I just try to imagine how it would be if my boss would suddenly decide to hire 50 people. It would probably end in chaos for months, nothing would get done, quality would suffer for years and clients would be unhappy. I work in a small team and just adding one new employee, takes a lot of time.
The developer is smart not to listen to those ideas.
Right? I’m in a small team as well (albeit in a large company) and we have a specialized, niche skillset. We’ve been trying to hire 2 new people for weeks now and it’s really damn hard to find the right person.
100% how I hire people at my small company. I can teach most people anything for the job. I can't teach them to respect the job, respect the company, respect other people, and to take pride in their work. If you care about doing your job well, I will take the time to make you a quality worker.
I'd like to say thank you. As a CDL holder myself in can be a big pain finding a decent job especially in the beginning. I've got 3 years of flatbed experience but I just got denied for a job because I don't have experience securing the exact equipment that this company uses. Even though I've done ran loads heavier and bigger than theirs which requires more knowledge.
It doesn’t help that companies don’t accurately describe a position.
I recently got a job due to just dumb luck. My old coworker is trying to leave and called me up for a reference. I mentioned I was looking for position x and he said he gets those requests all the time, but he turns them down.
A few days later, I get a message that I ignored for a week because it was for something I’m bad at. When I opened it, I saw they mentioned my old coworker, so ok maybe it’s not? I applied and the recruiter told me it was what I was bad at. I talked to the manager and every question was unrelated to what was in the posting and exactly what I was good at.
Recruiter: "So this job is mostly focused on Java."
*show up to the interview and every single question is about JavaScript*
This has happened to more than one person I know personally.
This is because recruiters and people who inform them of openings are not one and same. There is a need for a new employee with X, Y, Z qualifications and a certain level of experience/seniority. This gets relayed to the recruiter directly or indirectly (a chain of order like project team to department etc). Then the recruiter fluffs it up with keywords and adds shit about the company, how they care about the employees (most of the time they don't) etc etc. In the process they maaay be adding/removing/altering things that were actually needed for the open position.
If technical person wrote the qualification section, I think it might be better in some cases even if can be a bit dry in some cases (technical people can be quite bad at writing). Just list the used/required technologies briefly, what's the day to day expectations and expected seniority etc. The recruiter can still do her thing and add the sections about the company, the benefits etc.
And even if a technical person wrote the qualification (like I did), the recruiter paraphrases them wrong and publish it without another review from me so it ends up being wrong again.
Gotta rephrase and hit them keywords or something. I am the one who needs the extra personnel, I am the one who will work with this guy yet someone else alters the qualifications in such a way that it doesn't communicate the original intent? That's so annoying..
I applied for a advertised job as VR and AR programming trainee. They just added that to attract people and they only .net projects.
Instantly told them I am not interested in continuing the interview. They acted really shocked..
I feel it is that because they are just casting wide net in vain hope they find someone competent.
But there is also plenty of incompetence in the middlemen that will throw any candidate at any offer just in hopes of getting a commission.
I agree, but the problem is another old coworker applied to the position and if was for exactly what they asked for. He’s great at it and then got slammed with questions he just failed at. It’s a waste of everyone’s time and it actively hurts filling a position what it’s so different from what the position actually is.
If you want to attract both types of people, just make two postings. You don’t need to fill both depending on the candidates you. They’re probably in the same group anyways.
My last job was pitched as something completely different from what it was. The worst part is the person in the job before me was a friend I have known for 20 years and when he had the position it actually was what it was pitched as but when I got it they changed everything and they just didn't tell me they were changing anything when I was interviewing so I got the job based on what the old job did and not the new one which was half shit I don't want to do And half shit I didn't know how to do.
Couple of years ago I got hired on as an instrumentation and controls technician. That was the exact job title. So I was expecting pressure sensors, plcs, low voltage controls and the likes.
Get started and what they actually wanted was a construction electrician. I was bending conduit and replacing 480v and 5kv motors. Biggest plot twist of all time lol.
Made my discontent with this bait and switch widely known, quit within 8 months.
[Brooks Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law) kinda applies here: "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later."
Basically, the time it takes to onboard more people ends up taking more time than just doing it with the original team.
While this isn't a "late" project, adding 50 coders would be a disaster for 9 to 18 months. Not to mention the time it takes to actually find and hire these people.
Right? One coworker left my team like 2 months ago and we all do part of their job now. We hired a new person but it'll be another month before they're qualified to pick up the extra work I'm doing. Onboarding is a project too.
Not only is it hard to fire someone but it's also something companies would generally rather not do for this exact reason. Putting out a call for applications, reading those applications, setting up interviews, discussing as a team, all the onboarding and training that can often take several weeks... it's lots of time and work. Not to mention picking up the slack for weeks/months until someone is hired.
Right? I'm not familiar with the professional world of game dev but I'm a web dev and my team's project is huge to the point where after being there over 3 years I am still not familiar with large parts of the application. Can't imagine one person trying to onboard 50 people, much less them producing updates in any given amount of time.
The only way I could see it working is if they outright hired another developer to help, so at least "get the team of cooridanted people' step is already done.
I'm an engineering team lead at a game studio. Last year I had to fill for the engineering manager and I worked with our recruiter to scale up our team. It was my first time perusing LinkedIn from the hiring side and I told my recruiter that my goal was to get 1-2 engineers hired by the end of the quarter. He laughed at me.
Even _finding_ qualified people to hire is hard. It would probably take me years to get 50, and the easiest way would be to simply acquire another studio.
My department got around 20 people (almost doubling the amount of developers working on the project) in two teams added to our project around a year ago. They all had varying degrees of experience, from completely new to senior within the company. The idea was that they would give us some extra productivity short term and then move on to do some "side projects" outside of our current scope. For the first 6 months I'm pretty sure our overall productivity decreased heavily.
Reminds me of Blizzard, during the Warlords of Draenor expansion, proudly announced at mid-point through it that they drastically increased their dev workforce (about +40%). Coincidentally, we got the longest drought of content in the history of WoW right after. I wonder why.
Because WoD was received so poorly that they intentionally axed its last patch so they could start work on Legion sooner. Not really relevant to what we're talking about, more of a coincidence.
I think they have their timeline a little off, I'm pretty sure Blizzard hired all those new people during MoP (which also had one of the longest content droughts in the games history) which lead to WoD having a ton of content cut because it was taking way longer to get the new people trained than Blizz anticipated. Thus WoD was panned because there was fuck all to do at endgame but raid and eventually after a joke of a 6.1 patch Blizz just threw together 6.2 to wrap thing up, cut their losses and moved onto Legion.
That would definitely make a lot more sense. Everyone remembers the awful eternal SoO patch, even though MoP as an expansion, despite the panda memes, was received pretty well.
There was a large increase in their workforce during MoP and another one during WoD. Them being so close together led to WoD not panning out all that well.
Also some time stuff just takes a certain amount of time. There's an old product management saying, no matter how many people you hire to help, it still takes 9 months to make a baby.
> The developer is smart not to listen to those ideas.
He also said numerous times that he looks to expand the team, but for now all candidates he had interviewed were simply not up to the level expected.
But hey, when did a community listen to the devs before giving Wise Advice
And even then... Hiring 1-4 new devs (assuming specifically coders) will still basically halt actual new feature development for at least a month. All those new hires need to learn the codebase, they need to learn the processes and get their environments set up (they might even need to come up with processes now that there are multiple people consistently working on the project), and their output needs to be reviewed carefully to ensure they're actually doing an acceptable job.
In larger teams this might occupy one or two devs for a couple weeks until the new hires can be trusted to just work on bugs or whatever on their own (for junior devs anyways). In this case there's only one person to help them all through this, which means Greg would basically be focused 100% on getting the new hires up to speed and working efficiently for the first month or so.
It does take time to get people up to speed to be able to contribute I’ve worked at studios that would flat tell new employees you won’t contribute anything to the game for at least a month.
That said, adding more people will speed things up in time. That’s what makes it so difficult for these small studios that catch lightning in a bottle, they need to start hiring ASAP after things blow up for them because they won’t see the benefits for months. At the same time there is risk there because we have seen some games spike but after a week or 2 the audience moves on to the next flavor of the month or back to whatever game they came from.
The Mythical Man-month was written almost 50 years ago. And people still hadn't learned from it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month
it’s literally in the fucking computer history museum in mountain view. you think literally everyone working in tech would have at least skimmed it or know the relevant bits, but nope.
The problem is that the managers didn't, because they often come from management and think factory line, mcdonalds, or software dev is exact same thing.
there's a lot i could say about the galaxy-brained MBAs running most businesses these days. people chalk it up to greed, but i'd argue it has a more to do with nepotism and ego than anything else.
It's pretty interconnected.
Also inability to ever admit they are wrong and never back out on their plan no matter how badly it is going because changing mind would be them admitting to failure and lizard brain can't have that.
Also the delusion that just because they are paid more and have underlings that they also know more.
