The Exhausting development Behind Forza Motorsport

Senua

Senua

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An ex Turn 10 Dev shares behind the scenes stories of the development of FM23. And really shines a light on what the fuck is going wrong over at Microsoft's studios. 18 month contracts, getting rid of senior devs who have the knowledge and passion and replacing with cheap green devs. It's no wonder the game felt so rushed and without a proper vision.

 
Ms still using contactors after the halo infinite fiasco is insane. No wonder their games feel so sterile. If you are leaving in a year and a half anyway why would you put in the extra love? Games are art and need that passion to elevate it from other soulless corporate products. You need artists not contractors.
 
This seems to be a highly ineffective way to go about developing games, is this isolated to only Xbox/MS studios or is it more or less a common practice in the industry?
 
18 months contract - it takes 3-4 months just to get up to speed, and you're going to be actively looking for new work for at least a month or two, so in reality it's more like 12 months at max efficiency, and seeing team members just leave for no real reason is bad for morale. Needless to say it's a horrible way to make a game and explains why Forza is so underwhelming and disjointed.
 
skit_data said:
This seems to be a highly ineffective way to go about developing games, is this isolated to only Xbox/MS studios or is it more or less a common practice in the industry?
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Ms only. Its a company wide thing. Not just for xbox. They don't like to hire full time employees.
 
skit_data said:
This seems to be a highly ineffective way to go about developing games, is this isolated to only Xbox/MS studios or is it more or less a common practice in the industry?
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Nope even Sony uses contractors for its games but they have a higher level of QA when the work comes back. Sony even has their own contractor studio Called VASG (Visual Arts Service Group) that helps other 1st and 3rd parties.
 
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Aaron Olive said:
Nope even Sony uses contractors for its games but they have a higher level of QA when the work comes back. Sony even has their own contractor studio Called VASG (Visual Arts Service Group) that helps other 1st and 3rd parties.
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Every company hires contractor studios. But when it comes to internal employees, they hire devs full time and cultivate them. Ms contracts out its first party studios hiring.

Read up on the halo infinite development. 343i was hiring contractors to do design work.
 
SlimySnake said:
Ms still using contactors after the halo infinite fiasco is insane. No wonder their games feel so sterile. If you are leaving in a year and a half anyway why would you put in the extra love? Games are art and need that passion to elevate it from other soulless corporate products. You need artists not contractors.
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Hey if it works for Office to draw new icon for the latest M365 version revision, why wouldn't it work for game development!? It will cut costs and can always get more contractors!

* Thoughts of dumb ass MS management.
 
Phil Spencer's leadership has been a huge blow to Xbox and MS Games. Every single noteable Xbox first party game has been reduced to a mediocre mess this gen. And sure, it's probably a company-wide policy but as President of MS Gaming and not being able to stop it, it shows what a failure his leadership has been to MS Games.
 
From a business standpoint makes sense alot less overhead. I mean having your own employees don't guarantee success either.
 
Senua said:
18 month contracts, getting rid of senior devs who have the knowledge and passion and replacing with cheap green devs.
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fucked-up-seth-rogan.gif


This is a huge issue and it baffles me that they continue with this practice.. Just make a contract for the entire expectancy of the project. Or better yet, actually hire talented people instead of doing short-term contracts for projects that take 5+ years.

I don't really understand why they have the 18 month policy in place.
 
Senua said:
An ex Turn 10 Dev shares behind the scenes stories of the development of FM23. And really shines a light on what the fuck is going wrong over at Microsoft's studios. 18 month contracts, getting rid of senior devs who have the knowledge and passion and replacing with cheap green devs. It's no wonder the game felt so rushed and without a proper vision.

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this exact scenario happens everyday on any company developing software, it's not exclusive to gaming.
 
Robb said:
fucked-up-seth-rogan.gif


This is a huge issue and it baffles me that they continue with this practice.. Just make a contract for the entire expectancy of the project. Or better yet, actually hire talented people instead of doing short-term contracts for projects that take 5+ years.

I don't really understand why they have the 18 month policy in place.
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It's not a policy as much as it is law I think in most states that you have to give benefits to worker over 18 months. My company also did that.
 
ADiTAR said:
It's really cheaper. They don't need to give social benefits, 401k, etc.
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Of course it's cheaper… in the short term. In the long term you get things like Halo Infinite issues, Forza and so on.

They do contractors as a major supplement to their software dev teams for other projects (Windows, Office, Azure, etc), and it has hurt them there too.

However especially in gaming, software dev can get very complex including 3D modeling, animation, etc and as pointed out above, MS only gets about 12 months of decent work (and nobody on a short 18 months is going to be super dedicated).

