Paradox Has to Do Better Bottom Line

[elektrizikekswerk]

Part One:

If you cut the budget, That means the company is "bleeding less."

I was imagining cutting the staff by a quarter. But for argument's sake, lets say by as much as half. You cut the number of people working on a game by half, the company is spending half the money over the course of every single month the game is under development.

(I'm American, and it's beyond me how to use the Euro symbol on my keyboard, so I'm going to use the $ sign here)

If you have $20 million in a project's total budget before the company has to put SOMETHING onto the market to begin earning some revenue....

Over the course of one year with 200 people making $100,000 a product would need to hit the market at the end of the 12th month.

If you cut the number of staff by half, to 100 people and they are making $100,000 / year, that extends the timeline out to TWO years instead of one before hitting that $20 million benchmark when the company has to start making a revenue stream off that project.

computer games, engines, and all computer programs in general are becoming more and more complex. With more and more features and "working parts." Particularly with games' AI that has to be able to function with all those extra moving parts in order to provide the single player with some sort of challenge.

With increased complexity, necessarily comes a LOT more code. More code, means more potential for more bugs and/or broken game play mechanics. This is actually why I SUPPORT the concept of DLC. I understand and appreciate the fact that a basic functional game needs to come to market. That more features can always be added later on, which gives the company the opportunity to make more income so they can continue to provide the great products I enjoy.

I personally prefer a basic vanilla gaming experience that works "out of the box," and I am patient enough to wait longer to allow the developers to work more methodically as opposed to haphazardly under increasingly impossible time constraints. That's how we end up with disasters like Cities Skylines: II. (Not a complete "disaster" in my book, but this post is already too long to delve deeper in that and I have a bit more to say.)

Part Two:

There is an optimum number of people for peak efficiency for working on any given project. Beyond that, adding more people nets diminishing returns on the investment into more staff.

If a project is bleeding cash, there is a corporate tendency where "panic" begins to ensue. I'm going to again pick on CS 2 here.

When the corporate structure begins to "panic," they begin to put more and more pressure on those below them to hurry up and put something out. The "panicking" can bleed into other departments unrelated to the actual development teams. Such as the sales department. Sales will begin to want to....well....make sales!

When Sales wants to start pushing, that department in turn starts to turn up the pressure on the Marketing department. So Marketing starts turning up the hype. When Marketing starts hyping something, it generates an ADHD atmosphere for the future customer base who increasingly want something NOW! And if there are any delays, they start getting irritated and angry and begin leaving ugly reviews online. Which in turn, increases corporate "panic" at the top even more.

Part Three:

Remember, these are just hypotheses. I don't know what's happening behind the scenes at PDX. Most PDX products are perfectly fine. Stellaris and its DLC was a stunning success, as it deserved to be. CK III and Vicky III were good, with their later updates and DLC making them even better. EU IV is by far the greatest piece of work by PDX (IMHO, of course. There is literally no need for a successor title, and hope to see continued development for a long time to come).

CS 2 was probably the worst (I know it was developed by CO, but PDX had a hand in marketing and pressuring the product as well.) Based on what I've seen from CS2's marketing and advertising, it comes off as being overhyped almost to the point of being panic-driven.

Now, IF PDX DOES plan on making an EU V, it's gotta have a REALLY long development cycle. EU IV would be an extremely difficult act to follow. And this is where my entire point in "Part One" is derived from. EU IV comes from a place of absolute love. You could almost FEEL it with how well the game plays, the deep layers, all the different details from all the different DLC even focusing on various cultural clothing sets! The music packs! The different sprites! The dedication to squashing bugs and improving the AI.

Creative types like coders and artists can't be pressured. It's got to come from a place of love. And love is patient, as they say.

That's all fine. But you now didn't cut the budget, you just fired some people. 20 millions are still 20 millions. Same budget, same manhours, longer time.
Your point above was to achieve it with _less_ budget.

/edit: besides of that I totally agree to what you say, I'm a software developer myself and can relate. I just Don't get your "less budget means more time and same manhours" magic

 

[RisKFactoR]

That's all fine. But you now didn't cut the budget, you just fired some people. 20 millions are still 20 millions. Same budget, same manhours, longer time.
Your point above was to achieve it with _less_ budget.

Well, like I said, I worded my argument incorrectly. I should have said "SMALLER GROUPS." By "less budget," I meant cutting back on staff somewhat. Or rather, taking a look at the number of staff working on a project.

And fiscally, it does cut back on the budget. It's less money spent per fiscal year. It may extend the project deadline out by a year and be the same budget overall, but it's less per year.

 

[elektrizikekswerk]

Well, like I said, I worded my argument incorrectly. I should have said "SMALLER GROUPS." By "less budget," I meant cutting back on staff somewhat. Or rather, taking a look at the number of staff working on a project.

And fiscally, it does cut back on the budget. It's less money spent per fiscal year. It may extend the project deadline out by a year and be the same budget overall, but it's less per year.

Ah, ok. So not less total budget but less annual budget. That makes sense

 

[RisKFactoR]

Ah, ok. So not less total budget but less annual budget. That makes sense

Exactly.

I guess in summary, what I'm trying to convey, is to extend the development cycle. And by doing that, annual budgets would necessarily need to be cut back (while retaining the same overall budget assigned for the project from start to finish.) That way, you have a longer calendar for development and less pressure to get something out "NOW!"

