I am finding games in general "less bad" the more I get working in Project Management

[Swig]

I'm a Product Manager (not in gaming, but software dev) and I analyze every game I play and think about what I would do to improve it if it were my product. PUBG was really hard, because it had something that could have been amazing, but they did a terrible job of managing it. All I could think while I was playing was all the ideas I would have to make it far better.

 

[mclem]

Yeah, i'm blown away how for example things like TW3 or RDR2 come together.
I'm also impressed by huge multiplayer games like Battlefield.

I'm asking myself what is harder to make a good movie or a good videogame... anyone a clue?

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Videogames, easily, for one very simple reason:

You can reasonably expect the user of a movie to watch it in a manner you can predict; it's merely a scripted sequence of events. There's no expectation on the user's part for the movie to still 'work' if they don't do so. You control exactly what is onscreen at any given second.
For business software, the user's a bit less predictable, but they are still broadly working with you; they have a goal they want to achieve and you've fashioned the tool they're using to do so; it may happen in an unexpected way, but your goals and their goals are broadly aligned.
Games, though? The user is a massive wildcard. We have to code and design around the notion that they may be actively antagonistic to what we're trying to do, and we need to make sure things are still robust enough to cope no matter what this rogue random element might throw at it.

Users, in the nicest possible sense, were the bane of my time in the games industry. Looking back to an old post I made, I note this comment about how I was seeing developing for businesses as different from developing games:

I'd add in a 1a: Game *players* are unpredictable rogue elements which can behave in unexpected manners at any given moment, and you need to successfully cover all contingencies.

I'm constantly amazed at how much more painless it is to debug business software (where we can generally trust the user to not be actively antagonistic!) than it is to debug games software (where the user can and quite probably *will* attempt anything they can)

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[DoctorDake]

I'm now a project manager inside the gaming industry, and it is honestly a goddamn miracle anything ever gets released, regardless of quality. I'm amazed at the level of expertise and work it takes just to get something out the door, let alone something great.

 

[zebetite]

i work in marketing for a large-ish phone accessory manufacturer and suspect that all of the combined expertise within my entire company could do a pretty okay job of sourcing, designing, and distributing the packaging for a video game

the thing that goes inside that packaging? fucking voodoo magic as far as i'm concerned

 

[Jedi2016]

"Fuck procedural generation, why not just use Machine Learning??"

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Didn't Horizon ZD do both? Like they trained an AI on how to procedurally place all the plants and rocks and stuff?

i work in marketing for a large-ish phone accessory manufacturer and suspect that all of the combined expertise within my entire company could do a pretty okay job of sourcing, designing, and distributing the packaging for a video game

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I have a feeling that most large companies fly way more by the seat of their pants than their management would care to admit (especially to their shareholders). The people at ground level are scrambling every day to keep things running and as you get higher and higher up the management chain, it's all "everything's going great". They like to put forward the appearance of a smoothly oiled machine, but in reality the whole thing's ready to fly apart at a moment's notice.

 

[Deleted member 27771]

Making anything that gets distributed at mass scale is a minor to major miracle. Try to imagine getting car manufacturing going or even something simple that you use everyday.

Creation and the coordination of creation is pretty incredible but it's kinda something you have to go through to have the appreciation.

 

[low-G]

As a software engineer who does design projects, but also someone who has made some Unity games (which were at least fun), I think the problem is more often the tools available to developers and the absolutely cutthroat profit cycle of publishers.

There are fixes that users demand for a game, where in any other software field you could put it in the backlog and at least within months it'd get fixed, but knowing what a tangled mess games engines become extremely quickly, fixing even the most safe functionality becomes an inexplicable nightmare of cascading bugs caused not by coding but by quirks in everything from the game engine to the drivers to what-have-you.

Making games is a nightmare, but it shouldn't be that way.

 

[Dragoon]

Good project managers, or managers do well by compartmentalising stress. Still takes a toll especially when you have team members who are hard to handle. I used to run a start up and ended up with health problems. But knowing myself it's only time till I give it another try, only wiser this time.

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Well I told my boss within the first month of starting there don't let me get bored, or I'll find another place which is a major reason I left my last job. Outside of the first 1 1/2 week, I've been crazy busy for about 1 1/2 years now. :D

 

[Mr_Nothin]

To put this harshly and as truthfully as possible...."The audience doesn't give a fuck what you went through if the product/result is something that they did not like enjoy".

And it's ok for that to happen because at the end of the day the audience doesn't go into the project knowing what it took to get that done.
As an artist, I want my audience to base their opinions off of the final product. It's up to me to decide whether it's worth going through the bullshit to get to the end result.

 

[sn00zer]

To put this harshly and as truthfully as possible...."The audience doesn't give a fuck what you went through if the product/result is something that they did not like enjoy".

And it's ok for that to happen because at the end of the day the audience doesn't go into the project knowing what it took to get that done.
As an artist, I want my audience to base their opinions off of the final product. It's up to me to decide whether it's worth going through the bullshit to get to the end result.

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Im less concerned about the general audience. More talking about the talking heads who are saying "Well what they should have done is X, why didnt they do that"

 

[Pyro]

Same, plus it makes you appreciate great games even more!

 

[Deleted member 22585]

Since 3 years, I'm working as a Project Manager in the automotive industry, leading development of hardware and software projects.
It really makes you appreciate games more. Honestly, seeing all the BS that happens during the development, sudden critical issues out of nowhere etc. .... I see games as small miracles. Most people have no imagination how complex that stuff is, combining different systems, designs, walls of code etc.
Makes nearly bug free, polished games even more impressive.

 

[Asbsand]

I think a lot of this came to ahead when playing FF7 Remake. There are so many scenes that are just "out there", but beautifully crafted, it just makes you wonder how it all came together the way it did. Then remembering they actually needed to swap devs and then juggle the team with the rest of the demands of Square Enix. Its impressive even before you even start talking about what its like to play the game as a player.

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I was consistently so amazed by the graphics, animation-work and even how it tied into the admittedly railroaded gameplay at times, and it's for the same reason. I know what it entailed for a development team to put this much together. You can rely on your systems to a certain extent, but at most what you'll get is Breath of the Wild. An amazing game by many rights but it's simultaneously held back by the fact that it's designed to rely on its systems, and recreational content.

Designing a game that follows a single linear path with this much variation in cutscene and modified gameplay moments you really have to shuffle between the departments of every discipline and coordinate it well. This is why I also keep saying that Nomura, for all his flaws as a storyteller, is a terrific game-director. He can put games together, and if you ever read Jason Schreier's stories about BioWare you know how important it is to have just even that one figurehead who gets everyone else to coordinate properly.

BioWare spent years in pre-production because they had no upper-manager figure to tell them "This is what we're doing, let's get it going." Siloing is a huge problem in AAA games development, and even smaller development projects, so you need producers, managers and some vision-guy at the top who keeps everyone informed and keeps everyone focused on what needs to be made and for what.

Systems-development and project management is a whole field of its own. I graduated computer science last year and I'd say roughly 40% of it was about learning the tools to "work together" across our disciplines and across different fields. You can't just learn to be good at writing/coding/artistry and make the game. It's a collaborative process to the utmost degree.

 

[timrtabor123]

Been working on a group "experimental media project" of sorts in Civilization 5. I have a lot of respect for behind the scenes process of game development.