Let’s say a pretty big game developer released a pretty below par game that didn’t live up to promises or expectations.
Why wouldn’t they ask for help fixing it? Is it possible to hire another company or freelancers to help smooth the game out?
Surely it would be better for the company to hold their hands up, save face and get the game fixed ASAP. Not to mention if it was a fairly profitable game already, money wouldn’t be a problem.
In: Technology
There’s a book called No Silver Bullet that lays out in equation form why more people =/= faster Development. Basically for every person you add to development the communication paths grow algebraically. There’s a tipping point where you’re ass deep in a shit show. Or shitski showski if you will.
Having a small team of senior developers who understand the entire project deeply > having multiple specialized teams. Unless you have an utter rockstar tech lead who is a Golden communicator.
For an arbitrary example, I recently completed a much hyped video game with many bugs and patchwork storytelling. It all made sense when I saw the size of their credit roll. Too many people involved can kill competent, timely updates across teams. Communication is likely the culprit of how disjointedly the game debuted.
Source: agile IT project Mgr turned knowledge director
Software development isn’t that simple. When you have something as massive and complex as a video game it can take months for a new hire to get comfortable enough with the code that they can contribute without continuous oversight of the employees who know the code.
That’s months of paying and training new talent just to come in and try to fix up your game, when the problem usually isn’t the talent but the time they’re expected to fix bugs in.
You can sometimes hire specialists if you know where the code is failing but can’t figure out why, but the problem can sometimes branch across many different systems and the issue might come from somewhere you wouldn’t expect. Which is why it can take so long to solve a single bug, and why you need people already comfortable with the code base to be the ones working on it.
Because it doesn’t happen asap. Hiring externals would first require a lot of time in reading and understanding the code. Let alone fixing it if your game was already years in development and you couldn’t fix it yourself as a highly recognized triple AAA company. It takes way too much time and money and might not even be the best solution.
There’s a ramp up time working on a software project. Learning how everything works together is a pretty big task. That knowledge is gained organically for existing staff, but needs to be taught for new hires.
Beyond that, you can have too many cooks in they kitchen. If two people are working on bugs related to the same thing in the game, they risk causing more bugs because their fixes conflict with one another.
They already have people in their company who are paid to fix bugs.
Hiring new people wouldn’t speed it up because you have to take the time to introduce them to the code, explain how the game is supposed to work, make sure they work well alongside existing staff, train them with any unique software you use, and so on and so on.
Much better to just let the people you already pay to do that job do their job
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