Flagship Sunk?

[Tige]

But yeah. Making games is hard and whatnot.

Agreed. So is hiring, managing, distributing, accounting and herding cats.

It never ceases to amaze me that too many game developers think they can do all of the above because they are decent at making games.  They have gone to school to learn to make games and then get a job, working their way up the food chain to eventually getting to direct their own project.

Having completed that, it somehow translates into them being able to do everything, HR, PR, office manager, distributor, salesperson, psychologist, astronaut, sociologist etc etc. 

[eldaec]

Tweety wrote a good blog on how the gaming industry is not a special or unique snowflake a few weeks back.

See, Wheels are Round

I also can’t get over how everyone pretends that the development of an MMO is a mysterious process akin to alchemy, with a side order of virgin sacrifice. Don’t we have enough people who have made these games by now that schedules can be evaluated before crisis mode is initiated?....

And I don’t want to hear about how sometimes shit happens, or that the creative process cannot be regulated. My ASS. I used to do theater. If you’ve got good designers and actors, and adequate preproduction time that isn’t spent at a pool hall or in endless “conceptualization” mental masturbation sessions, you can sit down with a calendar and say “if we start on this date, we can deliver an enjoyable product on this date.” And that’s taking into account a workforce consisting of A) people who periodically have mental breakdowns to demonstrate their artistic purity, and B) people who are more emotionally stable but also more prone to “I double dog dare you to chug the rest of that Jagermeister.”

[Signe]

She's right.  I could make an MMO in my sleep.  Unfortunately, I have insomnia.   

[schild]

What was the point of that rant?

[Signe]

I don't know why anyone rants about anything to do with MMORPGs.  They're all a load of rubbish after a few months, anyway, fun or not.  Except for the ones that are rubbish right from the start.  RUBBISH.

[schild]

No no, I mean I don't get that specific rant - is she saying that these people have been making MMOGs for a while now and still can't do it? Or did she miss the obvious - that part of the problem is it IS all the same people making the same mistakes in the same genre. Is there anyone surprised by that? And the comparison to theatre was left-field worthy. As I said, I didn't "get it."

Edit: Psychochild cleared some of it up in the comments I suppose. But I'm still not entirely sure as to the original point of the rant.

[Ratman_tf]

Its always good to remember that people don't set out to make a bad game. There are people working on that game that tried their best and did the best they could, that believed in what they did but it just didn;t work out. And always theres this giant cancerous whale called WOW thats just leaving you fighting for the scraps and just sucks all the money that you could make away from you . It leaves you no chance at all. The oft reported fact that the management paid the staff out of their own pocket shows that there was something good in the workplace.

I'm coming to the conclusion that the best thing blizzard could do for the gaming induistry now would be to shut down WOW. Its not THAT good a game but its existance makes anyone else trying to break in pointless. Never going to happen but still

I disagree. Partly because I play WoW, and wouldn't like my MMOG of choice to go the way of the dodo, but also because I don't think it's subscribers would be apt to spend their subscription money on other MMOGs. Not the majority of their playerbase anyway. They are WoW players, not MMOG players.

[Amaron]

What was the point of that rant?

I think the second half was her trying to complain that arguments like "game development is hard" aren't really true.   Though her argument for why it shouldn't be hard doesn't seem to tackle how to get from A to B to C on truly fixing the problem.

[Trippy]

What was the point of that rant?

To show that she's a clueless idiot?

[Trippy]

No no, I mean I don't get that specific rant - is she saying that these people have been making MMOGs for a while now and still can't do it? Or did she miss the obvious - that part of the problem is it IS all the same people making the same mistakes in the same genre. Is there anyone surprised by that? And the comparison to theatre was left-field worthy. As I said, I didn't "get it."

Edit: Psychochild cleared some of it up in the comments I suppose. But I'm still not entirely sure as to the original point of the rant.

Her point is that because people can do X on a schedule (supposedly, I don't have any experience in her X) people should also be able to do Y on a schedule. She talks about other related things but that's the gist of it.

Edit: no do

[schild]

Ok, good, I'm not crazy.

[Signe]

Ok, good, I'm not crazy.

 

[squirrel]

What was the point of that rant?

To show that she's a clueless idiot?

I haven't read the rant, and I generally like Tweety for other reasons, but the proper noun to follow clueless in this case is twat. Just FYI. Ironwood and our UK visitors would put the country back in it I suspect. Anyway, as you were.

