Support NeoGAF

[ProtoByte]

I'm not blaming the studio, i'm blaming phil spencer and matt booty for not doing their jobs and managing these studios properly. How many studios need to be mismanged before the finger is pointed at the people directly responsible for it.

That's letting the people at the studios off the hook. The truth is that Spencer and Booty have been petrified of being victim to a Schreier/Kotaku 2010s style exposé. Rightfully so, perhaps, since they've never had a clue how to set up pipelines that facilitate good games. Wah wah crunch, wah wah meddling management. They probably thought that pissing off the activist media and burgeoning infiltrator cell in the game dev sphere was really going to be the last nail in the coffin. If their long time propaganda vector had turned against them, Nadella would've shut down the division years ago.

The devs took advantage of that fear and rode the gravy train all the way off a cliff. Yes, Phil should've intervened 3 years in with nothing to show for it, let alone 5. But supposed professionals shouldn't have to be told that not having more than fake footage after 6 years from an "all star team" with support from a studio like Crystal Dynamics isn't acceptable.

It's not even just Xbox devs, who have taken the warchest meme as literally as fanboys. Sony's been scared from demanding cutting edge standards from their devs as well. Practically every studio in the west refuses to enforce standards for efficiency, let alone excellence.

 

[StreetsofBeige]

A couple trailers and a vertical slice gameplay clip in what? 5 years?

Another big waste of time and budget in gaming history.

But give them credit for grifting years of salary out of it.

Tech and media always have open arms for big budget games and movies.

 

[kruis]

I have a question that maybe someone knows the answer to. How big was The Initiative team?

I always got the impression they were really small and were relying on contractors to do all the heavy lifting. Which in some ways could mean the money spent was much higher but the layoffs were small.

Insiders describe ‘fast and furious’ exits from Xbox’s Perfect Dark studio | VGC

As much as half of the core development team have quit in the past year; Initiative management says it’s “confident” in its team…

www.videogameschronicle.com

Xbox's The Initiative studio has seen a "fast and furious" wave of senior departures in the past 12 months, VGC has learned.

As much as half of the core development team known to be working on the upcoming Perfect Dark reboot quit the company during the last year, or around 36 people, analysis of employee LinkedIn profiles has revealed.

That includes most of The Initiative's senior design team, including game director Dan Neuburger, design director Drew Murray, lead level designer Chris O'Neill, principal world builder Jolyon Myers, two senior system designers, a group of three former God of War designers and more.

And the turnover of top talent doesn't end in design. Perfect Dark's two most senior writers also recently quit, analysis shows, along with the project's technical director, tech art director, lead gameplay engineer, lead animator, QA lead and more.

According to LinkedIn, The Initiative is now less than 50 people (when duplicates, former employees and erroneous listings are removed) and currently has just three roles advertised on its website. Analysis suggests it hired around 12 people in the past 12 months.

The timing of the departures coincides with the September 2021 announcement that Crystal Dynamics had been signed to co-develop Perfect Dark.

This, combined with the few job roles currently advertised at The Initiative, suggests that the Tomb Raider developer is likely taking a much stronger lead than first thought on the project.

Interviews with multiple former senior developers cited a lack of creative autonomy and slow development progress as the reason for their departures, and described the wave of exits as "fast and furious" with project momentum said to be "heavily affected".

--------------

Looks like The Iniative consisted of roughly 70 people during its first years and then shrunk to 50 people (with new people taking the positions of a number of those who had left).

 

[thismeinteil]

It's like they don't even check on the progress of any of these studios at all. They just buy them and then leave them be and hope the studio figures it out themselves. Like do your freaking job and get in their and actually manage. Make sure deadlines are being met, make sure the head of the studio is on top of things, talk to employees and find out things from their perspective etc. It seems like phil and matt just say that everything is fine and dandy when its not because they can't be bothered to hold themselves accountable for anything.

