GameFeelings

A big con against using Agile with Continues Deployment in gamedev is for me the question: ‘is it feasible as a business model’? Because at the end of the day the amount of work put into continues updates must be profitable to be able to run a business.

This is an article in the ‘Behind the scenes’ category where I share my personal experience developing games professionally.

The case at hand

I am currently thinking a lot about how to continue in developing Find the Gnome, but with a lot more ‘Agile’ and User-centered in this try. I am a professional software developer doing Agile/DevOps/Google design sprints/CI&CD/Metrics driven development/what-else, and I think this is one of my strong points that I should emphasis while developing games. (See my other blogs for more on these subjects)

Recently a Youtube of GDC 2019 caught my attention (thanks google suggestions!) It is a case study from Nick Popovich (Monomi Park), explaining his success. These are the points he made:

• Keep your game essential (refine on it). And aim these essentials to provide an experience that is able to sell over time.
• It is all about concurrent players (online, or offline) that are using your game. By using it they are advertising it (through conscious or unconscious updates to friends that they are liking this game)
• It revolves around a continues game update cycle that keep the ‘concurrent users’ train going (and accelerating, if possible).

His points align very well with my Agile approach to gamedev I want to take.

The cons

However, I spotted some flaws already. For me these flaws aren’t that of an issue, but time will tell.

• Nick Popovich is making money using this approach, but will others? Or was he just lucky?
• You can’t just keep updating games, you will run out of money eventually. Or, on the contrary, you can’t just stop updating your game if you had just 1 bad month. In this talk the motivation behind the decisions sounds a lot like voodoo magic: the cause and causality of things aren’t analysed well.
  A start could be in the Q&A part of the YouTube (https://youtu.be/DTvBgmNL-p0?t=3533) where Nick Popovich gives a rough guide on how he uses sales data to space out content updates. I think the ‘something’-like-a-service business model (through all kind of business) are in a maturing stage right now, and more guides on this subject are going to hit the markets in the coming years.

Next

Well, see it for yourself in this YouTube vid and decide if it is worth trying.

In my daily life I am a senior software engineer, practicing the latest insights on Agile development. I have seen many business software development in organisations, small and big, old or brand-new (even startups).

But I personally don’t see the fruits of Agile development in game development…

This is an article in the ‘Behind the scenes’ category where I share my personal experience developing games professionally.

TLDR: The byproduct of non-Agile development (long development times, bad attuning to consumers) was always there, but its costs has increased so much that it is now unavoidable to start using Agile development methods.

What ‘Agile’?!

First a quick introduction to Agile development, as I perceive it. Because it is often used as a buzzword with few meaning left in it. Non-agile is the factory line: in advance you plan and rule out all odds, the actual work is thus repetitive and not requiring a lot of skills (although you can argue it can still require some practice… but that’s exactly the problem: no thinking involved). It is input driven: someone somewhere decides what has to happen, everything and everyone falls in line to execute on that. Everyone has a predetermined place and function. You don’t need trust, you need rules.

For me, Agile is the opposite of the factory line. When you are agile you think of what you want to achieve, and make that happen with respect to the current state of the world and the tools at hand. By building on trust, by being in connection with everyone, by embracing the unknown. I think this definition sounds idyllic. And I like it, because I think that’s how humans like to be.

To communicate or not, that is the question

But why all this Agile or non-Agile? Why bother with project methodologies anyway? Just build that game already!
Well, the following picture illustrates how a perfect world would look like. But look at all those connections. Wouldn’t it be great if we could build products in a world where all those connections between the content creators and consumers were flawless?

However from my own experience, all connections between humans suffer from communication issues. At least my communications do. This is the same picture, but now with the possible issues.

Communications in organisations

For me, a project management method is a tool that helps organisations cope with these communication issues. The non-Agile project methods, where almost all game developments methods belong, have the following characteristics:

• You prepare to make a good-enough product that is sell-able to the masses. (This was done to account for the increasing costs of production, and the consumers accepted it because any product was better than none product at all)
• You try to mitigate the communication risks by using experts to understand the market’s needs. (This was necessary because your goal was to make something that had maximal impact on as many people as possible, but don’t listen to the individual)
• You plan in advance with what to build for what cost/benefit. (Because you had to prepare a whole factory line, where profits comes from doing it as efficient as possible)
• You add a line hierarchy with narrow boundaries to manage your workers. (Because of all these activities, the organisation is like a machine where every gear has its place. But those gears can’t do more than they are ment for, for then the whole thing would turn out to be less efficient.)
• You use mass media and and deals with large selling companies to get your products to the consumers.

But times are changing. A lot of the problems the non-Agile methods accounted for have been minimized in other ways:

• Creators and consumers can find each other much more easily. (Much less need for all kinds of parties acting as the middle-man. The internet with platforms like Steam have brought both much more close together.)
• Costs of tooling is so much more lower. (You can work from home, get tooling on-demand without upfront payments.)
• Access to skills has changed radically. (Flex workers all over the world are available to you with specialized services.)
• Access to information has changed radically. (You can learn basic to advance skills using the internet (and time/practice) where previously the access was the limiting factor now our time is the only limiting factor.)

Blast from the past

The non-Agile methods come at a huge cost: the distance of the consumer to the creator is almost automatically enlarged, the time to respond to changes is in terms of quarters and years, and with each change large losses in productivity are unavoidable.

These costs of non-Agile are currently outweighing the benefits.

