SOE to Publish Vanguard

[Morat20]

Options are not a panacea, but at least they force the exceutives to keep the company running well for up to <insert grant schedule here> years.  Now, I am just a simple man without one of those fancy pants Ohio public school diplomas, but making sure that employees, managers and board members have an incentive to not release SWG:NGE or Vanguard:SagaOfTheMushroomHarvester seems like a good thing to me.

Options don't "give an incentive to keep the company running well for up to <insert number here> years". They give an incentive to make sure the stock price is higher than the option price at a certain point.

You can drive your stock prices sky-fucking high by any number of means. Most of the quick and sure-fire ones fuck your company. Think "Enron". They made a shitton on options, because reality wouldn't sink in until after they cashed in.

Options don't force good business decisions -- especially not in a field where CEOs leaving in disgrace get multi-million dollar parachutes. Fuck up all you want. They'll pay you 3000 times the wage of a skilled worker to do it. And you'll get giant bonuses and as long as you know how to play the books right, you can ensure stock prices are ticking up when it comes time to exercise those options. Who cares about the crash afterwords? That's the next guy's problem.

[Furiously]

do you have to stare at your spellbook?

[Engels]

Well, that's the problem with an investor-driven economy; the investors aren't really invested other than a call to their broker and an occasional board meeting. Oversight of how the companies are actually working? That's someone else's job, normally someone interested in hoodwinking investors by presenting fiscal facts in a rosy light rather than a sincere sense of mutual ownership of a company's health. I know, I'm a wacky hippy.

[Yegolev]

Helping it to become the online sensation that it is today, Butters.

Hee hee.

In my experience, stock options are for suckers or crooks.  I have several years-worth of underwater options; funny how the price on the strike date is so high.  I pay them no mind.

Engels' comments are what divorce day-to-day operations in large corporations from the stock price, and therefore divorce executive decisions from the reality of the business.  I learned some time ago that all of the executive decisions make perfect sense if you just look at it from a stock-price perspective.  This only applies to the top level, though.  You still need to think in terms of "dept budget" at VP and lower echelons.

As for Vanguard looking good, this must be a recent development.  The model with boobs and a skeletal head?  Terrible.  The famous "Cat Riding a Cat" screenshot?  Terrible.  The environs in the shots on Brad's site?  Terrible.  That said, though, I'll reserve final judgement until I see it in motion.  They might add some bloom and motion-blur at the last minute.

[Yegolev]

No, there's never a point in a project like this when people say "it sucks, we're launching, fuck everyone."

Missed out on Seed, did you?

[shiznitz]

do you have to stare at your spellbook?

You might be serious, so no. The UI is very WoWish, or so I am told since I have never played WoW.

[Yegolev]

I just watched some video.  Looks bad, but not as bad as I thought it would.  Smells like someone rewrote EQ in the Horizons engine.

[DataGod]

I thought it actually looked pretty good as far as features, but I mean c'mon man 340gigs at release, thats a hog. That said Im going to try it, if it has robust and engaging PVP even better.


As to IPO and options: related to start ups

Unless employees have a "management change" clause they typically can cash out right after buyout/IPO. Founders may/may not have a work through clause if not they arent required to stick around, if so it usually isnt longer than 3 years. Depending on who the buyer is thier work and role can become that of a figurehead, or actually remain as that of a driver.

[Cheddar]

I just watched some video.  Looks bad, but not as bad as I thought it would.  Smells like someone rewrote EQ in the Horizons engine.

Gayest.  Avatard.  Ever.  You win!

[Triforcer]

Why the fuck should anyone who isn't the CEO (or upper management with a lot of stock options) fucking care about the quality of the product (beyond, of course, the minimal point of enough quality to not be fired and/or work in the industry again)?  To th artist/programmer/whatever, their salary is their salary.   People will work hard enough to not get fired/work again/not singlehandedly drive the company under, and beyond that, why should they care what you think?  Just cause they are in "gaming", so they are magically supposed to work harder for no apparent reason?

I see someone had a great summer associate experience  

Actually, I did have a great summer and am going back to my firm after the clerkship- it is insane money for Columbus with great Midwestern-attitude QOL (on the 3 or 4 nights all summer I got saddled with something very very short term by a partner, I was literally the only person left in an office of 200 by 10 p.m.).

