YouBet said:
Scruffy said:
My wife was talking about this last night.
She has a former co-worker who ended up working at Activision.
Ends up the people on his team, while producing some great stuff, generally only worked 15hrs a week.
While it sucks to be impacted, I think companies are really opening their eyes and thinking they should be getting more for what they pay people.
This could explain why it takes 6 years to make a game like mentioned above. That is absurd in my uninformed game making opinion.
Blizzard has always allowed their projects to incubate for a long time. Typical development cycle for a AAA varies, but in general, games these days are so complex from just about every standpoint that it just takes a long time. That 15 hrs a week is anecdotal and in my experience is an outlier as far as what game makers typically work.
I mean, the current game I work on is a fairly straightforward mobile game, and we're still only soft launched in a couple of territories after 3 years of work on it, and that's with all internal developers working full time plus contractors from various outsourcing. Putting out a console or PC game (let's even ignore cross-console releases) has a whole additional array of complexity in just about every aspect.
It's also important to note that often, a lot of the upfront time is preproduction, which is done by a small team doing things like planning, concepting, storyboarding, prototyping, and such to ensure the project is set up to succeed.