Oh and I'm fucked off at FSS. I've been playing HG:L again, and enjoying it, since I have MMMORPG distraction syndrome, but now I'm abandoning my 2.0 test server characters and the MP game in general since I know now it's fucked. Still SP is fun with the 1.3 patch and as Signe says, "Dayum I look good".

[Furiously]

Certainly will be interesting to see what happens with the game in the next few months.

[rk47]

Oh please add in a patch to allow TCP/IP play if they're taking the servers down at least.

[Jeff Kelly]

Most programmers I know are lousy managers. Why? Because in their heart they don't want to be.

If you hear your boss say: "Well at some time I have to do a little programming project again" or he has his own little pet project where he still likes to do something (and in the process completely stalls the project due to lack of time), just run.

In MMO management there is just the Peter Principle at work.

I don't get the "programming is hard you know" meme either. There are countless of projects out there on a similar or larger magnitude that get finished on time and/or on budget. Granted there are also a lot of projects out there that fail miserably or spectacularly.

Thirdly I also don't get the whinging about WoW. Before WoW the projected market for MMOs was ten people and the neighbour's dog. You can make a viable MMO despite WoW, other studios have done it. Als the majority of people I knew, while still playing WoW would have quit if something other were to come around. When Lord of the Rings Online dropped a lot did.

It's not that all of the people are still satisfied with WoW, a lot just keep playing and wait for the next best thing. It is know harder because people expect more from an MMO than they did before WoW. You can't just launch a bug-ridden half-finished piece of crap any more.

[Trippy]

I don't get the "programming is hard you know" meme either. There are countless of projects out there on a similar or larger magnitude that get finished on time and/or on budget. Granted there are also a lot of projects out there that fail miserably or spectacularly.

Are you a programmer?

[Jeff Kelly]

Are you a programmer?

Are we now getting to the "if you are not a programmer/an engineer/'insert career of choice' you wouldn't understand how hard it really is" point?

I could give you an answer (yes I am a developer) but then we would just get on to the next bit which is "so are you a game developer then?" (Answer: I am not). This will just boil down to the tired old argument: should you or can you criticise something that you are not experienced in.

Quite frankly I don't like the assumption that game development - especially MMO development - is somewhat harder than other lines of business. That is just myth building and patting yourself on the shoulder. Game development is just usually being managed even worse than normal projects.

There are countless projects that involve hundreds or thousands of people, a budget of millions or even billions of dollars and run any number of years and are finished on time and/or on budget. Usually only the spectacular failures are reported however. For every Heathrow Terminal there are dozens of other projects that you wouldn't read about in the news ("another project finished on time, general public rejoices").

Finishing a project on time and/or on budget is not something magical, you don't need to study alchemy for it, you don't need to sacrifice farm animals to a lesser known evil god and no amount of "iÄ, IÄ, Cthulhu F'thagn" will help you either.

In my personal experience most projects that fail don't even fail because of the work, they fail because of the management and the group think involved in such projects. Or to put it another way in most cases the saying "Show me how a project starts and I will tell you how it ends" is unfortunately very true.

Most bad projects I know suffer either from the "nobody wants to hear the truth" or the "We have no clue what the truth is, either" syndrome or to put it another way people that desperately want or have to do a certain project come hell or high water. The former is done by a management that fears it might not get funded at all if they tell it how it is ("if we tell them the real cost and time involved they will not fund our project"), the latter is mostly lack of experience.

Such projects are more often than not based on overambitious project goals and deadlines and are as a consequence often underfunded and understaffed. Sooner or later the project is extremely late, over budget and the staff has been running in crunch mode right from the start. By then the management is basically counting on the funders being to committed to the success of the project to pull out. The end result is something like Vanguard that has to be launched because funding has dried up not because it was finished in any way, shape or form.

In normal companies projects like that usually get killed by Controlling long before they get to that point however.

The point is: project management is a full time job that should be done by experienced people just as development is. Many projects however treat it as an afterthought, as something that is to be done along the way and is frowned upon by the staff because it gets in the way of "real work" and hampers "creativity". Also many people in project management just get there by way of the peter principle and have no clue about (and often no real interest in) managing projects.

It usually isn't even planned into the project plan.