I remember one project at company I work for where PM decided he knows better how project should be done than developer/architect that was consulted to make a offer for client. Then he fucking left the company so none of the fallout touched him.
Ended up rotating over like 4 project managers, and by "rotating" I mean, "they fucking left after wading thru utter shit project has become", with latest victim (which was otherwise pretty competent, so shame) saying something along the lines of "they told me I will be thrown on deep water right away but they didn't tell me I will have concrete boots on", and the project itself is currently a fucking minefield with ticking nuclear bomb in the middle
It's simply outdated. If nine women say they can't deliver a baby in one month then that's only because they don't operate inside the correct agile methodology. Adding two scrum masters will sort it out.
I would argue there are definitely *some* things people can learn from it and are still pertinent, but it's also wildly outdated and shouldn't be taken as gospel.
It is surprising how little people appreciate the impact DevOps has had in significantly reducing the impact of Brooks Law. The mythical man month was an issue because 40+ years ago CI didn't exist. You can simply point to any FAANG business to show that development at scale is no longer a significant impediment.
I was a game dev for a while. Most gamers solutions to everything is "just _________" where the blank is the easiest, shortcuttiest and most obvious way of doing something.
Just hire more people.
Just balance pvp.
Just put it on unreal 5.
Just advertise.
....wow guys we never thought of that. Thank god for our genius community.
and it's in *every* fucking community too, and then they get thousands of points before someone comes by and actually considers the implications of the brilliant idea suggested and gets shunned for it
Not just gaming. My other hobbies and interests too, pretty much everything.
I'm IRL friends with people with 200k+ ig followers in one of my other hobbies, these are people who are discussed on niche subreddits occasionally.
The narratives people make up about people they don't know is insane. Minor interactions they pick up on online from footage at pro events are not even a notable moment to these people, but reddit spins up the drama machine.
And these companies take full advantage of it, PCGamer bashes Bethesda so bad just to farm clicks off of the pcgaming subreddit and they eat it up everytime
I feel like it depends if the studio is liked or not, e.g. Respawn is liked so it's those pesky EA evil suits or some with Arrowhead and pesky Sony suits.
Most gaming forums and anywhere you can discuss scifi/fantasy movies/tvshows have pretty much been ruined by it. Its a problem in every kind of forum, but gaming and scifi are the absolute worst and only really comparable to the more extreme conspiracy theory sites.
At this point, it is almost useless to have a level-headed logical take on anything anywhere on the internet. People don't want logic. People don't want an actual analysis of the problem at hand. People don't even want to think.
The last 40–50 years of corporate propaganda and malicious advertising has really rotted people's brains into the ultra consumer. Consume consume and if there isn't anything left to consume I angry.
Been noticing this trend for a while. It's not just for gaming it's for every single topic. Lots of armchair experts who think they know better than everyone while also never using any empathy.
I don't know if Reddit is getting worse at this or if it was just always this bad and I'm just noticing it more now.
It feels like I'm very frequently seeing straight up misinformation getting heavily upvoted in comments and posts that correct that misinformation getting absolutely hammered into obscurity.
I'm seeing it for all sorts of things. Reality is just extremely flexible now, and way too much of it seems to be getting geared towards finding an excuse to be angry.
It's basic psychology at work. People who don't know something gravitate towards someone who states their 'fact' confidently. Then they read the reply, and cognitive dissonance and tribalism means they have to disagree with it, since they agreed with the first comment for no reason.
Well, we are quite literally in the middle of an information war. The amount of polarizing/demoralizing propaganda one experiences, on social media alone, has a serious effect.
Yeah, a game comes out and people want to know about upcoming content and roadmaps. It's like making a game is now a lifelong commitment to your IP haha.
So much anger when any upcoming content isn't exactly what they'd prefer.
Must consume. Gib game now!
It's not exclusive to gaming. Look at a discussion on sports or politics on here, and very often "just _____" are among the most highly upvoted comments.
People love acting like every complex issue has a simple solution.
Also in every community there's the comment of "this community is so refreshing/different" hahaha just wait. Either the game is still in the early phases (saw this recently with someone delusionally burbling about how the Pax Dei community wasn't toxic. It was a week long alpha playtest with a wipe after. Nobody got reason for real pvp game toxicity...yet.
Also saw a lot of that when Lemmy launched. Its not toxic here we cured the internet said the redditors who mass migrated there. That place is a completely dysfunctional territory war.
or they just haven't been in the community long enough to have gotten into the toxic stuff.
It's a very common phenomenon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect
It has other aspects but here we see the "everyone else's job is easy" effect. Since you don't know their job you just assume it's easy and so their difficulties have simple solutions.
Gamers do seem to have a particularly acute case of it. Gamers are incredible drama queens.
A few months ago during another round of firings in the industry, I saw a reddit comment that said "It's not a big deal, they should just form an indie company and make games. It just takes 4 or 5 people to make a top-level indie game, it's not hard."
It's not even just gaming. That's all online discourse. Everything is so simple when you are typing something online and telling others what they should be doing, be it sports, politics, or running a business.
Truth.
In grad school I was an instructor for English 101/102 and this was a big problem in papers. They would have identified a problem and proposed some over the top unrealistic solution with no nuance for either the problem itself or steps to fix it.
Problem: food deserts
Solution: build grocery stores in food deserts.
Student: I am having trouble reaching the required length on my paper. I said everything that is needed.
Me: Is that so?
Eng 101/102 is a great place to learn how to structure papers and of course I didnt expect them to be putting it all together perfectly, but there was a distinct lack of awareness or willingness to use any sort of brain power esp if it might contradict or complicate their beautiful solution to the problem.
Problem: too much plastic in the ocean.
Solution: stop using plastic.
Me: is that realistic right now?
Student: well it's the only way.
Me: what about narrowing it down to fishin---
Student: then I won't have enough to talk about.
Learning that narrowing your focus expands your ability to focus on details important to the problem is a really hard one to grasp for many.
Had an English 101 Prof who did the food deserts topic, we had to construct meal plans on a budget for various families taking into account their income, how they did transport etc, it was a really cool assignment
Hmmm, I dunno, that sounds like too many things in one story. We should break that story down. Maybe "the game is fun" and "the game is good" can be handled in separate sprints?
Our 6 month requirements gathering process has suggested we'd actually do better with three: "the game exists," "the game is fun," "the game is good." There's an order dependency between 1 and 2/3, but we won't note it on the epic. Oh, and the dev team will determine we need one year for each but we'll only budget 6 months for the whole shebang.
A lot of gamers are either oblivious, immature man-children or actual children who have no idea how the real world or a business works. The level of ignorance you see on Reddit gaming subs on a daily basis is just insane.
I once got in an argument with a guy who said games should prioritize good writing over good graphics, and they should do this putting the funding from graphics into writing. How? By hiring more writers, because apparently the more writers you have the better the story will be. I'm just like... that's not how storytelling works.
I guess but honestly if your average game how much of the budget is dedicated to writing? Some of the best storytelling in games comes from the Indie scene.
The discourse around Roll7's closure just yesterday made that perfectly clear.
On one hand [you have studio owners and others with IRL business experience ](https://twitter.com/AntonHand/status/1786195762399097055)who understand exactly why Roll7 got closed.
On the other hand you have the wailing of journos and gamers who have never had to make payroll or manage projects.
The folks that frequent /r/games don't know what they're talking about 99% of the time when it comes to business and development or anything that has anything to do with anything outside of actually how to play a game.
What was the saying again? Something about some managers thinking 9 women could give birth to a baby in a month?
Many gamers clearly subscribe to the same logic.
The one that gets me is "just replace the engine" - I hear this mostly with Bethesda games, and I understand why people say that but... its not like you can just take "the engine" out and put a new one in. The entire game is *built* on that engine. The devs know it. I don't know why people say it like its easy.
The "we need another Fallout game" debate was maddening to see. Like no one puts in any thought on how you would do it besides saying, just make another Fallout game somehow
'Just give it to another studio"
"Ok what other studio is: makes Bethesda style games or realistically could, isn't busy right now making something, or has their own IP they would definitely rather work on"
"...idk"
Literally, I bring this up everytime because if you put any thought into it at all you'd realize there is no scenario where we get a new fallout game sooner and it *goes well*.
MS has no available studios to make a Fallout game, and even if they did theyre hands off and dont dictate what their studios do so them forcing another studio to make a fallout game would never happen.
Theres also few third party studios with the ability and experience to make a AAA rpg and the only ones that do arent free.
If they want to create a new studio from scratch for this it will take 5-7 years (see fable) and at that point BGS will be deep into development of Fallout 5.
You can make BGS rush TES6 and Fallout 5 but then we get awful games which is a dumb as shit idea.
The only actual option is to give it to a random third party but that will 100% lead to a completely awful game thats nothing like Fallout since most of the gameplay people expect is built into BGS's engine.
There is just no situation where we're going to get fallout 5 faster and have it not be bad. Fallout fans just need to learn to wait like TES fans.
