How do we solve the issue of 'ten managers to every developer' that seems to be plaguing game development and much of the tech industry? This is arguably the leading cause for why game budgets are so overbloated.
How do we solve the issue of 'ten managers to every developer' that seems to be plaguing game development and much of the tech industry?
for starters? get rid of capitalists
This is the only real answer. The state of the video game industry is simply corporations following the trends of other ones because it works. No need for high quality products because you can put out trash and still have idiots buying and even defending it. The increase of indians programmers? Corporations simply using non whites for slave labor because they don't want to pay more money. Nothing will be done because people don't even question stuff corporations in more important stuff like housing. Video games won't get better anytime soon
Clearly the answer is to yell about Black folk on an imageboard, and we've got a crack team of passionate volunteers on it 24/7
Frick you, you're wrong. profit motive is what made the video game industry after it imploded in 1983 you dumbass.
You're misreading the situation because, through true, the financialization of the video game industry as far as those corporations that have been given tons of capital by private equity, banks, angel investors, or shareholders at first and second markets (robinhood account holders for example, it doesn't mean that corporations are in the wrong. They're responsible in paying creditors, interests, taxes, and then shareholders (almost in that order precisely), so if there is any solution to be had, it's cutting costs, downsizing, mergers and acquisitions, and reviewing what works (making games that consumers have always wanted) and foregoing strategies that don't - even if it means losing funding in revenue - like DEI and ESG strategies (non-capitalist crap).
>profit motive got the industry out of the hole it dug itself into
lol?
>Step 1
Leave AAA studio
>Step 2
Create non-AAA studio
>Step 3
Develope game in peace
>step 4
get bought by AAA studio
>step 4-B
Become an AAA studio
are people still doing this shit after the spiderman budget leak? all of these moronic myths are going to keep going forever?
>"im really smart, that's how i know that most of a game's budget is spent is marketing!"
>marketing was only 10% of spider-man's budget
>"uuuhh uuuhh i mean it's managers yeah that's what i meant"
>pms are not even 5% of the budget
>50 people in ART
>highest budget in ART
>for a fricking SPIDERMAN game
wow.. yeah all those women and diversity Art hires really helped their GOTY
ok so it wasn't the marketing, not managers, so now we've resorted "well obviously there's too many people making assets and animations!" What's next, the problem is that they're hiring programmers instead of dragging and dropping everything? Too much money being spent on music when the soundtrack should be nothing but public domain music instead? What the frick is even the point of this? Are you homosexuals really that desperate to get one up on the people running these companies that you'll say the stupidest shit in the hopes that maybe there's a chance you've finally outsmarted the bean counters in AAA studios?
The main argument people have been making for years is that man hours and budget are going to things that don't make good games. You post a chart showing that where the man hours are going is different than people assume but it stills shows that gameplay and design encompasses not even 1/5th of the total man hours. What did you expect?
These games have extremely high production values because that's what normalgays want. These games sell millions for a reason. You really think nobody ever said "wait maybe we shouldn't spend 200 million dollars on this?" Peak fricking midwit, you think that everyone but you is completely moronic and nobody has given any thought to obvious problems or solutions.
They are moronic. AA model of just throwing shit at the wall and THEN seeing what sticks worked a lot better than spending $200 million trying to glue it to the wall.
Look at the recent big new franchises, you've got Elden Ring riding on Demons' Souls momentum, and Baldur's Gate 3 from Divinity: Original Sin from like 2014. Both good, proven successful games, with organic expansion on top of them. Compare that to forspoken.
You are right corporations are flawless.
They are never rigid and stuck in their ways and their shrinking profit margins off extremely high risk projects are proof of that.
>UI 4.9M
the absolute state
We don't, because nothing wrong with a company wasting money to make a game that fails anyway. Let them be moronic.
Basically, I'm going to still get paid reguardless of success or failure. I do care about my work, but ultimately I don't care what happens to the product when I'm done with it.