I honestly don't think any of the heads at MS play games. Studios are probably easily able to bullshit their way out of progress reports. I know Phil isn't a real gamer. He thought Halo Infinite looked great just because it was at 4k 60FPS. Who cares about the models and textures and clipping, IT'S AT 4K 60FPS!

 

[semiconscious]

Interviews with multiple former senior developers cited a lack of creative autonomy and slow development progress as the reason for their departures, and described the wave of exits as "fast and furious" with project momentum said to be "heavily affected"...

trans: 'we were told to scale back our beach breaks...'

 

[Fake]

Adam McDonald

 

[SamuraiEdge]

What went wrong? The expectation that every game needs to be a huge open world game with RPG mechanics, crafting, or a full featured free to play moonshot, with excellent graphics and performance, and (mostly) simultaneous multiplatform releases. To be honest, devs abusing the "hours per dollar" metric just might be the source of this.

In order to do all of this you need a senior, experienced team with a focused design. Look at how buggy and broken even the biggest, best games like Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim were upon release. And that was with them only having a fraction of the requirements most games have today. Everything you add to a game increases its complexity exponentially, that's just how software development is.

That and the industry has scaled up immensely. We are awash in great games to play, there just isn't enough time for them anymore. Gaming has grown and the amount of people working in the industry is gigantic. We used to have discussions back in the day about if gaming would ever be as big as the movie industry, and it was an actual debate. The talent didn't disappear - it's still there. It's just these teams are releasing less frequently, and they can get lost in the deluge of shovelware and yearly CoD/sports games. There are more excellent games than ever, but there's even more mediocrity and significantly more crap.

Finally, maybe the biggest factor which has fueled all of this is cheap money. Near zero interest rates for over a decade after the Great Recession meant a flood of money into ventures that were not so profitable, because why not? It fueled a lot of waste, and the business and development dark patterns we are criticizing that are now unsustainable now that you can't just loan money to fund projects gone wrong with minimal cost. Now it's very expensive, and it gets worse the longer your game takes to ship. A 5% APY loan over 5 year development time (assuming you aren't paying it back until your game ships and makes money) costs you 27% of how much you originally borrowed, where as a 1% or 2% loan would only cost 5% or 10% more over that same timeframe. It makes an enormous difference in planning, and that is why you see companies freaking the fuck out about controlling their costs leading to layoffs and cancelled projects. They realize we aren't getting cheap money again, and the greedy bastards thought the decade of free money would last forever.

There comes a point – really, how much can you keep things going, leading to an eventual stagnation and maybe something similar to the whole Atari gaming crashout of the 80s when things just heavily regressed? I know it's very different technically and so forth, but some of that essence stays the same given all the bloat and only so much you can do and play that there are going to be huge casualties of job losses like we are seeing.

A lot of these game devs or higher-ups/investment hedge funds and related people really overestimated the 2020 lockdown boom opportunity, which has caused all this 'cutting of the fat' and reliance on stupid tools like AI as a means of some 'cost fallacy'.

One part of me hopes that things reach a better ground with good gaming experiences that could be made rich, akin to Clair Obscur on Unreal Engine 5, where the game budget looks to be around 20-30 million max, maybe by how things were hinted (and in line with a lot of Japan's game budget dev costs), with better AA coming than the stupid 'AAA' bloat that seems way overkill and not much to show.

We are part of the problem for sure, and gaming is indeed better than ever to some degree with what it is offering. But no one can deny that there is only so much of a market with current world affairs and consumer spending that only some games and experiences will thrive while others will not. And in retrospect, looking back at the PS1-PS2 days to now, the market share is still the same in that console space of 50-80 million safely, with it all now being about what people can spend their time on to play.

Only few winners in this who can make a game delivering an inspirational/aspirational experience in the medium, where in the past it use to feel more than it did. I wish we had more of this all around. It's what I hope to see in the future if things balance out.

As we are seeing now.