SOE Boss: Non-Gamers "Have No Business In This Business"

[Sylveria]

While I'm sure he has good intentions with that statement, I don't quite agree with him. To compare to something like writing literature, it is often encouraged that you read outside the genre you are writing in. So if you write fantasy, look at some technical books, or some biographies, anything to extend your areas of understanding.

I think the same thing could be applied to game development. It invites the bad, as we have seen, but it could also bring in new insights to keep the medium fresh.

Those are still books and writing. He's not saying RPG makers shouldn't make non-RPGs and shooter makers shouldn't make non-shooters. He's saying stock brokers and accountants, who seem to have nothing but contempt for the medium they control, the customers, and the culture surrounding it, shouldn't be people driving the gaming industry.. which is what we have now.

 

[Sylveria]

Upon reading this article...

Spoiler: ...this was the first thing that came to mind.

Absolutely 100% spot on. Thanks for posting that, Frank distilled my thoughts(as he always does) into a nutshell.
.

Here's the problem though.. People like Kotick and Reggie aren't experimental either. They are numbers guys. "Our marketing data suggests" are their cross and bible words. They are just as bad as those "hip young guys" who think they know what the young people want. I'd argue they're worse cause they have charts and graphs to support their claims, not just their gut feeling. They have to play it even safer because, lets face it, making a game costs far, far more than recording a CD. They can't afford to experiment, or rather their stock-holders wont forgive them for it.. which is why we get a new CoD every year and all the niche genres are shrinking while the big 'safe money' ones get bigger and more plentiful every year.

 

[odBilal]

While I'm sure he has good intentions with that statement, I don't quite agree with him. To compare to something like writing literature, it is often encouraged that you read outside the genre you are writing in. So if you write fantasy, look at some technical books, or some biographies, anything to extend your areas of understanding.

pretty bad comparison.

Elaborate would you please?

The comparison would only work if it would be: a writer that reads books is better than a writer that doesnt read books.

 

[Ed130 The Vanguard]

You don't need to be a gamer to make music for games. You don't need to be a gamer to write for a game. YOu don't need to be a gamer to voice-act for a game. And you don't need to be a gamer to sit in the management of a game related company. You need a MANAGER.

It helps if the manager KNOWS what his/her subordinates are doing, especially with a creative medium such as game design.

For Example:

The old manager of the company IT department I worked for was an old hand who was promoted from the ranks to his spot.
He KNEW what everyone's job was and could often do it himself.

Then he retired and was replaced by someone who has a degree in management.

Lets just say things got interesting and people left to the point when the company was forced to downsize, the IT dept was advertising vacancy's.

The manager is slowly unlearning practically everything in his degree (which would have worked in another dept but caused the IT dept to essentially implode).

Yes you need a manager who knows his way around the boardroom. BUT you also need one that knows his way around the coal-face as well.

 

[Monsterfurby]

As someone working in the industry, I can only say: YES, A THOUSAND TIMES YES.

However, there's a 'but' in there somewhere.

The key caveat is this: most people either like games or are talented businessmen (marketers/project managers/accountants/general managers/...) - to find someone who is BOTH is exceedingly rare, to quote a colleague of mine.

What adds to this problem is this: by default, this industry is MADE for people who love games, simply by virtue of a) wages being extremely low, b) working hours (especially in development studios, less so at publishers) bordering the inhumane and c) rampant mismanagement testing one's patience (although that might be CAUSED BY too many people either not knowing their product or not knowing business). To even that out, businesspeople in the upper management layers make unproportionally more money than the "gaming people" in middle and lower positions.

If that gap could be closed, maybe you'd get more gamers WITH management experience into the industry.

 

[disgruntledgamer]

I agree 100% If you're not a gamer why are you even in the business? It's a rhetorical question the answer is to make money. Your in the video game business to make money and you don't give a shit about the quality or about the game in general.

What you get when the head guys who are in charge of video game development, but don't give a shit about video games and are just in it to make money is essentially EA. They're going to gouge you 6 ways from Sunday and make everything to have a broader appeal and shove stupid fads down your throat like kinetic, which is Microsoft but whatever.