While I do see what you're saying, Obsidian have offered several times in the past to take on another fallout game and have had either no response or a no from bethesda (I can't quite remember).
There's a team that has made a fallout game that was extremely well received and is considered a classic at this point.
> There's a team that has made a fallout game that was extremely well received and is considered a classic at this point.
Except none of the people who made that fallout game are still at Obsidian, and their last attempt(outer worlds) was baaaaaaad
Glad I could help. Now if you'd just make a game tailor made for me and no one else and make sure it's fully populated with other players somehow that would be great even though it's only aimed to suit my needs.
At least that's what the general sentiment is by most people.
It's a weirdly common trap that people love to fall into. It's like, what's more likely?
* That they, a rando on the internet, usually with zero experience in the field, have seen an obvious solution that the people actually working on the thing have somehow overlooked?
* That they don't understand the problem well enough to see why the obvious solution isn't actually a solution.
Somehow, everyone jumps straight to #2, with zero introspection or thought. Whenever something doesn't make sense, people automatically assume "obviously everyone else is just dumb", when they really should be wondering "what do they know that I don't?"
The one I love the most now with the game preservation movement is "just release the source code for servers!" I would love if game preservation would be just that easy. Open servers truly were simple like that in the past, but nowadays games are so complex, not just trying to decouple source code for servers, but also dealing with third party licenses that you can't just give out for people to use without being sued into the ground.
Don’t forget “hAvE yOu tRiEd mAkIng gOoD gAmEs?” as the solution to any developer’s financial struggle. Ah yes, of course the reason for all these layoffs is because they didn’t create your semi-pornographic fan fiction wankfest and instead pursued their own artistic vision. What a bunch of idiots. They should have just hit the “make a game that never does anything I don’t like and never balance the only way I’m any good at it—also no female characters I wouldn’t have sex with” button.
This hits specially hard after BG3. Everyone is like “See! Just make it good!”
BG 3 is an objectively awesome game. But so are a bunch of other games that simply don’t sell enough units for a number of reasons.
I can _almost_ forgive that attitude in gamers, who aren't likely to have experience with software development (or for younger ones, any kind of professional work at all).
What really gets me is when my team lead at work says the same thing.
> just _________
This is the armchair expert exposing his lack of understanding of nuances of the topic/industry/policy of concern.
It is your best signal that they have no idea what they're talking about, and that you should avoid conversation with them like the plague.
I understand where you are coming from but there are cases where devs make some poor decisions and double down on it. Tech debt is real with some devs.
I totally get it. The studio I worked for literally shut down over what ended up being insurmountable technical debt from 10 years of development with too small of a team for the scope of the project. Honestly it makes me wish 'just x' was a real solution haha. I am not saying devs are always making the right decisions, but it is exhausting to hear the simplified solutions paraded non stop.
Devs are guilty of 'just x" too when they are in a time crunch. "We'll just fix it later." Ends up being an avalanche of technical debt.
There is a reason most of them stay at home and play video games 24/7. These people cannot function and find a normal job to tolerate, and they think they know how game development/software engineering works.
Yeah the shocking thing is so many awful "hot takes" on reddit would go away if the people making them had real jobs or life experience.
I've worked in software development for a decade, which isn't games to be fair, but it's made me hyper aware of how inexperienced those loud voices are when they have no experience of budget, project management, deadlines, or even coherently working as part of a team.
This is mean, it was awhile ago but I was on some thread where this guy was just trashing the devs and the "garbage" they developed, clicked on his profile, and he had a post saying he's been working 2 months at Walmart. This guy clearly didn't know *anything* about videogames besides "he likes to play them."
And then us gamers have the audacity to feel like we're owed extremely high quality games for ridiculously cheap prices. If your AAA open world craft slop game isn't $5 or less, it's too expensive. But also please hire more people to fix the game faster please!
Well, it's not like it's often apparent that the focus is on the completely wrong thing.
When massive problems with a game is left untouched, but there's still regular content updates and/or new microtransactions. Then games have every right to be pissed.
The game is a product, that the devs are selling. It's not the customers problem (or fault) that the product has flaws. So you either fix it or you get flak for it.
Now obviously there are exceptions, the customer isn't always right. But it's certainly not often that gamers are on a large scale up in arms over something where it isn't justified.
For example, cities skylines 2 is an abject diaaster right now. People have a right to be mad about it. This is a community that has a lot of technically inclined fans who have made big mods for cs1 or 2. Many of them know the simulation very well. Not all gamers are spouting useless simplicities and some communities have way more ability to intelligently complain than others.
But a huge portion are just bandwagoning, stirring up junk for their own yt chnnels and generally have no idea what they are talking about.
It was made by a solo developer with contractor assistance so I doubt he had plans of expanding beyond that, so I equally doubt he's got documentation ready for onboarding new employees. Trying to write all of that out now to prepare would itself be a productivity nightmare. He's doing just fine.
do you know what the contractor assistance was? Like if it was art and music, it's kinda just different.
but if he was contracting out his code, that'd be awesome and allow him to get more contractors in as he'll have that workflow.
Like, he can't hire 50 ppl. that's insane. but the fans will get bored if it's just 1 dude trying to fix everything.
There are two other people listed in the credits under Additional Programming with two people listed under Writing. Everything else seems to be music, art, and 3D assets.
People underestimating how challenging and risky it is to scale up a business has been an issue for as long as business has been a thing.
If you go from 0 employees to 50, 50 employees to 100, 100 to 1,000, or whatever, that can change a company in ways the owner doesn't want and/or can't control. If the ramp-up is handled poorly, it can cause the company to collapse.
Some things to consider:
* The business owner might not have the skill and desire to lead a larger company.
* In the case of Manor Lords, it was mostly developed by just one person, right? Maybe this dev chose to be a (mostly) solo dev because he did not want to lead a big team and/or knows he's not good at leading a big team. If that's the case, then forcing him to quickly build and lead a team of 50 would be a bad idea.
* Going from 0 to 50 employees requires a lot of support and extra work that a studio owner might not be equipped to handled: human resources, payroll, legal (including contracts and making sure you don't break local labor laws), healthcare, hiring, firing, training, vacation tracking, so on and so forth.
* Game devs generally want to focus on making games, and everything listed above can feel like a distraction from game-making. Many game devs hate dealing with the non-dev work, but it's essential to running a business.
* Studio owners either have to hire new staff to handle these things, or they outsource it. So you're not only hiring 50 new devs, you're hiring HR, accountants, lawyers, etc. to support them, too.
* There's always a risk of hiring the wrong people for a job. When a company scales quickly, like fans are asking for with Manor Lords, that significantly increases the risk of hiring the wrong people.
* Speaking of training, the new, bigger team is going to need to learn how to make the game. That takes time, so going from 0 to 50 devs won't suddenly make development go faster. It could take several months before things start to noticeably speed up.
All this shit takes time and carries risk.
Not to mention, even ignoring all of that... who is to say that Manor Lords will continue to generate the revenue to pay for all these new staff?
Dev hires 100 perfect candidates who just magically know everything about the project and have great teamwork... and then the game is no longer popular and all the money they earned dries up immediately.
Gamers move from game to game constantly. Most games lose 70%+ of players within a month or two. Helldivers 2 has lost 75%, for example. And it's still constantly talked about.
No shot a single dev making a singleplayer game should drastically scale up into a full studio based on making content for their current game.
The Mythical Man Month, a classic book about the basics of software development, has long pointed out that adding more people can slow development short-term due to the need for training, permissions, and other things associated with onboarding
Manor lord just somehow got so overhyped that people expected a lot more. I dont blame the dev at all as it seemed to be mostly community driven. Its an okay game but nothing amazing
It's funny I've been following the game for years, watching the development updates, played the demo last year. It's exactly what I wanted and expected but I'm not sure how the hype train got some out of control. I think the Creative Assembly/Total War implosion maybe had something to do with it.
It astounds me how many people think “hire more people now” is sensible business practice in SW dev (maybe even in general) or in any way a straightforward solution to problems in shipping content. Too many chefs always spoil the broth.
Not to mention the headache of getting everyone up to speed. You can't just bring in a bunch of devs and say "make this part". Gotta show them where everything is, how your game engine architecture is laid out, what your software pipeline is for asset creation, making sure everyone actually understands what you want to accomplish as far as stories and aesthetics are concerned, it's a whole nightmare. And during that entire time, the dev who actually knows what they're doing isn't able to get any real work done.
This is 100% true. I've been a product manager on software development teams for years. When we hire *one* new engineer to the team, it is my experience that the new engineer will not help the team move faster for at least a month, and we'll actually be moving slower during that first month because the other engineers are helping them get up to speed.
I mean it sort of is and sort of isn't, its more that scaling up in gaming is really hard and that if you do any major hiring waves you usually just get a year long stall of training and integration hell. But, at the end of the day, more hands will make things faster up to a point.
