of running baby-soft smoothly anytime soon.
It is this lack of serious standard operating procedure, fairly
rampant in the games industry, that, incredibly, allows some rare,
super-successful game products to be so unique. Once you regulate,
or insist on applying SOP to a project or development studio,
however, you need to know beforehand that your developers are mature
and capable enough to work well and succeed within a solid
infrastructure, with all of the little governmental /
interdisciplinary checks-and-balances that go with SOP.
At some point, even relatively disconnected shareholders, who are
invested in any business or industry, learn (through company
executives whose partial responsibility is to keep investors
informed) how involved the production process can be for the
commodities their investment monies support. Does this information
send a chill up their spine? Does it make them pause for a moment
and ponder if-and-when-and-why the next studio needs to be
shuttered?
Will investors start clamoring for a one-and-done
approach to game development products . . . just like the film
industry to which so many in the game development community want to
compare themselves? The same film industry that relies almost
exclusively on contractors who generally are given one opportunity
to "get it right" for a given film (or "You will never work in this
industry again")? The same film industry that, outside of
studio-side high-level management and production staff, offers no
benefits?
We should all continue to be watchful and wary of the machine that
functions behind the highly publicized game development sales. We
should all be careful of the "glamorous associations" for which we
have been wishing. We just might get it right between the eyes, and
we will all truly be competing with a global workforce, objectively
speaking, of course.
- This response was posted directly
to the public blog associated with the original Gamasutra.com
article.
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