>How do we solve the issue of 'ten managers to every developer' that seems to be plaguing game development and much of the tech industry?
this will naturally happen as the industry matures. we've just gone through record growth period for tech companies and gaming is as big as its ever been however recently the cracks are showing and most companies are laying people off.
for gaming, big companies are losing their higher quality talent as they move to found their own studios or just leave to go to other tech companies instead.
This issue of more managers than developers is completely made up morons on Ganker.
For one: Unionize and help fund more indie studios.
It's the only way.
Corporate bigwigs don't give a shit about video games, they care about maximizing profit by any and all means necessary and undercutting employee pay and benefits.
We live in a lootbox and microtransaction fueled nightmare bogged down by a million managers and ceos who don't touch development except in the worst ways.
For two: Valve should no longer be taking a fat 30% cut of profits on Steam just so they can be a tech r&d business that fricks around drops a video game once in a decade.
Most of the people who work there are cynical and full of shit when they say you can work on any project or game valve has.
Case in point: tf2, which has only recently gotten a revival of someone on the inside being able to give a shit enough to be able to speak to the community and get content in.
It has long been a monopoly and the large pay cut they take for themselves hurts indies the most and prevents from using that money to grow by investing in more employees or time to refine tech. See what happened to the Dungeon of Dredmor guys for example.
For three: we need better free and open source game engines and gamedev tools and resources to start. Unity's former CEO, ex-EA-CEO and known shithead Riccitiello, already fricked around and found out.
While game maker exists, its essentially 2d only.
Godot exists but it's quirky and has been designed without any kind of test game in mind to inform its architecture which lengthens development time to workaround its quirks.
FNA exists, which is a framework built around old Microsoft XNA from the X360 days, but it's more of build from the ground up effort than everything else on the market.
Unreal Engine isn't open source and is really robust, and they seem to have alright licensing but licensing and royalte fees impact the budget.
Four is the most fricked. Fix the economy and take capitalism down a peg in the U.S.
The U.S is so incredibly fricked.
>Retroactively reduce copyright duration to 14 years
This pretty much kills any and all brands that major companies have been banking on (name anything big and good from post-2010) and reduces the investment in marketing going forward since any long-duration advertising campaign will end up cannibalizing sales once the product ends up in the public domain.
A lack of marketing and established brands then leads to a need to cut the fixed costs of sloppy management and development that bloat budgets and push prices up.
This then leads to companies needing to foster competent management that can lead developers with hired for skillsets that aren't entirely anchored in heavily abstracted dragondrop shit.
Valve isn't a monopoly. Release your shit elsewhere and just don't bog it down with a million launchers.
>moronic commie joined the thread
And he'll stay that way as the house around him burns to the ground. Just leave the company, start your own studio and ignore these people.
AGI will do the needful sir
Well, clearly there are too many managers to be managed appropriately. I suggest an 11th manager to manage the other 10 managers, and a 12th manager to help translate between the 10 developer-managers and the developer, and we'll definitely need a 13th manager to handle efficiency concerns, and a 14th manager for best practices, a 15th manager to handle the other 14 managers and a 16th manager to handle that 15th manager.
There's nothing stopping you and your close circle of friends from making a game.
It's funny, when Epic did what OP suggested and fired a lot of managers and useless HR people all of Ganker made fun of t hem.
How else will you hire all of your relatives to do bullshit jobs without nepotism?
1. The liberals are in charge of the biggest vidya companies
2. They hire a ton of other liberals in order to solidify their power in the industry
3. Budgets rise a whole lot
4. The games suffer as a result
5. Also, blackrock investing and ol' larry fink, and such.
Solution: b***hes go back to the kitchen where they belong and all israelites and Black folk die.
it seems like AAA devs these days aren't passionate about videogames, they're just monkeys that can operate the two programs they need for their role. It doesn't help that creative leads are not so creative anymore.