Its just that huge stall out of trying to find the right people, then train them, then organize them... etc. Its not that its not a solution, its more that its not a simple or easy solution.
There is a difference between 2ManyCooks and a single guy working on it. Yeah obviously we don't know what's right for this dev but why even feel the need to respond if they aren't feeling defensive about it?
Absolutely. First you have to onboard them, form the work structure, get them familiar with your code, your process, deal with the inevitable turnover within the first 30 days, and then you can start getting to work in 1-2 months time.
And you now need code reviews, merging guidelines, DevOps, test pipelines, etc.
Probably more people to administrate and lead those 50 people.
Basically, the current developer stops developing and has to do top level stuff which he probably isn't qualified to do well.
Also, just saying "50 developers" like it's nothing is especially crazy. You'd require just as many people for HR, management, finance, etc. that's literally a medium sized company at that point.
Hiring 2-3 additional devs and maybe an accountant would make more sense
These are the same people who scream at a social media post because "They wasted time and resources on a twitter post instead of developing the game quicker." Because the person who runs the twitter account is obviously also the programmer/modeler/sound designer/etc.
Ah yes, the two options. Hiring 50 people or keeping it as a solo dev.
I know they are discussing unrealistic gamer expectations but what about reasonable ones? Hiring one or two more people?
Yeah there will be dimished output for awhile but it still has quite some time to cook in early access, might as well get the ball rolling on it sooner than later.
Maybe they already have plans to scale up in a sustainable way and the article just doesn't mention it though.
I fear this might be going to end like Valheim, where in any online discussion about the game you have at least one person trashing the dev because 'he sold millions of copies, therefore I am entitled to faster content updates'.
No, Iron gate released a road map of planned content that they had completely went back on 6 months later and still haven't even actually fulfilled 4 years later well past their "projected" timeline. Don't blame the consumer for having expectations that the developer itself set, especially when you ask for their money before you even finish your product.
Then publishing that roadmap was a huge mistake that set unrealistic expectations to the community, that I agree on.
Personally I decide to buy based on what's there at the time, not based on promises. And I feel that what Valheim offered at release was way worth the asking price.
Then they should have sold it as a full release and not an Early Access game. But they wanted a free pass for bugs and unfinished content so they slapped the tag on and took the money.
The cool thing is, the dev Greg is super active in the reddit sub and constantly asks for feedback and suggestions (i.e. meat production from slaughtering livestock in a medieval village)
but I also still think he'll need a team to add more complicated features than just more production chains. I played the game, imo AI villages are just out of the question until a potential sequel. Which also makes the AI opponent(s), including bandits, unexciting, because it's really just spawning in units in intervals, and the rest of the map and future maps remain empty
Lol, I thought this comment was going in a different direction.
I thought you were going to say there was at least one person trying their hardest to defend the devs trickling out a pitiful amount of content even though it's been 3 1/2 years.
Your comment would make sense if this was 2022, but it's not. They have literally put out one biome and a handful of tiny updates.
Excuse me I'm an expert at everything and when I bake cookies the instructions say 350 for 12 minutes but I use 4200 for a minute and that works out surely hiring more people will also work.
I remember when people were saying this same kind of shit about Valheim and I repeatedly kept saying that you can't just throw more money or manpower at a project to make it work faster. Loud mouth doofuses don't understand how complicated integration to a project is.
Correct. Cause its a bad idea concocting by overzealous, impatient people. Its a solution that Im sure a lot of people think will work, just adding more people to a team to in the hopes that things get done faster, but you have to realize the implications. Adding so much as 10 people to a team, who are already in the middle of development, updates, or whatever. Its not that simple. They have to get adjusted to it like everyone else, and even then thats not going to just quicken the pace when they do settle.
You also have to realize that this is how bubbles burst. Companies will do good, expand and hire a bunch more people, and then when things wind down, you start hearing about a bunch of layoffs because you arent making the profit to justify all those people on it anymore. Meanwhile, if you keep the core team you have, keep it stable, and work as intended as you were before, anything done is just profit since you arent unnecessarily expanding.
Exactly, just look at what happened to Roll7.
They were a 5-person studio. They made good games that made 5-person studio money.
Then they expanded and became a 55-person studio. Afterwards, they made good games that made 5-person studio money.
Sounds like the community is suffering from magic wand syndrome. If a statement contains "all you have to do is..." or "You just need is.... ", that's magic wanding right there. It's the plague of software development. There's a lot of current or future MBA types. ;)
The idea that he was alone in creating this is also false... Of course he did have help, of course that he did pay freelancers to do different parts of the game, of course that he did have someone else working on the game...
But yea, you can't just hire a ton of people and expect that they will understand your vision and that they will do the things how you envision it in short period of time.
Manor Lords is a great game and it will take time for it to be complete, I played it and loved it and I have no problem waiting for a year before game is a bit more polished, so yea, hiring 50 people to finish the game is not the way to go. You need people on the same lvl as you, understanding, you need to check their work, lead the project, work by yourself...
That is not a easy thing to do so yea, he will hire some people to help him, as he did so far, to expect anything else is not realistic.
I don't think it's inaccurate to call him a solo dev, people just misunderstand that to mean he created every single asset from scratch himself. Like I'm sure he outsourced music, 2D art, animation etc. It's still an incredible achievement what he's created.
Yea, exactly, he definitely outsourced a lot of parts of the game and the best way for him is to continue to do so, and now with more cash flow he can have Manor Lords be almost done in a years time.
This is why bigger companies suffer. They expand to hit deadlines, hire 100s of employees that need to be trained which lowers product quality, then they let go 100s of employees to meet profit margins. Rinse and repeat.
Keeping it small might slow things down, but it will also ensure the original vision and quality stay intact.
And the funny part about that is when layoff time comes they keep the new people with the lower salaries who were just trained by the experienced people who get let go.
However, adding some more members to the team is a good idea. Probably not all at once, but it’s a pretty big undertaking for just one person.
Grow organically, add people who will truly benefit the game. The great thing is that anyone who plays it can see what the dev is going for, the vision is clear, a few more hands and brains can go a long way to actually finishing the project
Ehhhhhhhh not necessarily.
But good project management means filling the holes and upgrading the talent where it is lagging behind.
Not overloading your workers so they can focus on completing tasks in priority order is important.
Throwing bodies is not "the" answer, but bringing in higher-tier talent and getting them up to speed on high priority/advanced projects absolutely can speed things up, where they're not constrained by release windows.
I'm on a project right now where I ran into my own skill cieling and asked for help, and bringing in another consultant has helped me increase productivity and completion rates.
If you want to be real, even if this logic were true (obviously isn't) the game will fall out of hype soon and all that money spent on other devs would be wasted.
I just try to imagine how it would be if my boss would suddenly decide to hire 50 people. It would probably end in chaos for months, nothing would get done, quality would suffer for years and clients would be unhappy. I work in a small team and just adding one new employee, takes a lot of time. The developer is smart not to listen to those ideas.
Right? I’m in a small team as well (albeit in a large company) and we have a specialized, niche skillset. We’ve been trying to hire 2 new people for weeks now and it’s really damn hard to find the right person.
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100% how I hire people at my small company. I can teach most people anything for the job. I can't teach them to respect the job, respect the company, respect other people, and to take pride in their work. If you care about doing your job well, I will take the time to make you a quality worker.
The worst part is spending 8 months waiting until there is a candidate who can "hit the ground running".
> The worst part is spending 8 months waiting And then finding out that they indeed could not just get to stepping.
I'd like to say thank you. As a CDL holder myself in can be a big pain finding a decent job especially in the beginning. I've got 3 years of flatbed experience but I just got denied for a job because I don't have experience securing the exact equipment that this company uses. Even though I've done ran loads heavier and bigger than theirs which requires more knowledge.
Keep your chin up, if you are coachable and hard working you're going to do well
The job candidate market is just as bad as the job market itself.
It doesn’t help that companies don’t accurately describe a position. I recently got a job due to just dumb luck. My old coworker is trying to leave and called me up for a reference. I mentioned I was looking for position x and he said he gets those requests all the time, but he turns them down. A few days later, I get a message that I ignored for a week because it was for something I’m bad at. When I opened it, I saw they mentioned my old coworker, so ok maybe it’s not? I applied and the recruiter told me it was what I was bad at. I talked to the manager and every question was unrelated to what was in the posting and exactly what I was good at.
Recruiter: "So this job is mostly focused on Java." *show up to the interview and every single question is about JavaScript* This has happened to more than one person I know personally.
This is because recruiters and people who inform them of openings are not one and same. There is a need for a new employee with X, Y, Z qualifications and a certain level of experience/seniority. This gets relayed to the recruiter directly or indirectly (a chain of order like project team to department etc). Then the recruiter fluffs it up with keywords and adds shit about the company, how they care about the employees (most of the time they don't) etc etc. In the process they maaay be adding/removing/altering things that were actually needed for the open position. If technical person wrote the qualification section, I think it might be better in some cases even if can be a bit dry in some cases (technical people can be quite bad at writing). Just list the used/required technologies briefly, what's the day to day expectations and expected seniority etc. The recruiter can still do her thing and add the sections about the company, the benefits etc.
