All three consoles have digital distribution storefronts for smaller indie games. And they’re hugely popular too. There’s a reason Transistor was one of the most talked-about PS4 games during E3.
Strictly speaking, production orders, inspections and whatnot aren’t “projects”. They are ongoing processes. Projects are endeavors that last for a limited period of time and produce discrete output or deliverable. For example, a factory’s manager might initiate a project to retool their assembly line.
Deadlines, deliverables and milestones aren’t achieved unless you manage and prioritize the work tasks. Unfortunately, due to the inconsistent nature of developing software, it is often difficult to manage those tasks.
I hadn’t heard of these kickstarter games. Interesting.
But the attract little interest from the major publishers, and are a small portion of sales overall on consoles. They get much more play in the computer gaming market, and the phone market is nothing but indies for the time being. You have much fewer and more limited indies available as well, due to the upfront fees and testing.
All of the major publishers release downloadables on the PSN, XBLA, and Wii U/3DS eShop. MS actually requires that all indies hook up with a publisher before putting their game on the service. This is rarely a problem (though you’ll hear a few horror stories from indies who can’t find a publisher). And again, many of these games make big bucks. Minecraft on the 360 has sold close to 7 million copies, for example.
Big publishers dominate the phone market too and a few indies that started in the phone market like Zynga and Rovio are now massive companies that can challenge the big boys in market cap.
Basically, indies have a bigger presence on the console than you think and major publishers have a bigger mobile presence than you think (count the EA games in the iOS top 20 sometime).
Minecraft is a bit of an anomaly though and shouldn’t really be used as a typical scenario. I’d be curious to see where the next couple most popular indie titles ranked.
I recently had a conversation with someone about PC indie titles and they mentioned Minecraft. While Minecraft is around the #5 best selling PC game, it stands largely alone in a top ten or top twenty list. Down at the bottom of the list (like #60ish) you have a couple games like Binding of Issac with one million copies, though a good chunk of that came from indie bundles where it was practically free. Saying “Indie games can be successful, look at Minecraft” is a bit like saying “MMORPGs can have a lasting successful subscription model, look at WoW” and ignoring the rest of the industry that either went to some F2P variant or bankrupt.
But, like I said, I don’t know numbers for Xbox so I’d be legitimately curious to see how it looked from that end.
I can also point to numerous great indie games which would never in a million years get a console release, but which are easily played via PC. Frayed Knights, for one.
Definitely. I think we may be on the same page, but the thing I frequently run into in the corporate IT world is that project managers often only look at the milestones, timelines and deliverables without much, if any regard for the actual worker bees.
It’s often a case of trying to cram 50 lbs of project tasks into a worker with a 25 lb capacity, and better person management would go a long way to making sure that the right 25 lbs is in the worker, and the other 25 lbs is still waiting in the hopper.
They also frequently lose sight of the larger picture of actually making a good solution and doing what’s “right” in favor of meeting the aforementioned deadlines, deliverables and milestones.
To which I say- what good is achieving a milestone or creating a deliverable if it’s going to cause more problems in the long run because of slipshod design or execution? Better to be late and do it right in the long run, I’ve found.
That’s why it can sometimes be a smart thing to find a comfortable niche.
What if your competitor makes his target delivery date while you let yours slide, and when you deliver your much better & reliable product 3 months later, you found your customer has already ordered 300K units from the competitor and isn’t interested in you anymore? Sometimes deadlines aren’t arbitrary.
Here’s the Top 10 from last year on the XBLA. It only includes 2012 sales, so games like Castle Crashers and Trials HD have sold considerably more in total:
- Minecraft – 4,997,000
- The Walking Dead – 2,615,000
- Trials Evolution – 1,002,000
- Counter-Strike: Global Offensive – 273,000
- Castle Crashers – 252,000
- Gotham City Impostors – 258,000
- I Am Alive – 245,000
- Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater HD – 226,000
- Alan Wake’s American Nightmare – 206,000
- Trials HD – 203,000
Assuming that’s 2012 only sales for Minecraft as well, it matches what I expected. Minecraft is very successful and there’s a big dropoff when comparing other titles.
That doesn’t mean that selling 250,000 copies can’t be a success vs. development costs. Just that using a game that sold 20x times that as the primary example is a little misleading, intentional or not.
Some game types, like top-down turn-based RPGs are nearly impossible to get funding to produce. But several projects have proven that people are willing to pay upfront for these games, thus cutting normal investors out of the picture and enabling studios to produce games those niche markets want. Some of these titles are raising millions of dollars. I myself am invested in four or five old-fashioned games that I won’t not have time to play for at least a year. But they put out the call – give us the money and we can make the kinds of games you want, not the kinds of dumbed-down games investors think will hit it big – and I answered, along with a lot of others.
