Failure Panel at GDC
March 6, 2012, Game Developers’ Conference, San Francisco—A panel looked at the various causes for product and company failures. The panelists described the many dysfunctional processes and functions that caused projects to falter. Jamie Cheng, Scott Anderson, Steve Swink, Amir Rao, Colin Northway, Ron Carmel comprised the panel.
The contributors boiled down to two main areas, business and creative. In the business issues, most of the problems were due to variations of governance problems. Because most game developer companies are small, they don’t have rigorous controls and procedures in place for short- and long-term management. Lack of budget controls and other loose financial management causes the companies to run out of money before the product is completed.
Hiring practices followed as a major contributor, since most companies didn’t do actual searches, but hired friends or relatives of friends. It is important to hire a person who fills gaps in the talent pool, especially when the total people resources are very thin. Along with poor hiring practices came strained communications. Because everyone was a friend, it is hard to make critical statements to others. In addition, some of the recipients of the criticisms then worked to avoid further contact, so all communications to those people just put information into a black hole.
On the creative side, a number of issues surfaced. The biggest problem was too little design before starting development. Understanding the total game flow and all of the possible transitions is necessary, but many failures were attributed to starting out with some really cool idea, and then not knowing where to go with the idea. After significant development, the cool idea didn’t have any structure or flow.
Some of the developers lost their focus and started too many small pieces, and could not integrate them into a cohesive whole. Distractions included interpersonal issues, too many technical issues allowed to fester and eventually collapse, and poor emphasis on keeping the game interesting and possible to complete. As the game threads became more entangled and complex, the developers could no t decide where to go next.
A corresponding problem is spending too much time and energy, too much focus on a single issue, on a single part of the game. Spending a lot of time fine tuning the graphics of a room should not be a priority when the basic game navigation is broken. The challenge is to determine when work focus in not helping complete the game development.
The combination of poor management and too little design is toxic for most companies. Unfortunately, the developers may not notice the problems until many months have passed, making corrections and necessary changes much harder to accomplish. The panel suggested that setting measurable, and realistic goals and, as distasteful as it may be, working within a (loose) corporate structure reduces the possible avenues for poor choices. Not all failures are bad, since most of the panelists considered that they did learn something in the process of sinking rather than swimming.
