The game of burning money

There are many enjoyable aspects to game development, but burning through money is not one of them—especially when it also comes with a lower quality product. Having worked as a game programmer in studios of various sizes, I've always maintained a bit of an entrepreneurial mindset. I often find myself pondering how these endeavors remain profitable despite obvious problems, causing frontline employees to operate well below their potential. Why aren't studio culture and workflow issues addressed to significantly enhance the company's output? After years of witnessing these recurring patterns, I've embarked on this series of posts—Wisdom straight outta Basement. The reason these issues persist is straightforward: they are grossly undervalued by managers and decision-makers, yet glaringly obvious to regular developers. So, let's try to bridge these two worlds and explore potential solutions for this problem

The size of the troll

As there are many types of crimes committed against dev teams' efficiency, there are also various ways they impact studios and companies. Let's take a look at these three work aspects that are most susceptible to bad studio organization and culture:

1. Actual time effectively spent on the product - This is the most obvious one. Disheartened, demotivated, or simply lost developers won’t commit as much time to improving the product as people who are highly motivated, know exactly what their goal is, have clear tasks, and feel appreciated. Without going into too much detail here, I would say that on average, teams run at 40%-65% of their max capacity. I’ve been in a team working at ~30%, and I’ve been in a team running at ~75% (the best studio I’ve ever worked for).

2. Employee churn - A highly effective environment usually means highly motivated and happy employees who stay longer. According to IGDA reports, the average employment time in game dev is ~3 years. This means that costs of replacing developers (recruitment, onboarding, training, adjusting to the culture) are incurred every 3 years, not to mention the lost knowledge and expertise, which in critical situations can be fatal for the project.

3. Quality of work - In creative industries, studio atmosphere and employees well-being are extremely important for the quality of their work. Try to imagine a concept artist who hates his job, his boss, and needs to fight with his producer to push any objectively positive changes. Even if he stays in the studio for years, even if he grinds overtime, the quality of his work will be much lower than what he is really capable of. No extraordinary work can be created in a mediocre environment.

How many times have you heard about a project that went on for many years, involving a massive dev team, only to be canceled or flop upon release? Do you think this team was somehow much worse than the industry average? Or do you attribute it to luck? Or perhaps there was something else that went wrong?

Can we slay the troll?

No. Always there will be problems, smaller or bigger, in every studio, as team management and game production are more of an art than a science. There are no 100% correct answers. But for sure, we can avoid the biggest known issues and create systems that would give us a chance to react and iteratively improve the studio's workflow and culture. In a way, it’s as much a product as the game created.

Let’s think about the profits. What if, for developers time worked on the project we are at 50%, and we increase it to 75%? What if we can make our employees stick with the studio for 4.5 years instead of 3? If the game is “just fine”, how many more copies can it sell if it gets improved by 10%? These metrics are so bad in the game development industry that it’s relatively easy to achieve satisfying results. And it can be done by avoiding most common mistakes that are repeated over and over again.