Difference between me and your grunt artist and programmers?  They didn't slash my salary to 30-40k a year and say I have to work 90 hour weeks for the privilege of "WORKING IN LAWYERING!2@!".  My post was about the poor saps who apparently get fed that line in the gaming industry.  Even for lawyers in the hellish NY/DC situation (like many of my classmates were) they aren't expected to LIKE the raping like progarmmers and artists apparently are. 

Given the situation these guys are in, I just get angry when MMO fans self-righteously proclaim that those grunts are responsible and should feel shame for displeasing the Tribunal of Catassery.  Blame the suits or Halliburton or Bush or whoever else you like, but don't expect the guys on the ground to give a shit about your divine anger.

[Signe]

You should become a gaming lawyer.  I'm sure there's big bucks karma points to be made.

[Margalis]

Triforcer has a point. Where I to take a job in the gaming industry I would likely work longer hours and make $30k less.

Then again, maybe part of the reason they work long hours is that they are mostly inexperienced, lack any sort of project management, etc.

A lot of game companies hire recent grads out churn them out after a few years. While that is cheaper at some level you have to wonder if fewer, better workers would be more efficient and produce a better project in the end. Salaries are a cost but lost sales are a cost as well.

[Venkman]

One enters the game industry for the passion not the money. There's far FAR better places for that, across every competency required to deliver a game.

Missed out on Seed, did you?

Which closed on Sept 28.

[Merusk]

One enters the game industry for the passion not the money. There's far FAR better places for that, across every competency required to deliver a game.

So lack of forethought and intelligence is a requirement for the games industry,eh? Good to know, it certainly explains why they can't learn from pervious mistakes, or forsee the ones coming at them from their previous decisions.   

Having seen some of the discussions Margalis has had about tech and what-not over the years, I'd be hard-pressed to say he's not passionate about his career path.  He's just not stupid enough to take part in his passion while cutting his own throat.

[Margalis]

I almost took a game dev job a month ago but it fell through, the details were kind of tricky involving overseas stuff.

That would actually have been a huge pay cut, but that's ok. "Passion" is fine but tell me again why I would have passion for:

1. Longer hours for lower pay
2. Working with a bunch of incompetent people
3. On something that may never ship, is obviously garbage, or is the umpteenth sequel to some boring franchise.

When I graduated from college I interviewed at a bunch of game places, and most of them were f*cking terrible. The people there were clueless. Not just the recent grads but all the higher-ups as well. I talked to one group of people that made that Bruce Lee game for XBox. This is a funny story:

These guys were devs that used to make Star Wars games of various sorts. They started their own company and the guy who was the creative head for episode 1 was their "chief creative officer." They had an incredible "hot" property, Bruce Lee. They were going to make a "cinematic experience" game. All they could talk about was how they would ship their game as a launch title, it would be one of the few good XBox launch titles, and if they sold just one per 3 Xboxes they would all be filthy rich.

I asked them what a "cinematic experience" game was. They hadn't figured that part out yet. They said the game would have a one-on-one fighting mode and single-player adventure mode - how often do games like that work out? And they know NOTHING about one-on-one fighting. They showed me the tools they were using, some graphical scripting thing they were very proud of. Level designers could drag and drop "if" statements and use menus to program. Putting together an incredibly basic script took hours. It was insane.

This is a real conversation I had with a programmer:

Programmer: "So, this is one of the one-on-one levels."
Me: (It looks like garbage, trying to think of something to say) "Uh...cool is that a shark swimming around in the background there?"
Programmer: "No, that's a helicopter!"

What. The. Fuck. The background was supposed to be some night-time cityscape and I thought it was a fishtank.

The game ended up coming out a year late and on IGN it got something like a 3.8 rating. I'm not joking. It may have been the worse reviewed game in history, and I could see that coming JUST FROM THE INTERVIEW. It was obvious these guys had no fucking clue. All the warning signs were there - "big" licensed property, game that tried to do to much, gameplay experience totally undefined, hotshot creative guy with movie experience only, execs that has dollar signs in their eyes.

Why would I have a passion to work at place like this? So I could spend two years slaving away from half the money I could make elsewhere, on a game that obviously is going to totally suck, and turn out to be so bad I wouldn't even want my name on it?

There is passion and there is stupidity.

These guys where the worst, but plenty of other places were almost as bad.

I did interview with some better places. Liquid Entertainment (made some Asian-themed RTS), Blizzard, the Guild Wars guys, (I'm not sure I even got a phone screen with them). I suspect these places are less of the "churn out incompetent college kids" sorts of shops which would explain why I didn't get offers from them. The places that did show interest I had zero interest in.

