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What is stopping Xbox from forcing all their studios to work on 1 AAA game each 3-6 months?

Gaelyon

Member
That's my point
Instead of movies they should start making a TV show, shorter to make and release episodes each 3 months on game pass
Game design need time. Features must be tested. Some ideas work on paper then doesn't after being programmed. Level design need testing, feedback and refining. Artwork may be scrapped, redone, improved. story writing, dialog, scripts are refined over months of time, often years. Music and sound design need context and testing. Dialog recording is done in many languages, translation need final script. Motion capture takes weeks and then months of animation work and need each story scripts, each cutscene, each combat moves finals. Programing need tons of debugging, optimisation, testing of new feature, upgrades. Interface, UI, input, all need testing and feedback.

The more large the team the more you need management, schedules, meetings. Working with dozens of teams spread across the globe with different time zones is a nightmare.

You can't force workload past a certain level of complexity. It doesn't work, it's counterproductive and a recipe to disaster. If it was that easy to bring 20 000 people in a large warehouse and shit an AAA game every 3 months everyone would do it...
 
So you're asking why Microsoft doesn't just consolidate all of their studios together, so that the combined output of all of their game developers can knock out a game every 3 months?

Have you ever tried herding cats, OP?
This is essentially what they would have to do to make it work.
 

Jigsaah

Member
Get rid of Booty...get rid of Greenberg. Phil has enough good will to keep him but he's on thin ice. Sarah Bond is mommy, but I'm sure she has some blame to take here as well.
 
With the amount of studios they have, they should just build their own advanced diverse game engine built on Direct X and have all the devs use it. But they’d probably fuck that up too.
 

Jinzo Prime

Member
Why aren't they putting every studio they have on 1 game and release it in 3-6 months that would fit game pass

This format isn't working well

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OP, what you're talking about is industrialization. You want to turn AAA game development into factory work, and I agree with you. Sales figures prove that people just want pretty, vapid, repetitious busy-work — that would be perfectly suited to standardization and commoditization.
 

Dr. Claus

Banned
A Modern AAA video game can't be made in 3-6 months, even if you have 4000 people working on it. That isn't how that works. That is never how that works.
 
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I'm sure there's some parallell here to politicians who believe more money is always the answer to solving any and all complex problems. Some resources can't just be instantly created by pouring more money in.
 

SHA

Member
If I spend close to 100B I'd prevent the chances of odd successes to happen cause dealing with that money is way bigger than me and my personal ideals.
 

FunkMiller

Member
Fuck that, OP.

They should be made to all engage in a Squid Game style competition to the death, with the winner allowed to drink a small vial of Phil's tears.

It can be televised on Netflix, and what's left of Bethesda can make the game adaptation, that will come out in 2045 and still only be at 30fps on consoles.
 
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Fabieter

Member
I don't think you understand how game development works.

It's taking Kojima 6 years to put out Death Stranding 2 using the same engine.

Do we know when he started development?

Anyway all those different studios have people doing basically the same so they all doing the same game would mean alot of people would be idle waiting for their next job.
 

RoboFu

One of the green rats
More devs doesn't automatically mean faster turn around.

Imagine you have two narrow ditches to dig where only one person can dig at a time. You have 100 people to dig one ditch vs 3 to dig the other ditch. Who finishes first ?

Well the 3 people quickly determine they each take turns for 10 mins until the ditch is done.

The ditch with 100 people first has to determine what order everyone digs and how long. To do this they need someone to make that decision so they take a vote to choose a leader. The leader then has to choose the order in which they dig and how long. It takes two minutes to switch out a one digger for another so he figures out that to be more efficient that they to needed 10 min shifts. Now he needs to figure out an average of how much ditch one person can dig in 10mins so they take some time to conduct test to figure this out. Now they have an average and determine that they only need 50 people to be the fastest and most efficient so need they need to find the 50 best diggers out of the 100. They test each person how much they can dig in 10 mins and come up with the 50 best and let the other 100 go.

Now they are finally ready to start digging the ditch 4 days after the other ditch with 3 diggers finish in the first hour. 😵‍💫
 

ManaByte

Gold Member
Forcing studios to do what they don’t want is how we got Redfall. Arkane didn’t want to make it but Zenimax ordered them to. Then MS inherited the corpse.
 
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