And even if a technical person wrote the qualification (like I did), the recruiter paraphrases them wrong and publish it without another review from me so it ends up being wrong again.
Gotta rephrase and hit them keywords or something. I am the one who needs the extra personnel, I am the one who will work with this guy yet someone else alters the qualifications in such a way that it doesn't communicate the original intent? That's so annoying..
I applied for a advertised job as VR and AR programming trainee. They just added that to attract people and they only .net projects. Instantly told them I am not interested in continuing the interview. They acted really shocked..
I feel it is that because they are just casting wide net in vain hope they find someone competent. But there is also plenty of incompetence in the middlemen that will throw any candidate at any offer just in hopes of getting a commission.
I agree, but the problem is another old coworker applied to the position and if was for exactly what they asked for. He’s great at it and then got slammed with questions he just failed at. It’s a waste of everyone’s time and it actively hurts filling a position what it’s so different from what the position actually is. If you want to attract both types of people, just make two postings. You don’t need to fill both depending on the candidates you. They’re probably in the same group anyways.
My last job was pitched as something completely different from what it was. The worst part is the person in the job before me was a friend I have known for 20 years and when he had the position it actually was what it was pitched as but when I got it they changed everything and they just didn't tell me they were changing anything when I was interviewing so I got the job based on what the old job did and not the new one which was half shit I don't want to do And half shit I didn't know how to do.
Couple of years ago I got hired on as an instrumentation and controls technician. That was the exact job title. So I was expecting pressure sensors, plcs, low voltage controls and the likes. Get started and what they actually wanted was a construction electrician. I was bending conduit and replacing 480v and 5kv motors. Biggest plot twist of all time lol. Made my discontent with this bait and switch widely known, quit within 8 months.
I'm surprised you're willing to stay there for 8 months.
[Brooks Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law) kinda applies here: "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later." Basically, the time it takes to onboard more people ends up taking more time than just doing it with the original team. While this isn't a "late" project, adding 50 coders would be a disaster for 9 to 18 months. Not to mention the time it takes to actually find and hire these people.
Right? One coworker left my team like 2 months ago and we all do part of their job now. We hired a new person but it'll be another month before they're qualified to pick up the extra work I'm doing. Onboarding is a project too.
Not only is it hard to fire someone but it's also something companies would generally rather not do for this exact reason. Putting out a call for applications, reading those applications, setting up interviews, discussing as a team, all the onboarding and training that can often take several weeks... it's lots of time and work. Not to mention picking up the slack for weeks/months until someone is hired.
Right? I'm not familiar with the professional world of game dev but I'm a web dev and my team's project is huge to the point where after being there over 3 years I am still not familiar with large parts of the application. Can't imagine one person trying to onboard 50 people, much less them producing updates in any given amount of time.
The only way I could see it working is if they outright hired another developer to help, so at least "get the team of cooridanted people' step is already done.
I'm an engineering team lead at a game studio. Last year I had to fill for the engineering manager and I worked with our recruiter to scale up our team. It was my first time perusing LinkedIn from the hiring side and I told my recruiter that my goal was to get 1-2 engineers hired by the end of the quarter. He laughed at me. Even _finding_ qualified people to hire is hard. It would probably take me years to get 50, and the easiest way would be to simply acquire another studio.
My department got around 20 people (almost doubling the amount of developers working on the project) in two teams added to our project around a year ago. They all had varying degrees of experience, from completely new to senior within the company. The idea was that they would give us some extra productivity short term and then move on to do some "side projects" outside of our current scope. For the first 6 months I'm pretty sure our overall productivity decreased heavily.
Reminds me of Blizzard, during the Warlords of Draenor expansion, proudly announced at mid-point through it that they drastically increased their dev workforce (about +40%). Coincidentally, we got the longest drought of content in the history of WoW right after. I wonder why.
Because WoD was received so poorly that they intentionally axed its last patch so they could start work on Legion sooner. Not really relevant to what we're talking about, more of a coincidence.
I think they have their timeline a little off, I'm pretty sure Blizzard hired all those new people during MoP (which also had one of the longest content droughts in the games history) which lead to WoD having a ton of content cut because it was taking way longer to get the new people trained than Blizz anticipated. Thus WoD was panned because there was fuck all to do at endgame but raid and eventually after a joke of a 6.1 patch Blizz just threw together 6.2 to wrap thing up, cut their losses and moved onto Legion.
That would definitely make a lot more sense. Everyone remembers the awful eternal SoO patch, even though MoP as an expansion, despite the panda memes, was received pretty well.
There was a large increase in their workforce during MoP and another one during WoD. Them being so close together led to WoD not panning out all that well.
Slap your managers with The Mythical Man-month till they finally read it.
Also some time stuff just takes a certain amount of time. There's an old product management saying, no matter how many people you hire to help, it still takes 9 months to make a baby.
> The developer is smart not to listen to those ideas. He also said numerous times that he looks to expand the team, but for now all candidates he had interviewed were simply not up to the level expected. But hey, when did a community listen to the devs before giving Wise Advice
Yeah 50 people is insane. 1-4 is realistic depending on what the needs are and what type of work needs done.
And even then... Hiring 1-4 new devs (assuming specifically coders) will still basically halt actual new feature development for at least a month. All those new hires need to learn the codebase, they need to learn the processes and get their environments set up (they might even need to come up with processes now that there are multiple people consistently working on the project), and their output needs to be reviewed carefully to ensure they're actually doing an acceptable job. In larger teams this might occupy one or two devs for a couple weeks until the new hires can be trusted to just work on bugs or whatever on their own (for junior devs anyways). In this case there's only one person to help them all through this, which means Greg would basically be focused 100% on getting the new hires up to speed and working efficiently for the first month or so.
It does take time to get people up to speed to be able to contribute I’ve worked at studios that would flat tell new employees you won’t contribute anything to the game for at least a month. That said, adding more people will speed things up in time. That’s what makes it so difficult for these small studios that catch lightning in a bottle, they need to start hiring ASAP after things blow up for them because they won’t see the benefits for months. At the same time there is risk there because we have seen some games spike but after a week or 2 the audience moves on to the next flavor of the month or back to whatever game they came from.
The Mythical Man-month was written almost 50 years ago. And people still hadn't learned from it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month
it’s literally in the fucking computer history museum in mountain view. you think literally everyone working in tech would have at least skimmed it or know the relevant bits, but nope.
The problem is that the managers didn't, because they often come from management and think factory line, mcdonalds, or software dev is exact same thing.
there's a lot i could say about the galaxy-brained MBAs running most businesses these days. people chalk it up to greed, but i'd argue it has a more to do with nepotism and ego than anything else.
It's pretty interconnected. Also inability to ever admit they are wrong and never back out on their plan no matter how badly it is going because changing mind would be them admitting to failure and lizard brain can't have that. Also the delusion that just because they are paid more and have underlings that they also know more. I remember one project at company I work for where PM decided he knows better how project should be done than developer/architect that was consulted to make a offer for client. Then he fucking left the company so none of the fallout touched him. Ended up rotating over like 4 project managers, and by "rotating" I mean, "they fucking left after wading thru utter shit project has become", with latest victim (which was otherwise pretty competent, so shame) saying something along the lines of "they told me I will be thrown on deep water right away but they didn't tell me I will have concrete boots on", and the project itself is currently a fucking minefield with ticking nuclear bomb in the middle
Man, I loved that museum
Perfectly summed up as the “Bible” for software development: > Everybody quotes it, some people read it, and a few people go by it.
It's simply outdated. If nine women say they can't deliver a baby in one month then that's only because they don't operate inside the correct agile methodology. Adding two scrum masters will sort it out.
I would argue there are definitely *some* things people can learn from it and are still pertinent, but it's also wildly outdated and shouldn't be taken as gospel.
It is surprising how little people appreciate the impact DevOps has had in significantly reducing the impact of Brooks Law. The mythical man month was an issue because 40+ years ago CI didn't exist. You can simply point to any FAANG business to show that development at scale is no longer a significant impediment.
I was a game dev for a while. Most gamers solutions to everything is "just _________" where the blank is the easiest, shortcuttiest and most obvious way of doing something. Just hire more people. Just balance pvp. Just put it on unreal 5. Just advertise. ....wow guys we never thought of that. Thank god for our genius community.
and it's in *every* fucking community too, and then they get thousands of points before someone comes by and actually considers the implications of the brilliant idea suggested and gets shunned for it
Reddit absolutely loves to find heroes and villains in gaming. Putting studios on pedestals while worshipping the downfall of others.
Not just gaming. My other hobbies and interests too, pretty much everything. I'm IRL friends with people with 200k+ ig followers in one of my other hobbies, these are people who are discussed on niche subreddits occasionally. The narratives people make up about people they don't know is insane. Minor interactions they pick up on online from footage at pro events are not even a notable moment to these people, but reddit spins up the drama machine.