What you get when you have people who are in charge of video game development, but also play video games is essentially The Bioware of old. People who care about games make better games and making money is just a means to an end.

 

[shrekfan246]

Would you trust the head of a record label who doesn't listen to music?
Would you trust a book publisher who doesn't like to read?
Would you trust a movie publisher who hates movies?

The head likely won't have much of a hand in the day-to-day. As such, I don't care if any of them are anti-(insert medium here).

Would I trust my mixing to someone who hates my music? No. But perhaps I would trust it to someone with a good ear for sound, even if they didn't listen to music.

Would I trust my book to someone who didn't read? If they were going to market it, fuck yeah.

Same for the movie publisher who hates movies, though again "hate" is a little stronger than "doesn't game."

Since gaming involves more than one medium, it's even more apt to have people outside "the biz" involved. Artists can understand art and aesthetics without knowing games. Games try and be like movies; wouldn't it be awesome if we had scripts that were better than a Jerry Bruckheimer flick? Or even just better than porn?

And when you get higher up the ladder, does it matter at all? A CEO who is a complete moron when it comes to games will still try and make money. It's not like he's going to spend billions of dollars to tank the industry or something.

It's a bit funny to me that people apparently believe the CEO of a publishing company is going around the development studios day to day, giving them tips on how to change things or telling them what to do. I can't even imagine how hellish it would be to be a gamer who works for a publisher directly, instead of through a middle-man via a development studio.

Yes, the publishers can make some pretty stupid decisions, but they can also make some pretty good ones when it comes to developers who just can't see any issues with their precious creation. No matter how good you think you are at something, there's going to be problems with it, and getting your opinion echoed back at you by like-minded people isn't going to be productive for the economy you're working in.

You don't need to be a huge fan of something to run a business based around it. It may help, but in the end being a 'gamer' doesn't qualify somebody to run Electronic Arts.

 

[Glademaster_v1legacy]

I don't fully agree with what he is saying but I agree with the point that I think he is trying to get across. That is that people working in the industry should understand what they are making and selling which they don't in some cases.

 

[Legion]

I disagree with him, you do need some non-gamers perhaps to be involved as otherwise these passionate gamers would bankrupt all these game companies as they would take every single risk so long as it made a good game in their eyes.

That doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Being passionate about games doesn't mean you can't be logical when it comes to making them.

I can't even think of what else to add, your comment literally doesn't make any sense, it just assumes that if somebody likes something, then their professionalism is somehow impaired.

It's like suggesting that athletes shouldn't get allowed access to their own bank accounts in case they bankrupt themselves getting all the latest sporting equipment.

 

[Frostbite3789]

I'm inclined to agree with him, based on observation. Valve succeeds in many realms where EA, Ubisoft, Activision, etc. fail because they know who they're selling to (themselves)
How can one run a functioning business when they have no idea what their customers want or, in many ways, who they even are

If every publisher was Valve, we'd never have any games to play. Or they wouldn't be released as they are, as much as we complain about rushed deadlines and the like...we still play and for the most part enjoy the games.

With fewer games released, prices would have to go up to make up for the high development cost due to increased development time.

Long story short, not every publisher/dev can be Valve. You wouldn't even want them to be.

 

[weirdee]

Many people find it difficult to straddle both the business and the enjoyment of their particular game's field of experiences. I understand that most people who do the work never have the time or capacity to enjoy the games they make. Many don't even have to in order to do their jobs, but at the same time, being blind all the time doesn't do favors for those that could really use the insight. It isn't reasonable to expect all of them to make the effort to cross that bridge, but the ones who do...they are the ones who can help us get closer to the ideal.

It's very tiring, though. Perhaps there is an easier solution to this issue?

 

[Razorback0z]

I think his point is simply this.

I have been out of the limelight for some time and with the imminent release of Planetside 2 I better get in the media and remind people who I am.

Thats all hes saying. Its called marketing.

 

[weirdee]

for instance

Taking a look at the MML3 fiasco just one more tired but necessary time, after discussion with both the hopeful and the pragmatic, I know that maybe, just MAYBE, the reason they pulled the plug on it was very good at the time, regardless of how fucking boneheaded it looks, even with the months behind us and having both the perspective of then and the perspective now.

