Continually rebuilding teams means loss of wisdom and experience
The cycle of firing excess developers as a project is completed needs to stop, says Double Fine's Tim Schafer.
Lionhead, Funcom, and Bioware have all fallen afoul of this corporate strategy that hires new developers as development escalates, then cuts staff as soon as a project is completed.
But while this may make a certain kind of business sense, it is far from the best practice for creating a smoothly running game studio.
"One of the most frustrating things about the games industry is that teams of people come together to make a game, and maybe they struggle and make mistakes along the way, but by the end of the game they’ve learned a lot — and this is usually when they are disbanded,” Schafer told Wired.
“Instead of being allowed to apply all those lessons to a better, more efficiently produced second game, they are scattered to the winds and all that wisdom is lost."
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In the end, this means the cycle of hiring and firing is a costly process that means studios don't get the most out of their employees.
Schafer had to make this call after the completion of Double Fine's first game, Psychonauts.
“After Psychonauts, we could have laid off half our team so that we’d have more money and time to sign Brütal Legend,” he said.
“But doing so would have meant breaking up a team that had just learned how to work well together. And what message would that have sent to our employees? It would say that we’re not loyal to them, and that we don’t care.”
“Which would make them wonder,” Schafer continued. “’Why should we be loyal to this company?’ If you’re not loyal to your team you can get by for a while, but eventually you will need to rely on their loyalty to you and it just won’t be there.”
Unfortunately, this sort of hire/fire mentality is not exclusive to game development.
The follow-on to my current contract, in a different industry, was won by another company which underbid in order to gain a foothold. Compounding the problem is that none of the key personnel will sign on with the winner for substantially less money than they're currently making, nor is the winner willing to team with any of the existing companies. That's leading to the inevitable "brain drain" as existing people with years of knowledge in this specific arena move on to other projects.
Any incoming employees of the winner, provided there actually are any, will have nobody to transition duties or knowledge from. It will take them an extraordinary long amount of time to come to grips with what's already in place, and then progress from there.
But, at least the awardee saved some money, and that's all that matter, right?
Same thing occurs on technical support contracts.
The practice DOES make sense... for short-term gains/reduction of loss...
But the time taken to get the new teams up to speed/trained/etc, in ANY industry is a cost/waste of time.
Keeping the employees on for a month, or so, while not full-ramped may be cheaper than going through the hiring/training process.
There is a real danger of talented people changing there career path with this process. Nobody wants to keep moving there family around every couple of years. The industry will eventually be full of graduates, with a lot of experienced people leaving.
I am such a person who has left with 12 years experience in the industry. It's not hard to find a job with more security than the games industry these days and thats saying something!!!!!!!!
