A lot of gaming companies build on already built engines and some companies’ biggest revenue generators are several years old. However, we always hear about how stressful working for these companies usually is (unlike a lot of other tech jobs). Even casual mobile gaming companies like King and Playrix have multiple thousands of employees. Why are such big staffs necessary?
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I used to work at a major gaming company. It’s very labor intensive and requires lots of staff, developers, designers, artists, project managers and testers. Some games I worked on we would have 10+ graphic designers essentially drawing renderings of game characters and objects all day. Put it this way, in most games every object you see on the screen was hand drawn by a graphic designer originally, and then you have several developers to put everything together.
(I’ll miss a lot of obvious management roles… )
Coders to maintain and improve the game engines.
Coders to create and maintain in-house custom tools for all the other teams.
System Administrators (database, network, backups) so that everyone can work together.
Graphic designers of all levels to create and design all the graphic elements for the game.
CGI/Graphic artists to create all the specials effects.
Sound designers to create all the sound effects and soundtracks.
Game designers to create the actual game, including level designers, game play, puzzles.
Scenarists/Writers/Content creators to create dialog and back stories.
Animators to create all the animations including all the work in motion capture and also the cut scenes…
QA and testing: Test the game, create and maintain automated tests tools.
Web designers and web development for the game website.
Marketing, create the advertisements, game launch, coordinating with media and also youtubers and influencers (some game invite people for pre-launch parties and first hands on).
Merchandising, create all the goodies that will be sold on the web site.
Also
All the management staff, all the HR staff.
…
Ever see the credits list at the end of a movie? Hundreds or thousands of names. Developing a modern game is similar. You need artists, modelers, developers, voice talent, project mangers, testers, system admins, sustaining engineering (bugfixes for old games), etc.
I work for a Casual Mobile Games Company and we have 100’s of staff. In general these can be divided into 2 groups, those working on a specific game and those working to support the organisation. In the game specific group we have:
– Software Engineers: Writing code
– Quality Assurance (QA): Testing the game
– Product Designers: Defining features
– Technical Product Owners: Translating features into requirements for engineers
– Artists: Designing the feature
– Technical Artists: Translating designs into workable visuals
– Data Science: Analysing user behaviour and data to make more money
– Marketing: Making art and sales for users using data from Data Science
– Producers: Coordinating development
– Management: Coordinating everything and dealing with fires
And then you have central operations such as:
– Infrastructure: Server and Security
– Human Resources: Usual HR stuff
– Central Tech: Writing code for common functionality between games (such as game engines)
– Automation: Writing automated tests for the games
– Senior Leadership Team: Vision for the future
– Finance: Dealing with paying for things and people
We might have 4 or more games in development and each group might have 5-15 odd members each (5 developers, 5 QA, ect…). Even though some of our games were released 10 years ago we still work on frequent updates and on dealing with legal compliance and app store requirements…
It takes a lot of time and effort and most people wouldn’t believe the work that goes into free to play mobile games…
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