So long term it's short sighted shit that results in prolonged dev times that are eventually even costlier. However it's easy for some product manager to point to labor cost savings on their PDR vs taking overall picture into account.

This shit is on MS as a whole and on Phil in particular since he has been either head of their dev studios or Xbox for 15-20 years.
 
Robb said:
I don't really understand why they have the 18 month policy in place.
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It's a law. After 18 months they have to make the temp a full time employee. Before the law was in place, companies would just use temps as indefinite employees. SOE used to do that. They would lie to the temps on hire and say after 90 days they'd be rolled over to full time employees but in reality they never intended to do that.
 
Just finished watching.

This guy said he was very clearly told that this was a contract job with a firm 18-month term with a 6-month gap between contract terms and he took it anyway. First because it paid more than his current job and he needed to effing eat and secondly because he wanted to give little kids the same magic he felt opening Forza as a little kid on Christmas.

Then he got to work making the game as the guy who made rocks and mountains, but not trees, and he was doing that until the contract of a really senior person ended. This senior contractor was so important that the project could have collapsed without him but he was being mercilessly fired at the end of his contract anyway. This meant that the narrator had to actually learn how the tools work, which apparently really hard and is his definition of crunch.

Then he worked his way up to doing R&D, which meant figuring out how large the textures could be before breaking the engine, while also doing development, which was making textures that didn't break the engine. People started to see the work the Forza team was doing because stuff was going up on Twitter and he was really happy.

Then he was told his contract was ending. By this point in the story he seems to have worked his way into the position of being the grizzled and indispensable old timer so he said he asked if he could be hired as a full time employee, but his lead said no. So it's obviously because the higher ups needed a third house while his only option was to have no job for 6 months. He didn't have time to do documentation so the wisdom he had accumulated couldn't be passed down because he never wrote anything down before that. So his contract ended and he found a different job, which must have been 6 months later as he had previously said not having a job for 6 months was his only option. But he didn't clarify.

Seems like it would have been a perfect piece for Jason S. to add to his long list of development crunch exposés. Maybe JS will signal boost it to highlight the realities of accepting a contract job with Microsoft.
 
ManaByte said:
It's a law. After 18 months they have to make the temp a full time employee. Before the law was in place, companies would just use temps as indefinite employees. SOE used to do that. They would lie to the temps on hire and say after 90 days they'd be rolled over to full time employees but in reality they never intended to do that.
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Yep and Microsoft got sued for it. They paid $97 million to 8,000 former permatemp contractors back in 2000 and since then the lines between contractor and employee are made abundantly clear before you take a contract job for Microsoft.
 
GHG said:
That's exactly the issue.

They are attempting to run a gaming division as they would a regular software business.
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Games are regular software and this is a problem everywhere. That's why companies try to simplify the apps, make them modular and add features over time. We need to go back to AA gaming and shorter, more focused game experiences.
 
jm89 said:
The 18 month policy probably works in enterprise. But in gaming where one project can go on for years seem like a bad idea.
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They used to churn these games out every other year. So the policy likely worked for a long time since the person's work would be done in one contract. But this game took six years to make. Something seriously went wrong.
 
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K' Dash said:
Games are regular software and this is a problem everywhere. That's why companies try to simplify the apps, make them modular and add features over time. We need to go back to AA gaming and shorter, more focused game experiences.
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Games are not "regular software". They are multidisciplined, a lot more difficult to make, tend to have a lot more complexity, and involve a lot of teams that you would not see anywhere else across software development.

If Microsoft want to continue to make games in this fashion then maybe it would be better for them to make games that can be shat out within 18 month periods. But for the rest of the industry, most of whom respect the processes involved in developing games and understand the artistic side, they can continue to make games at whatever level of scope and budget they deem appropriate.
 
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Not saying it's right but I think that's just how Microsoft operates. A buddy of mine was there for a couple of contracts before being made a full time employee, but he's not working on video games. Common sense should tell you that a hiring a bunch of contractors is not ideal for making video games, but from what I know of the inside, common sense is very uncommon at Microsoft.
 
Aaron Olive said:
Nope even Sony uses contractors for its games but they have a higher level of QA when the work comes back. Sony even has their own contractor studio Called VASG (Visual Arts Service Group) that helps other 1st and 3rd parties.
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You're confusing things here.

VASG (Visual Arts Service Group) is an internal team, with its own full-time staff, part of the Product Development Services Group of SIE, which provides design, tech, animation, performance capture and sound recording services to PlayStation Studios developers, partners and sometimes even third-party studios.

They're not contractors (understood as employees hired on 18-month contracts after which they're let go of the company, like Microsoft seems to do with their US studios), their full-time job just happens to be to support other people's games.
 