I have a passion for working on something good, or something I can at least help make good. The next Resident Evil? Sign me up. The next game that nobody ever heard of but is really cool? Sign me up.

Some 3DO dreck like "World Destruction League", a shitty Bruce Lee game, nearly any game developed in-house by EA? No thanks. My idea of fun is not adding a shitty superstar mode to a game that is 15 years old and calling it a new version.

[WindupAtheist]

You should post more stories like that.  That was awesome.

[Azazel]

I concur. Great post.

Much more interesting than bitching about VG.

[Margalis]

Link to the review in question:

http://xbox.ign.com/articles/363/363937p1.html

"There's nothing redeeming about this game other than the picture of Bruce Lee on the cover."
Score: 3.9

[Venkman]

And yet people continue to do it.

For every failure (of which there are many), there are those that aren't.

It really depends on the role you want, the role you can do, and whether those two match.

It's hard to explain, but it's all around us as proof.

[Jayce]

I went into computer science specifically to be a game programmer.  When I graduated, the dotcom boom was in full swing, and I got distracted, got some experience, one thing led to another and here I still am in business development.

Reading stuff like this, I think I may have gotten lucky rather than unlucky.  As starry-eyed as I was, I might have actually taken a job like Margalis describes and ended up with what is arguably worse than no experience - bad experience.

The few times I have thought about switching directions and trying to break into the industry, I always eventually threw out the idea when I thought it through.  Given the nature of most game dev houses as stated in this thread, I would not only have to find someone willing to hire me, I'd have to find a place I'd be willing to work for.  99% of them seem as though their process would be poor, management would be bad and co-workers would be worse.

[Morat20]

I went into computer science specifically to be a game programmer.  When I graduated, the dotcom boom was in full swing, and I got distracted, got some experience, one thing led to another and here I still am in business development.

Reading stuff like this, I think I may have gotten lucky rather than unlucky.  As starry-eyed as I was, I might have actually taken a job like Margalis describes and ended up with what is arguably worse than no experience - bad experience.

The few times I have thought about switching directions and trying to break into the industry, I always eventually threw out the idea when I thought it through.  Given the nature of most game dev houses as stated in this thread, I would not only have to find someone willing to hire me, I'd have to find a place I'd be willing to work for.  99% of them seem as though their process would be poor, management would be bad and co-workers would be worse.

I thought about game programming myself. When I graduated though, I realized I could look to hire on -- for a rather significant pay cut. For long hours. And speaking to a few friends with experience, I'd be running a huge chance of ending up with a bunch of fuckups who would make my low-pay, long-hour job a teeth grinding hell on earth.

Or I could go to work for a NASA contractor (still lower than average pay), put up with the every-few-years "OMG, contract renewal! Will I still have a job" crap -- but get to do something fun and exciting. What I code -- especially lately -- is fairly boring. But it's worth it for the times I get to be involved in flights, astronauts, and all that starry-eyed space shit. That was worth the pay cut. That was worth the occasional "My job is in the hands of fucking politicians" shit. It's even worth the "PRIVATIZE SPACE" rants from libertarians who have no fucking idea how complex and dangerous doing anything in space is.

Games? Fuck, there's maybe a handful of houses I'd kill to work for. The rest I'm not sure I'd piss on if they were on fire. (However, just a note -- I'd happily move to fucking Iceland to work for CCP. Everytime the Devs talk about the under the hood details, I start to drool. That's some cool shit. Reading about their DB lag issues is what got me through an insanely difficult class on advanced DB design. Boring as shit, but the fact that understanding the class meant I could understand the details the Devs weren't talking about made a difference).

All in all, though -- the gaming industry seems to big on ego. Good projects take competence, teamwork, and professionalism. It's all great and good to have some famous designer dripping awesome ideas out his damn fingertips leading the process, but unless each and every person involved -- from accountants to art designers to the lowest coder or QA flunky -- is professional and competent,  it's going to be shit. It might be shit that everyone says "Fuck, if only this wasn't coated in a layer of shit it'd be the most fucking awesomist game EVER" but it's still shit.

[shiznitz]

If I had $20 million and wanted to start a game studio and I have no experience in the industry whatsoever, what kind of people should I hire? I don't understand why hiring experienced non-gaming programmers and having them managed by a reasonably good creative guy with gaming experience wouldn't work. I am a strong believer in paying more for skilled labor that will get the job done better in fewer iterations than hiring an army of rookies and cracking the whip on 'em.