I would also suggest keeping future projects more on the downlow. Being more secretive about upcoming projects for a longer period of time; deeper into alpha and closer to a beta announcement in order to give the development team more of a "headstart" on the hype train. The downside to that is that fewer ideas from the fan base could realistically be implemented as almost all the features would be locked-in and unable to be changed.

 

[AngryHitsuji]

Creative types like coders and artists can't be pressured. It's got to come from a place of love. And love is patient, as they say.

This is nonsense.

Gamedev is well known for it's insane crunch & management pressure being put on workers.

 

[RisKFactoR]

This is nonsense.

Gamedev is well known for it's insane crunch & management pressure being put on workers.

That's a much more recent trend starting around the mid 2000s. EA is by far, the largest offender in this trend. The result has been the same as when any other industry puts an insane amount of pressure on the workforce:

Loss of quality.

When a corporation becomes larger, there is a big disconnect between those at the top that are only handling money rather than the business, and those at the bottom who are actually running the business. I'm not saying PDX is at that point yet. Stellaris was the last great title they developed themselves. And of course, EUIV and HOI are their other two gems. They have two more original titles coming out: "Humankind" and "Foundry." (I'm a lot more excited about Foundry than I am Humankind.)

The entire problem, as I have touched upon before, is the fact that programs.....
ALL sorts of programs, not just games...
have developed a lot more complexity.
A LOT more complexity.
Like.
Millions of lines of code, and a hell of a lot more "moving parts," so to speak.

Especially when they are creating a brand-new game completely from scratch. Either because they're using a completely different engine, or simply because it is a brand-new original title. As opposed to just simply "upgrading" just to add new features like "Out of the Park Baseball" does. Rather than keep making new iterations, Paradox opts for the DLC concept instead.

Having established the fact that programs are a HELL of a lot more complex, planned development cycles haven't really gotten much longer to compensate. The only way companies are compensating for increased complexity while maintaining the same schedule, is by hiring more staff. Hiring more staff, increases the development cost. (Increased complexity will necessarily increase costs regardless. They can either "play tall" by hiring more staff, or "play wide" by extending the development cycle. But probably not both.)

More people working on a project necessarily increases communication issues. It also introduces more clashes of opinions. That's why smaller gaming houses that is run by the actual creator of a new original title him or herself, are always so damn great when they get their start.

Sid Meier
Shigeru Miyamoto
Markus Heinsohn

Paradox is different, in that they were an already-established board game developer. They managed to keep their vision of what makes gaming so much FUN. Mostly because, I speculate, that they have remained a fairly small company and have established their niche market of grand strategy back in the 1980s and kept with that vision ever since.

Anyway, I'm starting to ramble. This post is far longer than I intended it to be. Sorry about that.

 

[the_unnamed]

How exactly does cutting the budget allow for people to spend more time working on a project? If the budget is being cut, doesn't that mean there is less money to pay people with?

By setting priorities, e.g. focusing on flawless core content. Thick purse quite often leads to less relevant luxury expenditure, only binding funds and manpower.

 

[RisKFactoR]

By setting priorities, e.g. focusing on flawless core content. Thick purse quite often leads to less relevant luxury expenditure, only binding funds and manpower.

That's basically my argument. Reduce the manpower, extend the development timeline. A good phrase most use for this when things start escalating out of control in too many complexities, ideas, and features:

"Get back to the basics." Too much "feature creep." It is entirely too easy to begin to completely lose focus on the entire point of a game and wind up with a mess that wants to appeal to every gamer, while actually being appealing to none.

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

Rambling on below......

Again, picking on Cities Skylines here.

Agents and "supply chains." They want to use all of these agents, and a complex supply chain for building a pure city building game. Why? When building a city, it doesn't matter HOW all 37 instances of Burned Bean Coffee shops source their beans! It only matters that the game accurately calculates what truck traffic should be and which streets and roads they most sensibly should use, based on the numbers, sizes, and locations of all the businesses and industries. Same with the number of cars based on the size of the residential, commercial, and industrial zones.

I get that people love those features, but you really have to prioritize what game you are developing. Are you developing a city-building game who's main purpose is building a city? Or are you building an economics game that focuses on building industries, supply chains, and logistics? Cities Skylines 2 got a really bad rap from a lot of people because the agents system is broken. Pure City Builders bought a game just to build big, beautiful cities. And "Factorio"- style players for some reason or another thought they were buying a game that was more along the lines of Factorio. The devs failed on BOTH counts.

The only reason why CS:1 works, is because CO relied on modders to come to their rescue. For CS:2, they did away with the Steam Workshop and have discouraged the modders from coming to their rescue again! Which is kind of insane in my mind.

I'd love to see PDX just dump CO and hit the drawing boards to build their OWN city-builder from scratch in-house. This time, build a true successor to Sim City 4. Get rid of the entire "Agents" system, and have the game calculate its own statistics. instead of having an AI try and control 100,000+ different "agents." While utilizing the road-building non-grid-style tools of Sim City 2013, CS1 and 2. I also like the 3D graphics, but it needs to be "grittier." Not so.... "Smooth," and "plastic-y." I don't like the cartoonish feel of the graphics from all these agent-driven city builders since Sim City 2013.