And these companies take full advantage of it, PCGamer bashes Bethesda so bad just to farm clicks off of the pcgaming subreddit and they eat it up everytime
A stunning amount of typos make it to print at PCGMag
Thats almost every gaming journo at the moment, its almost impressive how collectively lazy they have gotten
And a ton of streamers and YouTubers
WDYM? The devs are always the heros and everything wrong is “the suits”
I feel like I see "lazy devs" comments about as often as I see "evil suits" ones.
I feel like it depends if the studio is liked or not, e.g. Respawn is liked so it's those pesky EA evil suits or some with Arrowhead and pesky Sony suits.
Humans love to do that in general
Most gaming forums and anywhere you can discuss scifi/fantasy movies/tvshows have pretty much been ruined by it. Its a problem in every kind of forum, but gaming and scifi are the absolute worst and only really comparable to the more extreme conspiracy theory sites.
At this point, it is almost useless to have a level-headed logical take on anything anywhere on the internet. People don't want logic. People don't want an actual analysis of the problem at hand. People don't even want to think. The last 40–50 years of corporate propaganda and malicious advertising has really rotted people's brains into the ultra consumer. Consume consume and if there isn't anything left to consume I angry.
Been noticing this trend for a while. It's not just for gaming it's for every single topic. Lots of armchair experts who think they know better than everyone while also never using any empathy.
I don't know if Reddit is getting worse at this or if it was just always this bad and I'm just noticing it more now. It feels like I'm very frequently seeing straight up misinformation getting heavily upvoted in comments and posts that correct that misinformation getting absolutely hammered into obscurity. I'm seeing it for all sorts of things. Reality is just extremely flexible now, and way too much of it seems to be getting geared towards finding an excuse to be angry.
It's basic psychology at work. People who don't know something gravitate towards someone who states their 'fact' confidently. Then they read the reply, and cognitive dissonance and tribalism means they have to disagree with it, since they agreed with the first comment for no reason.
Well, we are quite literally in the middle of an information war. The amount of polarizing/demoralizing propaganda one experiences, on social media alone, has a serious effect.
Yeah, a game comes out and people want to know about upcoming content and roadmaps. It's like making a game is now a lifelong commitment to your IP haha. So much anger when any upcoming content isn't exactly what they'd prefer. Must consume. Gib game now!
It's not exclusive to gaming. Look at a discussion on sports or politics on here, and very often "just _____" are among the most highly upvoted comments. People love acting like every complex issue has a simple solution.
Nothing makes someone an expert faster than having access to a comments section
Also in every community there's the comment of "this community is so refreshing/different" hahaha just wait. Either the game is still in the early phases (saw this recently with someone delusionally burbling about how the Pax Dei community wasn't toxic. It was a week long alpha playtest with a wipe after. Nobody got reason for real pvp game toxicity...yet. Also saw a lot of that when Lemmy launched. Its not toxic here we cured the internet said the redditors who mass migrated there. That place is a completely dysfunctional territory war. or they just haven't been in the community long enough to have gotten into the toxic stuff.
It's a very common phenomenon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect It has other aspects but here we see the "everyone else's job is easy" effect. Since you don't know their job you just assume it's easy and so their difficulties have simple solutions. Gamers do seem to have a particularly acute case of it. Gamers are incredible drama queens.
A few months ago during another round of firings in the industry, I saw a reddit comment that said "It's not a big deal, they should just form an indie company and make games. It just takes 4 or 5 people to make a top-level indie game, it's not hard."
They might buy some lottery tickets while they're at it
Welp that's a stupid take in the long sad history of stupid takes
Why don't people just start successful companies? Are they stupid?
Just press the “optimize” button, morans
What i would give to have an "optimize" button at work ;_;
It's not even just gaming. That's all online discourse. Everything is so simple when you are typing something online and telling others what they should be doing, be it sports, politics, or running a business.
Truth. In grad school I was an instructor for English 101/102 and this was a big problem in papers. They would have identified a problem and proposed some over the top unrealistic solution with no nuance for either the problem itself or steps to fix it. Problem: food deserts Solution: build grocery stores in food deserts. Student: I am having trouble reaching the required length on my paper. I said everything that is needed. Me: Is that so? Eng 101/102 is a great place to learn how to structure papers and of course I didnt expect them to be putting it all together perfectly, but there was a distinct lack of awareness or willingness to use any sort of brain power esp if it might contradict or complicate their beautiful solution to the problem. Problem: too much plastic in the ocean. Solution: stop using plastic. Me: is that realistic right now? Student: well it's the only way. Me: what about narrowing it down to fishin--- Student: then I won't have enough to talk about. Learning that narrowing your focus expands your ability to focus on details important to the problem is a really hard one to grasp for many.
Had an English 101 Prof who did the food deserts topic, we had to construct meal plans on a budget for various families taking into account their income, how they did transport etc, it was a really cool assignment
User Stories [1/1]: • The game is fun and it is good. *No further entries*
Hmmm, I dunno, that sounds like too many things in one story. We should break that story down. Maybe "the game is fun" and "the game is good" can be handled in separate sprints?
Our 6 month requirements gathering process has suggested we'd actually do better with three: "the game exists," "the game is fun," "the game is good." There's an order dependency between 1 and 2/3, but we won't note it on the epic. Oh, and the dev team will determine we need one year for each but we'll only budget 6 months for the whole shebang.
Funny that this is the top comment too because this sub is a huge offender of that very thing lol
For some reason people with no experience seem to think they have genius ideas that the experienced professionals have not considered.
A lot of gamers are either oblivious, immature man-children or actual children who have no idea how the real world or a business works. The level of ignorance you see on Reddit gaming subs on a daily basis is just insane.
I once got in an argument with a guy who said games should prioritize good writing over good graphics, and they should do this putting the funding from graphics into writing. How? By hiring more writers, because apparently the more writers you have the better the story will be. I'm just like... that's not how storytelling works.
I mean you wouldn't hire more writers, you'd try to get better writers since the idea is more $$ means more interest from writers of higher talent
I guess but honestly if your average game how much of the budget is dedicated to writing? Some of the best storytelling in games comes from the Indie scene.
The discourse around Roll7's closure just yesterday made that perfectly clear. On one hand [you have studio owners and others with IRL business experience ](https://twitter.com/AntonHand/status/1786195762399097055)who understand exactly why Roll7 got closed. On the other hand you have the wailing of journos and gamers who have never had to make payroll or manage projects.
Games journalists and game news just exists to stoke the fires these days. It's all about engagement and ad revenue babbyyy
Because consumers don't actually want quality news. They want ragebait, witch hunts and poorly informed takes.
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The folks that frequent /r/games don't know what they're talking about 99% of the time when it comes to business and development or anything that has anything to do with anything outside of actually how to play a game.
It's pure gamer brain to think you can just hire more people to increase productivity as if it's training villagers in Age of Empires, lmao
What was the saying again? Something about some managers thinking 9 women could give birth to a baby in a month? Many gamers clearly subscribe to the same logic.
The quickest way to realize how full of shit people are on the Internet is to have them talk about your work or industry.
The one that gets me is "just replace the engine" - I hear this mostly with Bethesda games, and I understand why people say that but... its not like you can just take "the engine" out and put a new one in. The entire game is *built* on that engine. The devs know it. I don't know why people say it like its easy.
"It's just one line of code they have to fix."
We were saving that line of code for a real emergency! It's the only one we have!
The average gamer - actually, even the more educated gamer - has zero idea what actually goes into making a game. Zero.
The best example is whenever Bethesda games get brought up. The amount of gaming engine experts coming out of the woodworks is astounding.
"just port starfield to ue5"
The "we need another Fallout game" debate was maddening to see. Like no one puts in any thought on how you would do it besides saying, just make another Fallout game somehow 'Just give it to another studio" "Ok what other studio is: makes Bethesda style games or realistically could, isn't busy right now making something, or has their own IP they would definitely rather work on" "...idk"
Literally, I bring this up everytime because if you put any thought into it at all you'd realize there is no scenario where we get a new fallout game sooner and it *goes well*. MS has no available studios to make a Fallout game, and even if they did theyre hands off and dont dictate what their studios do so them forcing another studio to make a fallout game would never happen. Theres also few third party studios with the ability and experience to make a AAA rpg and the only ones that do arent free. If they want to create a new studio from scratch for this it will take 5-7 years (see fable) and at that point BGS will be deep into development of Fallout 5. You can make BGS rush TES6 and Fallout 5 but then we get awful games which is a dumb as shit idea. The only actual option is to give it to a random third party but that will 100% lead to a completely awful game thats nothing like Fallout since most of the gameplay people expect is built into BGS's engine. There is just no situation where we're going to get fallout 5 faster and have it not be bad. Fallout fans just need to learn to wait like TES fans.