When I look at modern media, the social media, I see shout outs from gamers all over the world. These gamers spit on the side effects of non-Agile methods and demand change. So, besides the fact that the world is changing faster than ever, the costs of the non-Agile methods are becoming the real issue. Here is a video of a review pointing out issues with game updates that inspired me to write this blogpost:

we CAN do better

I believe in the game industrie. They are showing they want to change.
The rise of Indy development, introduction of DLC, beta releases have become ‘Early Access’, whole new models like micro transactions combined with games-as-a-service.

But is this change for the better? Does it address the underlying core issues?
One could argue that some of the late improvements are Agile development, especially the ‘games-as-a-service’ model. Because a lot of those games increase their features over time, thus start small and become great over time (or that’s their target).

But I think there is very few agile development going on here. No one listens to the consumer. Or when they do, their communication lines are clouded up with bad incentives…

There is some good though. I see signs of a few (mobile) game developer companies that are building games incrementally, continuously having a sell-able product, and closely listening to the consumer on what to build next.
But the majority, especially AAA development, still suffer from the big problems that non-Agile development has nowadays. (Don’t mention Early access, it is often executed so poorly it deserves a blogpost on its own.)

And I want to point out that there are always examples of games that try to approach the problem differently.
One of the latest games I found was ‘Realm Grinder‘. A nice little game that received a lot of good updates over its lifetime that all increased its value, even with game-play altering expansions. The trick here is that these kind of games rely on introducing changes in game-play during the play-time every so often to keep things interesting. I think more game types should try finding out if it is possible to incrementally add to the games without altering all previous build stuff.

And I think I should mention ‘No mans sky‘. Not because of the horrible communications before launch, but because of the big updates that got to the game FOR ALL USERS. Even for those users who did pay already. Many studio could take example from that. I think It increases the bonding gamers have with you. (And for the sunk-money-fallacy excuse: money still comes from new players that enjoy the experience, finding a live and well-patched game from a caring publisher.)

I want to close this blogpost with a how-to. How do I know if a decision is Agile or not? I try to think of it as follows.

The past is: thinking/planning in advance (official name: input driven). The future is: building what’s needed/consumer metrics driven (official name: output driven).

As a comment to the following video states:

‘I accidentally bought an Early Access movie at a Walmart a few months ago. The second act repeats seven times and half the dialogue is is unspoken text, but the story is basically alright. Maybe it’ll get better with future updates but I have no idea how to update dvds, please help.’

This is an article in the ‘Behind the scenes’ category where I share my personal experience developing games professionally.

In my opinion, Early access is just a reminiscent of a gone-by area of the style of thinking, trying to get the pro’s of something new but not wanting to let the old go. And yes, the end product is even less desirable than doing it ‘the old ways’. As pointed out by the reviewer in the video above.

Into the deep

Let me break down what I see is happening. And why I think that it is actually a nice try but executed miserably.

From what I have seen in gaming, game development is most of the time executed as a line projects. They describe a goal, get a few brilliant people to figure out how to get there so most things are accounted for (this is the important part of line thinking: smart work preparation, dumb work execution), create a few development teams to execute on the plan, and deliver all the goods at the set date.

This seemed to work well in the past times. But I know for a fact that is a fallacy. There were always signs that it wasn’t the best development method. But they did stick to it because.. because.
Back then there was no real incentive to change. 30 years ago the entrance fee to the gaming industry was very high: you needed connections everywhere to get something build for the right platform and get it published. A few knew how this trick was done, where the lucky first, and could then reign on their thrones for ages.

So?

Well, I think line-thinking is not the optimal approach when creating things. It suffers from a lot of problems. The most obvious: if you’re half-way into the project, big chance you don’t have anything working yet. (Working as in: it could sell for some money) Some less essential parts can be finished, but you need all parts together for it to be ‘the thing’ as specified at the start.
(Read my article on Agile vs non-Agile game development for more about those problems)

It is exactly this issue that early access has: it is a product that only functions as a whole, but someone decided to declare a few parts ‘optional’ and release it anyway.

but planning is everything?!

Don’t get me wrong, I get it on the business side. You want to plan in advance to know how the whole game plays out. And that planning then gives you the (although false) hopes that you have something worthy to invest in.

I like to see it from the consumer perspective. There is a real world out here: people’s tastes changes over time. One year your game is the ultimate, next year no-one plays your genre anymore. And that’s a problem in an era where games take 3 to 5 years to develop.

From my combined thoughts of how things have worked out, I understand the early access move. If a game company had plannen a big game IP, and suddenly sees diminished interests, they wanted to get a piece of the cake while they still can. So there is the early access release.

The early access move became relevant in the last years because there is an increasing pressure to deliver. Gaming has gained significantly increased exposure in the past 15 years. And I think most of the pressure on game studio’s is from the money-injecting side that want Return On Investment and low risks, and see a goldmine currently hitting the big veins they were after.

What do you oppose?

I am thinking about these things for a while now. They are really hard to solve, because there are so many things involved.

But wouldn’t it be great if a game was able to evolve? That you could make a small game first with a small user base and small scope, and iterate on that? (but without calling it sequel x?) I think everything is in place in the current times we live in to make this happen:

• Very good and easy update infrastructure everywhere (and that people nowadays are trained to accept updates as something good)
• Much better access to information (and training, and resources, etc)
• Multiple ways of monetizing (that people are accustomed to)
• Dev teams are up to this task (and almost expecting to develop that way)

The only important thing is to develop different than before. The planning-and-then-executing isn’t working any more, so get rid of it. Choose instead an Agile mindset (in contrary to the line-thinking). Aim your work and your organisation on the creation of needed stuff (the output).

I have had more thoughts on Agile related to gamedev. Check this blogpost.