Everyone says that good games come from passion, but does everyone in the company have to have that passion?

[Nija]

If I had $20 million and wanted to start a game studio and I have no experience in the industry whatsoever, what kind of people should I hire?

I'd say get in touch with people who had made cool mods for fps games. Try and grab the guys who made that Air Bucs mod for UT. Try and find people who aren't making counterstrike clones.

A handful of good programmers and a few guys willing to download all those beta/free Korean mmos from the HELL LIST and rip out all the art assets. You'll never get sued for using them, and there's probably 50,000 man-hours worth of graphical content ready for use.

Start small like the puzzle pirates guys, but don't try to do it retroactively like that crazy M59 dude who posts here/used to post here.

[Yegolev]

Gayest.  Avatard.  Ever.  You win!

What?  Really?  You mean Ashley?  Sure, that's a girl's name but he's pretty manly.

[Yegolev]

Missed out on Seed, did you?

Which closed on Sept 28.

While your statement is true, Seed is an example of a project in which they publicly said "it sucks, we're launching, fuck everyone."  I have the email somewhere where they said it.  On top of that, they required you to buy a month before you could undertake the free trial.

[Venkman]

If I had $20 million and wanted to start a game studio and I have no experience in the industry whatsoever, what kind of people should I hire?

If you had this choice, you'd first want to define what it is you want to do and then hire the people to do it. This lets you have complete freedom to spec out the appropriate engine/dev suite and hire the appropriate talent. Lots of studios get tripped up by trying to do something really different from their established development timeline. You wouldn't be restricted by how you, or the staff, did things in the past. Being able to start your own new process is risky and time-consuming, but far less than forcing a square peg into a round hole of how things are "usually" done.

And better still, if you had that $20mil, you don't even need to worry about creating an over-promising but unrealistic demo to try and get that funding. Just define the concept, pick the appropriate system, establish the appropriate business model, develop, test, launch, win.

Of course, this is all very clean because almost nobody gets to do it this way :)

[HaemishM]

Given the situation these guys are in, I just get angry when MMO fans self-righteously proclaim that those grunts are responsible and should feel shame for displeasing the Tribunal of Catassery.  Blame the suits or Halliburton or Bush or whoever else you like, but don't expect the guys on the ground to give a shit about your divine anger.

If the grunts on the ground don't give a shit, no one else up the chain is going to either. And if they don't give a shit about my fun in the game, why should I give a shit what they feel? It's a whole lot of not giving a shit.

Everyone involved for a shitty product like SWG should take responsiblity for their part. The higher up you go, the more of the responsibility you should take. It was shitty and no one who played it in beta should have thought it was acceptable for release.

[Morat20]

If I had $20 million and wanted to start a game studio and I have no experience in the industry whatsoever, what kind of people should I hire?

I'd say get in touch with people who had made cool mods for fps games. Try and grab the guys who made that Air Bucs mod for UT. Try and find people who aren't making counterstrike clones.

I think that'd shoot you in the ass if you didn't screen carefully. Having talent is good -- but you need professionalism and reliability just as much. The problem with some whiz-kid who did insanely awesome shit with his UO grey shard is that when faced with working with 20 people on a single project, dealing with milestones, deliverables, and customers who are not himself and his buds -- he's likely to choke. He's likely to code shit he finds fun, but not his customers. Or write code that breaks half the game because he doesn't give a damn outside his own little baliwick.

You can develop a mod with a handful of people and clearly delineated zones of control. With a shop of 20 or 50? If you can't interact with the other coders, can't read a design document, and can't communicate effectively what the hell you're doing -- I don't care how much talent you have. You're dead weight. You're fucking over everyone else.

I knew a guy growing up -- really good programmer. He was doing mods, programming his own games, all self-taught. Went to a good school, got a serious education, even made a good amount of money selling some rather useful code he developed as a student. He's virtually unemployable. If it's not a single-man contract, he can't do it. His code isn't readable by humans. His manner of doing things is esoteric to the extreme. His ability to relate to other people is exceeded by that of even poorly-trained monkeys. He's a fucking genius who does the work of three or four people, and in the process tends to come up with elegant and innovative solutions to problems.

But ask him to collaborate with someone else -- even in a very structured project with minimal interaction between coders -- he's useless. Utterly useless.

[HaemishM]

You know Brad McQuaid?

[Morat20]

You know Brad McQuaid?