The problem is that just because it was the right thing to do doesn't mean you shouldn't just not tell everybody else that was heavily invested in that project either mentally or emotionally anything at all about those reasons.

at the very least, explain why you wouldn't be able to say anything (like, even, something about business confidentiality, even though given the scope of the project, that kind of thing flies in the face of everything they were trying to do), or even tell the people working on it in advance that the project was already cancelled instead of watching them work on something you'll never let them finish, or the people on the message board talking about it for months long after the project was actually canned, and the news feed was cut off, but pretend that something is still happening, in the hopes that everything will eventually die down so you can get back to making all them fucking sequels in the hopes that some day you can justify crushing people's souls to your children when they ask you about it

there may be a hard numbers part to the business, but those numbers represent the dreams of people, who have feelings, and perhaps it would be best not to treat those people like you treat the numbers?

hell, they could have even released the pregame "demo" just to make some money back, with the explanation that the game was not going to be completed, but they didn't even do that, regardless of the fact that it was already finished as a complete work in of itself, and they didn't, and yet there was not a single actual explanation

sorry to derail, but i'm just trying to demonstrate that above all else there needs to be a BALANCE so that i don't have to keep fighting the people i like over issues that remain unresolved due to poor public relation skills and vaguely detailed internal policies that remain questionable as far as common sense goes

yes, internet people are crazy. but perhaps treat them with some fucking respect once in a while, maybe, just maybe, you'll have their support, regardless of what you have to do, as long as you be a fucking man about it, instead of trying to smooth shit over using the people who had nothing to do with your actions, but are saddled with the task of justifying them to people using the crappy pile of nothing that you gave them while you covered your ass behind the scenes while telling yourself that staying safe was the right thing to do for the long term interests of the company, as if that would help you sleep better at night

you leave a bad situation behind, there's no reason for your fans to ever come back to you later

ANYWAY

for how much these people should know

they need to be able to take into account the perspectives of those outside of the mindset of the people on top in order to be able to make important decisions that affect those people

this may or may not require intimate knowledge of a game, but at the very least, they should be able to observe something beyond how it benefits the company and to how somebody might realistically view the situation, instead of pretending that those people are just puppets that act a certain way based on which wires you pull on and discounting the rest as atypical behavior

 

[Ed130 The Vanguard]

Well, obviously you need to have managers in place that know the field they are managing. But not everyone needs to have that experience.

Um yes they do.

When I mentioned that 'things got interesting' said interesting things included

The new manager dumping important jobs/systems and processes and replacing them with his own (which were completely inadequate)

Spearheading acquisitions that were either useless or more expansive in the long run due to his lack on knowledge.

I could go on about how he 'cleaned house' and destroyed morale, I could even talk about how and why he got the job in the first place (to look good on his CV) but the point I am trying to make is this:

You need some sort of experience in the field you are managing, you can muddle through without any but it'll be messy and others with that knowledge base will do better.

 

[JediMB]

Did one of the following ever happened to you when playing a game:

The music made it hard to hear an important dramatic dialogue or couldn't be appreciated over the sound of gunfire?

You couldn't differentiate between friend and foe, or between different enemy types from a medium distance?

The game constantly kept relying on cutscenes to tell you the story?

If the people doing the jobs you mentioned would've played a few games, they might've taken these things into consideration.

Most of those things fall under the responsibility of people in producer and director roles.

1) They'd have to tell the audio engineer, not the composer, to adjust sound balance according to feedback they would likely receive during testing.

2) They'd have to tell the artist that two or more designs would be too hard to distinguish, so the artist would have to redo them. Concept art always goes through multiple iterations before making it into a game anyway.

3) Cutscene reliance is a matter of tradition, not writing. It's tied to the basic game design established in the original design document, and writers rarely have any input for those. Once again, it's directors/producers that instruct the writers of what's needed, and it's they who approve what makes it into the game.

But in the end, the reason for a lot of issues not being fixed before release comes down to bad planning, moving deadlines, or changed publisher demands. The base-level content creators are rarely responsible for these things.