What they often fail to realize is that project management is not only management of schedules and deadlines or budgets. The process starts by answering the question: "What do we want to do and what can we achieve with the budget and staff that we have?" basically the things that need to be answered before I do schedules and budgets. Projects that succeed in answering that question in an honest way have a significantly higher probability of succeeding than those that don't. That process is most probably the hardest part of a project and can take months. If it is done correctly however the rest just falls into place.

It also gives you the arguments you need for talking to the customer/the one who shall fund your project. ("If you give us amount X we can do Y, if not we will not be able to do Y but we could do Z instead)

I have been in both kinds of projects in my career. Those that failed spectacularly and those that finished on time. The latter ones usually took a long time to clear up just exactly what we had to do, how it needed to be done and even if we could do it at all considering time, staff and budget available. If you only have money staff and time for a 5 bedroom house you shouldn't plan to build a cathedral and you shouldn't take on projects where you are expected to do just that.

So is MMO development hard? Yes it is, just like any other really big project where you do something new, where many people are involved and the budget is in the millions. Should that be an excuse for the amount of failures and bad games we see each year? In my opinion no.

[Trippy]

So is MMO development hard? Yes it is, just like any other really big project where you do something new, where many people are involved and the budget is in the millions. Should that be an excuse for the amount of failures and bad games we see each year? In my opinion no.

Given the amount of software that is released late (or never released at all), overbudget, and buggy I would say your expectations are too high, and I'm not even talking about MMO development specifically. Despite the fact that many programmers wear the title "Software Engineer" programming is really not like engineering in the more traditional disciplines -- it's much more a mixture of art, craft, and engineering. When companies like Microsoft struggle with it mightily (e.g. Vista) you know it's not a simple problem to solve. In fact it might never be solvable with the current methodology for writing programs.

You can always say that it's "bad management" that caused a project to fail or do poorly but that's really just an easy way of assigning the blame -- it's like saying it's the CEO's fault if a company's doing badly. The actual reasons are much more complicated than that. Software is particularly hard and not like other engineering fields because of, among other reasons, the incredibly difficultly estimating the amount of time it takes to do certain tasks, the fact that it's as much a creative process and an engineering one (as mentioned above) and the fact that you can't just throw more bodies at a problem (aka the "mythical man month") like you can in some other engineering fields.

When you go back and look at failed projects you can usually figure out what went wrong. Unfortunately with software, as history has proven time and time again, that does not mean your next project is going to turn out any better. You can put as much top notch management and processes in place (like at Microsoft) but unless everybody is coding to a strict and detailed spec where there's basically no opportunity to make choices (i.e. you are just a glorified typist that understands how to write in a foreign language) you are still dealing with an inherently hard to predict and creative process and even at well managed companies problem may arise that are difficult if not impossible to recover from especially if there are hard deadlines in place.

Getting back to game development it's no coincidence that game companies that have a lot of experience and release games on their own schedule generally turn out better games than companies that are forced to release games on a particular schedule, even if they are well-managed. When you are forced to start chopping out parts of the game to met the deadline that always has a ripple effect on other parts of the code/game and things usually end up being out-of-kilter because of it. These large-scale MMOs that we've been talking about here tend to have more "moving parts" than your typical single-player game which just exacerbates the problem.

[IainC]

I'm hearing from sources that the developments over the weekend aren't as bad as they are being made out to be. Apparently there have been layoffs but there are still people working at Flagship. Sadly I don't have any direct corroboration of that to back it up, all I have is grapevine stuff.

[schild]

Just for the record, I have no made even the slightest attempt to find someone to interview. We all know what happened with the game. It wouldn't be interesting or even remotely in the same drama arena as Vanguard. Unless they were sacrificing midgets to the sun god and Roper had a man in his stomach giving orders, I really just can't see any appeal there. Apologies. Also, I'm moving to Austin. Frankly, I can't bring myself to care about this situation.

[Signe]

Are you going to go the Richard Garriot's big annual do?  Or is that over? 

[Margalis]

I second everything Jeff Kelly said. In reality estimating how long something takes is not that hard for most tasks, the problem is a culture that encourages low-balling.

[Merusk]

Architecture is both creative and technical.  There's a great many projects that fail to meet deadlines, but it can always be pointed to the managers who don't understand the tasks they're managing, (oldschoolers who don't use computers or CAD and still type or have secretaries who email while they dictate.)  OR because they simply don't want to be managing ("I didn't go to school to manage people I went to school to design buildings!" is a very common complaint.). The ones that are on time don't do stupid shit like having the intern (guy out of school for < 4 years or still in school ) detail your framing and window connections at his own pace.