No. Or I'd probably HAVE a job in the gaming industry. Doing what, I have no idea. :) My skill set is a bit eclectic, and over the years I've become far more fascianted by the esoteric shit computers can do rather than the commonplace. I'm rountinely shocked by the fact that some of my younger coworkers don't know the basics of data structures. I feel like an old fart saying "What the fuck do you mean, you don't know what the hell an AVL tree is? No! A hash ISN'T exactly like an array -- how the hell do you do your job not knowing that?"

Not that I've ever used an AVL tree for anything.

[Margalis]

For the hypothetical $20 million question:

For some things I would want people with experience in games. Main graphics programmer and main network programmer, for example.

For most other things it probably doesn't matter all that much. You do want people who have some idea if what they are working on is actually fun at all, but that doesn't require gaming experience.

I think the whole "you must have passion" is a bit of a red-herring. You must have "passion" to work at a lot of places because by any objective measure they suck. People with "passion" often translate into people who will constantly put up with being shit on.

[Morat20]

For the hypothetical $20 million question:

For some things I would want people with experience in games. Main graphics programmer and main network programmer, for example.

For most other things it probably doesn't matter all that much. You do want people who have some idea if what they are working on is actually fun at all, but that doesn't require gaming experience.

I think the whole "you must have passion" is a bit of a red-herring. You must have "passion" to work at a lot of places because by any objective measure they suck. People with "passion" often translate into people who will constantly put up with being shit on.

I'd tack on a few others:

1) Your DB design needs to be done by someone with formal training (degree or massive certs) and significant experience designing, maintaining, and upgrading high-end commericial DBs. Experience with MMORPG DB design would be nice, but frankly I'd go for the guy who did DB designs for bank transactions and stock trading. He'll fucking understand the concepts of "speed" and "reliability". Frankly, I could shit better DB design than some of the MMORPGs I've played.
2) Your project manager should have experience managing projects (NOT be promoted technical lead unless he's shown serious management skills -- even then, have him trained first. Not a fucking markerter. AND NOT SOME GUY WHO WAS A WHIZ WITH HIS TEAM OF 5 MODDERS). This includes things like "setting realistic deadlines, and understanding that his hot-shot fucking technical lead thinks everyone can put shit together as fast as he can, and thus discretely tacking on some development time. He should also understand the concept of "quality" and have a large sledgehammer with which to beat the concept into his workers brains. If he cannot create, read, and explain a design document -- don't hire him.
3) I agree -- the graphics and network guys need experience. Games are cutting edge there, and you should get the best.
4) If one of your developers says "It'll run fine on a high-end machine three years from now" -- fire him. Salt his cubicle, lest that pop up elsewhere.

I watch game development, and I see the same shit I've seen in any other software project -- design bloat, feature bloat, and failure to follow software engineering principle. I think game designers are more prone to chasing after the new shiny -- maybe your game NEEDS a realistic physics engine, maybe it doesn't....but you should have a better reason than "HL2's gravity gun was fucking cool!" to implement it.

One thing I've always been curious about: How hard are the art guys to ride herd on? I'd expect -- based on nothing but stereotypes -- that getting them to come up with a consistant artistic vision would be difficult.

[Venkman]

Creatives can be a bit flaky, unless they buy into the total vision, or are sub-contractors you're paying to believe in it :)

I can't possibly agree with you more on #2. I've worked with both types. Heck, I'm not ashamed to admit I've been both types. There's a lot more to being a PM/Producer than convincing your four college buddies this thing is gonna make them REAL CASH MONEY!!, particularly if you inherit a team.

[UnSub]

Liquid Entertainment (made some Asian-themed RTS)

Battle Realms was their Asian-themed RTS. It had the interesting idea of making resources infinite (rice and water) but putting a hard cap on the number of units you could have - the way to win was to pick the correct mix of units, because a well-balanced squad would pretty much always beat a squat of top tier units. Did a number of things better than Warcraft III, but obviously didn't have the same marketing clout.

Hope they continue the franchise at some point.

[Margalis]

Yeah that was it. They sounded pretty cool. I'm not sure if they stopped being interested in my or vice-versa, it was a while ago now.

#2 is tough. Project Managers are hard to find. Usually they are either promoted technical people with no management skills or professional manager types who have no touch with engineers and don't understand the product very well.

They are often in a jam as well as upper management will say "we need X and Y by Z date!" and then what do you do? If you can't make it you can say that once or twice but then after that you have to fall into line and just pretend.

At a lot of places being the guy in charge of the schedule means telling upper management one thing and developers another, and just hoping the result isn't a total clusterfuck.