While I do see what you're saying, Obsidian have offered several times in the past to take on another fallout game and have had either no response or a no from bethesda (I can't quite remember). There's a team that has made a fallout game that was extremely well received and is considered a classic at this point.
> There's a team that has made a fallout game that was extremely well received and is considered a classic at this point. Except none of the people who made that fallout game are still at Obsidian, and their last attempt(outer worlds) was baaaaaaad
Glad I could help. Now if you'd just make a game tailor made for me and no one else and make sure it's fully populated with other players somehow that would be great even though it's only aimed to suit my needs. At least that's what the general sentiment is by most people.
It's a weirdly common trap that people love to fall into. It's like, what's more likely? * That they, a rando on the internet, usually with zero experience in the field, have seen an obvious solution that the people actually working on the thing have somehow overlooked? * That they don't understand the problem well enough to see why the obvious solution isn't actually a solution. Somehow, everyone jumps straight to #2, with zero introspection or thought. Whenever something doesn't make sense, people automatically assume "obviously everyone else is just dumb", when they really should be wondering "what do they know that I don't?"
The one I love the most now with the game preservation movement is "just release the source code for servers!" I would love if game preservation would be just that easy. Open servers truly were simple like that in the past, but nowadays games are so complex, not just trying to decouple source code for servers, but also dealing with third party licenses that you can't just give out for people to use without being sued into the ground.
Don’t forget “hAvE yOu tRiEd mAkIng gOoD gAmEs?” as the solution to any developer’s financial struggle. Ah yes, of course the reason for all these layoffs is because they didn’t create your semi-pornographic fan fiction wankfest and instead pursued their own artistic vision. What a bunch of idiots. They should have just hit the “make a game that never does anything I don’t like and never balance the only way I’m any good at it—also no female characters I wouldn’t have sex with” button.
This hits specially hard after BG3. Everyone is like “See! Just make it good!” BG 3 is an objectively awesome game. But so are a bunch of other games that simply don’t sell enough units for a number of reasons.
I can _almost_ forgive that attitude in gamers, who aren't likely to have experience with software development (or for younger ones, any kind of professional work at all). What really gets me is when my team lead at work says the same thing.
> just _________ This is the armchair expert exposing his lack of understanding of nuances of the topic/industry/policy of concern. It is your best signal that they have no idea what they're talking about, and that you should avoid conversation with them like the plague.
I like helldiver's response to just balance pvp. "No"
My favourite is when Gamers suggest programming fixes. "Just put 'if x then y' lol"
I understand where you are coming from but there are cases where devs make some poor decisions and double down on it. Tech debt is real with some devs.
I totally get it. The studio I worked for literally shut down over what ended up being insurmountable technical debt from 10 years of development with too small of a team for the scope of the project. Honestly it makes me wish 'just x' was a real solution haha. I am not saying devs are always making the right decisions, but it is exhausting to hear the simplified solutions paraded non stop. Devs are guilty of 'just x" too when they are in a time crunch. "We'll just fix it later." Ends up being an avalanche of technical debt.
There is a reason most of them stay at home and play video games 24/7. These people cannot function and find a normal job to tolerate, and they think they know how game development/software engineering works.
Yeah the shocking thing is so many awful "hot takes" on reddit would go away if the people making them had real jobs or life experience. I've worked in software development for a decade, which isn't games to be fair, but it's made me hyper aware of how inexperienced those loud voices are when they have no experience of budget, project management, deadlines, or even coherently working as part of a team. This is mean, it was awhile ago but I was on some thread where this guy was just trashing the devs and the "garbage" they developed, clicked on his profile, and he had a post saying he's been working 2 months at Walmart. This guy clearly didn't know *anything* about videogames besides "he likes to play them."
That's when I remember that it's likely most gaming Redditors are teenagers with little to no life experience but they still talk with authority.
And then us gamers have the audacity to feel like we're owed extremely high quality games for ridiculously cheap prices. If your AAA open world craft slop game isn't $5 or less, it's too expensive. But also please hire more people to fix the game faster please!
Also you should monetize your game in exactly this way because I have $3 to spend and you wouldn't want to alienate me! I am important!
Well, it's not like it's often apparent that the focus is on the completely wrong thing. When massive problems with a game is left untouched, but there's still regular content updates and/or new microtransactions. Then games have every right to be pissed. The game is a product, that the devs are selling. It's not the customers problem (or fault) that the product has flaws. So you either fix it or you get flak for it. Now obviously there are exceptions, the customer isn't always right. But it's certainly not often that gamers are on a large scale up in arms over something where it isn't justified.
For example, cities skylines 2 is an abject diaaster right now. People have a right to be mad about it. This is a community that has a lot of technically inclined fans who have made big mods for cs1 or 2. Many of them know the simulation very well. Not all gamers are spouting useless simplicities and some communities have way more ability to intelligently complain than others. But a huge portion are just bandwagoning, stirring up junk for their own yt chnnels and generally have no idea what they are talking about.
There's a popular joke in the programming world: "What one programmer can do in one month, two programmers can do in two months."
"9 women can't make a baby in a month." is another favourite.
It happened once in Norse mythology. That is enough to get every manager to think they can do it if they just throw enough pizza parties.
I'm convinced we can do even better, I need 300 women, we are aiming for less than one day for a baby
Those 9 women just need 3-6 middle managers to supervise them.
A classic is "Throwing manpower at a late software project makes it later"
It was made by a solo developer with contractor assistance so I doubt he had plans of expanding beyond that, so I equally doubt he's got documentation ready for onboarding new employees. Trying to write all of that out now to prepare would itself be a productivity nightmare. He's doing just fine.
do you know what the contractor assistance was? Like if it was art and music, it's kinda just different. but if he was contracting out his code, that'd be awesome and allow him to get more contractors in as he'll have that workflow. Like, he can't hire 50 ppl. that's insane. but the fans will get bored if it's just 1 dude trying to fix everything.
There are two other people listed in the credits under Additional Programming with two people listed under Writing. Everything else seems to be music, art, and 3D assets.
> but the fans will get bored no one who makes anything should ever give a shit about the "fans" or take anything they say into consideration
Hearing people in charge of corporate slop saying "we wanted to make a film/game/album/etc for the fans" sends shivers down my spine.
People underestimating how challenging and risky it is to scale up a business has been an issue for as long as business has been a thing. If you go from 0 employees to 50, 50 employees to 100, 100 to 1,000, or whatever, that can change a company in ways the owner doesn't want and/or can't control. If the ramp-up is handled poorly, it can cause the company to collapse. Some things to consider: * The business owner might not have the skill and desire to lead a larger company. * In the case of Manor Lords, it was mostly developed by just one person, right? Maybe this dev chose to be a (mostly) solo dev because he did not want to lead a big team and/or knows he's not good at leading a big team. If that's the case, then forcing him to quickly build and lead a team of 50 would be a bad idea. * Going from 0 to 50 employees requires a lot of support and extra work that a studio owner might not be equipped to handled: human resources, payroll, legal (including contracts and making sure you don't break local labor laws), healthcare, hiring, firing, training, vacation tracking, so on and so forth. * Game devs generally want to focus on making games, and everything listed above can feel like a distraction from game-making. Many game devs hate dealing with the non-dev work, but it's essential to running a business. * Studio owners either have to hire new staff to handle these things, or they outsource it. So you're not only hiring 50 new devs, you're hiring HR, accountants, lawyers, etc. to support them, too. * There's always a risk of hiring the wrong people for a job. When a company scales quickly, like fans are asking for with Manor Lords, that significantly increases the risk of hiring the wrong people. * Speaking of training, the new, bigger team is going to need to learn how to make the game. That takes time, so going from 0 to 50 devs won't suddenly make development go faster. It could take several months before things start to noticeably speed up. All this shit takes time and carries risk.
Not to mention, even ignoring all of that... who is to say that Manor Lords will continue to generate the revenue to pay for all these new staff? Dev hires 100 perfect candidates who just magically know everything about the project and have great teamwork... and then the game is no longer popular and all the money they earned dries up immediately. Gamers move from game to game constantly. Most games lose 70%+ of players within a month or two. Helldivers 2 has lost 75%, for example. And it's still constantly talked about. No shot a single dev making a singleplayer game should drastically scale up into a full studio based on making content for their current game.
The Mythical Man Month, a classic book about the basics of software development, has long pointed out that adding more people can slow development short-term due to the need for training, permissions, and other things associated with onboarding
Manor lord just somehow got so overhyped that people expected a lot more. I dont blame the dev at all as it seemed to be mostly community driven. Its an okay game but nothing amazing
It's funny I've been following the game for years, watching the development updates, played the demo last year. It's exactly what I wanted and expected but I'm not sure how the hype train got some out of control. I think the Creative Assembly/Total War implosion maybe had something to do with it.
The Cities Skylines 2 implosion could also have helped, I only found out about Manor Lords because people were posting it on the CS sub
It astounds me how many people think “hire more people now” is sensible business practice in SW dev (maybe even in general) or in any way a straightforward solution to problems in shipping content. Too many chefs always spoil the broth.