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Internal employees will prob work well in smaller projects. When you have like hundreds of people working on a game I don't care if it's internal or external it will be a mess to manage and impossible to get everyone on the same page. This seems to be the bigger prob in game development nowdays.
 
When I was in the military they wanted to implement this "rotating crew" concept for these brand new big ass vessels; essentially having 2 or 3 crews ready to rotate every 3 months so that the ship could continuously be used throughout the year. It was a good idea on paper, but what they found out was that almost all of the maintenance and proper planning was being left for the "next crew" consistently and it led to a domino effect of big problems that had to be addressed by taking the ship out of patrol, essentially making the problem worse than had they just kept the 6 mos. in 6 mos. out approach with 1 crew.

Videogame development takes such a fine balance to maintain between all the moving parts, it's easy to see why the approach leads to issues.

It's hard to build a foundation for anything when the foundation needs to be understood and rebuilt/modified by new people constantly. 18 month contracts for games that typically take 3+ years is an easy recipe for disaster leaving your franchise in a mess after too many releases. I'm sure management weights short-term vs. long-term financials as a catalyst for these practices, but it just leaves full-time employees frustrated and short-term contractors indifferent to the final release.
 
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This is going to be the fate of the COD studios now that Microsoft are involved.

Can you imagine those games with even less passion going into them?
 
Senua said:
An ex Turn 10 Dev shares behind the scenes stories of the development of FM23. And really shines a light on what the fuck is going wrong over at Microsoft's studios. 18 month contracts, getting rid of senior devs who have the knowledge and passion and replacing with cheap green devs. It's no wonder the game felt so rushed and without a proper vision.

Click to expand...

Looks like they are using the same successful approach they had with 343i… feels odd…
 
Senua said:
An ex Turn 10 Dev shares behind the scenes stories of the development of FM23. And really shines a light on what the fuck is going wrong over at Microsoft's studios. 18 month contracts, getting rid of senior devs who have the knowledge and passion and replacing with cheap green devs. It's no wonder the game felt so rushed and without a proper vision.

Click to expand...

Damn. Well, that explains a lot about what happened to the game. It's not bad, but it'sa far cry from previous entries.
 
Killer8 said:
This is going to be the fate of the COD studios now that Microsoft are involved.

Can you imagine those games with even less passion going into them?
Click to expand...

At this rate I think it would have to take something like that for more people and perhaps the media to be a bit more honest about Xbox
 
GHG said:
Games are not "regular software". They are multidisciplined, a lot more difficult to make, tend to have a lot more complexity, and involve a lot of teams that you would not see anywhere else across software development.

If Microsoft want to continue to make games in this fashion then maybe it would be better for them to make games that can be shat out within 18 month periods. But for the rest of the industry, most of whom respect the processes involved in developing games and understand the artistic side, they can continue to make games at whatever level of scope and budget they deem appropriate.
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As a software developer, I tend to agree. I've made desktop, mobile and web applications but none of them require 2D/3D art skills and music/sound or even the math/physics/AI knowledge required for a game.
 
The whole idea of 18 month contracts is idiotic, especially if it's related to a job requiring deep knowledge of the engine and the game's mechanics. The new guy not only is going to waste about a third of their contract learning all that stuff, but they also won't have any investment or passion in doing stellar work knowing they'll be gone soon.

You end up with a soulless, broken game that's missing key content and losing active players like crazy. Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if this was the last Forza Motorsport game and Turn 10 got disbanded or moved to assist on Horizon or other projects.
 
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SlimySnake said:
Ms still using contactors after the halo infinite fiasco is insane. No wonder their games feel so sterile. If you are leaving in a year and a half anyway why would you put in the extra love? Games are art and need that passion to elevate it from other soulless corporate products. You need artists not contractors.
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Halo Infinite was the last xbox game I was actually hyped for and the campaign was so bad. Such a shame.
Their practices just sound like the usual corporation eating itself. Too big to be managed properly and constant war for power.
Corporation must keep growing. no matter it grew 15%... it was forecasted to grow 17%, so let's fire 7% of the staff to make up for it because math says so!!! And let's get rid of these old guys because they earn too much.
Then they are surprised the games sucks when it's all about money
 
ReBurn said:
Sounds like modern AAA to me.
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Yup. Everyone excited to spend $70 to replay the same game they've been playing for decades. Either by rehashing a successful game as a sequel or just remaking it. Or go the square route, say "hey, remember that game 30 years ago everyone loved? Let's remake that, but break it up into multiple parts and charge $70 a pop to maximize profit!"

And the gaming community eats it up. Devs are creatively bankrupt.
 
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