My point was that often, these deadlines and deliverables are made without regard to anything but absolute fictions, and tend to grind the workers under their weight. It’s a shittily run shop that expects people to churn out crappy work just to meet deadlines. And it’s even worse if your competition is dropping the hammer on you hard enough to require that and your management isn’t getting out from under it.
Ultimately, it’s a failure on the part of whoever wasn’t on the ball enough to schedule a reasonable schedule or fail to anticipate that particular market movement, not the worker bees who can’t make an arbitrarily set due-date or milestone.
It’s kind of like someone telling me that I need to be in New York City by 7:00 pm Eastern time today. Is it my fault if I am late with such a restrictive time window(5 hours, with at least 3.5 hours flight time), or is it the fault of whoever set this deadline?
Exactly. If apipeline that gives two years for a game ends up being so tight the coders and devs and QA and whatnot can’t breathe and can’t afford a single slip - then lengthen the pipeline. Add six months. Add a year. You don’t need every person the full length, so your actual costs aren’t going up 25 or 50%. This also lets you develop the concepts much stronger, and you can still take advantage of the fact that graphics development tends to improve over a short period, because they aren’t being as rushed. They can nail down a great deal of the work in preproduction anyway and polish the aspects that matter most, like core gameplay.
Former IT PM, and a lot of this depends on the corporate culture. My previous company wouldn’t LET you look at the worker bees…you had X resources, Y scope and Z schedule - figure out how to get it done. Basically, they set you up to fail at all three - the result was a continual revolving door of project managers trying to keep their jobs by pushing staff - and a staff that was ruled by terror since entire teams would get let go for failing to meet the deliverable.
The previous job to that was one where you’d go into your status meeting and say “well, we intended to be this far, but the team in Buffalo got pulled onto an emergency project and that is going to set us back at least two weeks.” And the CIO would say “yep, I know about that, I said to do that, update your schedule - and give it another week, they aren’t going to wrap up in Buffalo as fast as they think they will.” Absolutely no “well, when they get back tell them they’ll need to work overtime.” Everyone was allocated across multiple projects, PMs didn’t have authority over people - they weren’t functional managers - and if the CIO needed something different, the functional managers were rallied. And because that happened rarely and from the top, when the functional managers got rallied by the CIO for a project and in turn rallied their participants on the project team, everyone pitched in.
Then you have the people who think that because it takes nine months to make a baby, you can put nine people on it - four of them not even women - and get a baby in one month.
A lot of it comes down to people not understanding that in any project you have three goals you want to meet:
- Do it quickly.
- Do it cheaply.
- Do it well.
…however, realistically you can only expect to accomplish two of those. It’s seems to be one of those fundamental rules of the universe that we haven’t figured out a way to get around. Yet many still try. So instead of focusing on two of those, they try to focus all three and wind up achieving none of them.
To be honest, part of the problem there is the US and part of the problem is deciding that Unions should be based around a profession. I work as a programmer in the games industry (although admittedly definitely a niche market) and am in a union. My union specifically caters for people with Masters degrees and above. I would hedge my bets that many of my co-workers are also in unions.
However, I have friends and ex-coworkers that now work for larger, established companies (for example the rather well known subsidiary of EA that my cycle ride to work takes me past) that would also be in unions.
Also - and probably importantly - my currently employer doesn’t know I am in a union (well, unless the check any public register that there may or may not be). I’m not required to tell them. They get to find out when I decide that they need to know, which is kind of useful and would be hard to pull off if it was industry/employer based.
Because no one cares. In every technology company I’ve ever worked, regardless if it’s a small software startup or a giant like Deloitte or Accenture, they all work the same:
Account managers/partners/salespeople sell projects. They don’t care if it’s properly scoped out. All they care about getting the sales credit.
Project managers like me don’t care. I’m technically “responsible” for the project. Of course it’s hard to actually feel responsible since I didn’t scope the project, plan the project, put together the team or actually lead them. Some combination of the sales guy, technical architect, team lead and resource management staff do that. So my job becomes basically reporting on the project and figuring out which of these idiots to try to fix the blame on when it fails or goes over budget.
Developers/engineers/analysts care because they are the ones who have to do the work (and they are delicate geniuses who are so smart they don’t need things like coding standards or documentation). But they can typically be replaced or outsourced.
That would largely defeat the purpose of a Union as established under US law. It couldn’t do any of the things unions in the United States do; such as negotiation or fighting over workplace conditions or work rules.