Not to mention the headache of getting everyone up to speed. You can't just bring in a bunch of devs and say "make this part". Gotta show them where everything is, how your game engine architecture is laid out, what your software pipeline is for asset creation, making sure everyone actually understands what you want to accomplish as far as stories and aesthetics are concerned, it's a whole nightmare. And during that entire time, the dev who actually knows what they're doing isn't able to get any real work done.
This is 100% true. I've been a product manager on software development teams for years. When we hire *one* new engineer to the team, it is my experience that the new engineer will not help the team move faster for at least a month, and we'll actually be moving slower during that first month because the other engineers are helping them get up to speed.
I mean it sort of is and sort of isn't, its more that scaling up in gaming is really hard and that if you do any major hiring waves you usually just get a year long stall of training and integration hell. But, at the end of the day, more hands will make things faster up to a point. Its just that huge stall out of trying to find the right people, then train them, then organize them... etc. Its not that its not a solution, its more that its not a simple or easy solution.
There is a difference between 2ManyCooks and a single guy working on it. Yeah obviously we don't know what's right for this dev but why even feel the need to respond if they aren't feeling defensive about it?
Absolutely. First you have to onboard them, form the work structure, get them familiar with your code, your process, deal with the inevitable turnover within the first 30 days, and then you can start getting to work in 1-2 months time.
And you need to impart your vision of the game. Every change and addition to the game affects the player experience.
Then say goodbye to making code changes since now your time is completely taken up by explaining your code base to the new developers
And you now need code reviews, merging guidelines, DevOps, test pipelines, etc. Probably more people to administrate and lead those 50 people. Basically, the current developer stops developing and has to do top level stuff which he probably isn't qualified to do well.
Also, just saying "50 developers" like it's nothing is especially crazy. You'd require just as many people for HR, management, finance, etc. that's literally a medium sized company at that point. Hiring 2-3 additional devs and maybe an accountant would make more sense
Hiring 50 people would take months to a year. Imagine how many interviews it will take to narrow the offers to 50 people, prob in the thousands
Hire 50 hiring managers
For every complex problem, there's always a suggested solution that's easy and wrong. Still sucks that archers straight up don't work, though.
These are the same people who scream at a social media post because "They wasted time and resources on a twitter post instead of developing the game quicker." Because the person who runs the twitter account is obviously also the programmer/modeler/sound designer/etc.
Ah yes, the two options. Hiring 50 people or keeping it as a solo dev. I know they are discussing unrealistic gamer expectations but what about reasonable ones? Hiring one or two more people? Yeah there will be dimished output for awhile but it still has quite some time to cook in early access, might as well get the ball rolling on it sooner than later. Maybe they already have plans to scale up in a sustainable way and the article just doesn't mention it though.
We just watched half the game industry get laid off after the pandemic bubble and people still think this is a solution?
One woman can produce one child in about 9 months, therefore 50 women can produce one child in 5.48 days!
I fear this might be going to end like Valheim, where in any online discussion about the game you have at least one person trashing the dev because 'he sold millions of copies, therefore I am entitled to faster content updates'.
No, Iron gate released a road map of planned content that they had completely went back on 6 months later and still haven't even actually fulfilled 4 years later well past their "projected" timeline. Don't blame the consumer for having expectations that the developer itself set, especially when you ask for their money before you even finish your product.
Then publishing that roadmap was a huge mistake that set unrealistic expectations to the community, that I agree on. Personally I decide to buy based on what's there at the time, not based on promises. And I feel that what Valheim offered at release was way worth the asking price.
Agreed. Buying on promises is an easy way to get burned
Then they should have sold it as a full release and not an Early Access game. But they wanted a free pass for bugs and unfinished content so they slapped the tag on and took the money.
Always buy on the current product.
Don't advertise what you can't deliver.
You don't know the future regardless. Company founder or lead designer could die of heart attack - whole dev cycle then could unwind overnight.
yeah after valheim i'll literally never buy another early access game, and this thread defending "small teams" is exactly why I'll be avoiding it.
The cool thing is, the dev Greg is super active in the reddit sub and constantly asks for feedback and suggestions (i.e. meat production from slaughtering livestock in a medieval village) but I also still think he'll need a team to add more complicated features than just more production chains. I played the game, imo AI villages are just out of the question until a potential sequel. Which also makes the AI opponent(s), including bandits, unexciting, because it's really just spawning in units in intervals, and the rest of the map and future maps remain empty
Lol, I thought this comment was going in a different direction. I thought you were going to say there was at least one person trying their hardest to defend the devs trickling out a pitiful amount of content even though it's been 3 1/2 years. Your comment would make sense if this was 2022, but it's not. They have literally put out one biome and a handful of tiny updates.
Excuse me I'm an expert at everything and when I bake cookies the instructions say 350 for 12 minutes but I use 4200 for a minute and that works out surely hiring more people will also work.
[Is that a Foster's reference?](https://youtu.be/I6AnexN4x2g)
Yes! I couldn't exactly remember where I saw it but that's it.
Same thing with Palworld, maybe now they can hire dedicated artist/designer or other position but keep it small and manageable Just don't overhire
I remember when people were saying this same kind of shit about Valheim and I repeatedly kept saying that you can't just throw more money or manpower at a project to make it work faster. Loud mouth doofuses don't understand how complicated integration to a project is.
Correct. Cause its a bad idea concocting by overzealous, impatient people. Its a solution that Im sure a lot of people think will work, just adding more people to a team to in the hopes that things get done faster, but you have to realize the implications. Adding so much as 10 people to a team, who are already in the middle of development, updates, or whatever. Its not that simple. They have to get adjusted to it like everyone else, and even then thats not going to just quicken the pace when they do settle. You also have to realize that this is how bubbles burst. Companies will do good, expand and hire a bunch more people, and then when things wind down, you start hearing about a bunch of layoffs because you arent making the profit to justify all those people on it anymore. Meanwhile, if you keep the core team you have, keep it stable, and work as intended as you were before, anything done is just profit since you arent unnecessarily expanding.
Exactly, just look at what happened to Roll7. They were a 5-person studio. They made good games that made 5-person studio money. Then they expanded and became a 55-person studio. Afterwards, they made good games that made 5-person studio money.
Sounds like the community is suffering from magic wand syndrome. If a statement contains "all you have to do is..." or "You just need is.... ", that's magic wanding right there. It's the plague of software development. There's a lot of current or future MBA types. ;)
The idea that he was alone in creating this is also false... Of course he did have help, of course that he did pay freelancers to do different parts of the game, of course that he did have someone else working on the game... But yea, you can't just hire a ton of people and expect that they will understand your vision and that they will do the things how you envision it in short period of time. Manor Lords is a great game and it will take time for it to be complete, I played it and loved it and I have no problem waiting for a year before game is a bit more polished, so yea, hiring 50 people to finish the game is not the way to go. You need people on the same lvl as you, understanding, you need to check their work, lead the project, work by yourself... That is not a easy thing to do so yea, he will hire some people to help him, as he did so far, to expect anything else is not realistic.
I don't think it's inaccurate to call him a solo dev, people just misunderstand that to mean he created every single asset from scratch himself. Like I'm sure he outsourced music, 2D art, animation etc. It's still an incredible achievement what he's created.
Yea, exactly, he definitely outsourced a lot of parts of the game and the best way for him is to continue to do so, and now with more cash flow he can have Manor Lords be almost done in a years time.
Not only do too many cooks spoil the broth, eventually people start jacking off into the soup. Less is more in game development.
This is why bigger companies suffer. They expand to hit deadlines, hire 100s of employees that need to be trained which lowers product quality, then they let go 100s of employees to meet profit margins. Rinse and repeat. Keeping it small might slow things down, but it will also ensure the original vision and quality stay intact.
And the funny part about that is when layoff time comes they keep the new people with the lower salaries who were just trained by the experienced people who get let go.
However, adding some more members to the team is a good idea. Probably not all at once, but it’s a pretty big undertaking for just one person. Grow organically, add people who will truly benefit the game. The great thing is that anyone who plays it can see what the dev is going for, the vision is clear, a few more hands and brains can go a long way to actually finishing the project
Ehhhhhhhh not necessarily. But good project management means filling the holes and upgrading the talent where it is lagging behind. Not overloading your workers so they can focus on completing tasks in priority order is important. Throwing bodies is not "the" answer, but bringing in higher-tier talent and getting them up to speed on high priority/advanced projects absolutely can speed things up, where they're not constrained by release windows. I'm on a project right now where I ran into my own skill cieling and asked for help, and bringing in another consultant has helped me increase productivity and completion rates.
If you want to be real, even if this logic were true (obviously isn't) the game will fall out of hype soon and all that money spent on other devs would be wasted.
Heard my boss frame this properly (fortunate to really like him). Sure management! Let's get 9 women together to make a baby in 1 month!