   Those projects that are not only on time but don't leak or fall down are also not "pushing the envelope" because that costs in all areas (time, budget and problems).  I suspect the same of software design.  If you're trying to break new ground, triple your estimates and then still prepare for overages.

[Salvator]

So is MMO development hard? Yes it is, just like any other really big project where you do something new, where many people are involved and the budget is in the millions. Should that be an excuse for the amount of failures and bad games we see each year? In my opinion no.

Bad games are usually bad not because of the concepts but the execution and planning of those concepts. I think you are spot on about the seemingly unprofessional atmosphere surrounding most game studios.

[Alkiera]

I second everything Jeff Kelly said. In reality estimating how long something takes is not that hard for most tasks, the problem is a culture that encourages low-balling.

I also back up what he said.  I've worked in small startups where R&D was vital, and yet whatever timeframe we suggested necessary, management wanted it in half the time, if not tomorrow.  I've also worked in other companies where, for regulatory reasons, the project design/spec/implementation and testing were exceedingly well documented, and project planning and timeline were treated with respect, and those projects were more likely to finish on time, barring sales/marketing intrusion with new 'must-have' features.

I also agere with Merusk; software engineering is not particularly different from architectural, mechanical, or any other engineering; there is some art to it, but most of it is a matter of copying customer requirements into a different language, whether that language is C++, AutoCAD, or whatever, in order to produce a building, object, or program that works the way the customer wants.

The only real difference is the age of software engineering in comparison to the others, and therefore the age and experience level of most of the practitioners.  I think companies that approach software development the same way they do hardware development (like the latter company above, which did both) are better off than those software-only companies that don't have benefit of experience from other engineering disciplines.

[AngryGumball]

No no, I mean I don't get that specific rant - is she saying that these people have been making MMOGs for a while now and still can't do it? Or did she miss the obvious - that part of the problem is it IS all the same people making the same mistakes in the same genre. Is there anyone surprised by that?

It sure suprises me a lot when the same people make the same mistake. Rather annoys me and still makes me want to throttle them.

[schild]

It doesn't surprise me ever. These people are all doing the same thing through every development cycle and expecting different results.

[Margalis]

When I was interviewing for gaming jobs in the summer of 2000 I could tell that most of the companies I was interviewing with would be out of business within a couple years, that's how obviously flawed they were. Even in 3 hours of interviews it was easy to tell that most of the staff was clueless and the products they were putting out were destined to be garbage.

[UnSub]

Was project management the reason HG:L failed?

Was it poor general management of Flagship?

Was it an over-ambitious scope?

Was it feature creep?

Was it overpromising and underdelivering?

Was HG:L over-designed and under-resourced?

Was it charging a sub fee for a game in a genre where sub fees aren't common i.e. action RPG dungeon crawls?

Was it the compeition that was too strong?

Or was it a whole host of these factors (and others) combining?

Based on the things I've read, it looks like people enjoyed working for Flagship, but given where they are now, they failed badly in achieving their goals. The "MMOs are hard" is not an explanation for what happened, because there are enough MMOs out there who didn't fall into the same traps. If MMOs are hard, then those developing for them need to be prepared for them to be hard. MMOs r srs busnss.

And then there is the fact that new products always run the risk of failure. Even the best new products might not make it if other factors conspire against them.

Better project management would have probably helped HG:L, but to pretend it is the only reason that Flagship got scuppered is a bit near-sighted.

[UnSub]

When I was interviewing for gaming jobs in the summer of 2000 I could tell that most of the companies I was interviewing with would be out of business within a couple years, that's how obviously flawed they were. Even in 3 hours of interviews it was easy to tell that most of the staff was clueless and the products they were putting out were destined to be garbage.

You still should have joined them. At least you would have ended up with anecdotes to tell in the unemployment queue.

[Soln]

So.  Did anyone manage a refund?


I am not trolling. Per se.  Only curious.

[schild]

So.  Did anyone manage a refund?


I am not trolling. Per se.  Only curious.

Me?

[rk47]

  what a day that was. I think his MO was just keep hammering the CS with emails demanding a refund and one day he nailed the epic refund.

[schild]

It was like Diablo, but with real money. And more ragging on engrish types.

http://www.f13.net/index.php?itemid=620