GaaS can be very profitable due to the ability to charge recurringly. This is a much more complicated product. Attempting this without the proper skill sets has contributed to the decline of AAA.
Mike, I really appreciate your comment. It can get a bit quiet here on substack. I'm sure I come across as very white collar but I used to do some assistant work for an architect and I loved it. I also used to do asbestos abatement supervision which required me to climb 15+ meters up walls without a rope or safety to make sure corners that were not easily visible passed the black glove test. A lot goes into making and maintaining a building. The construction workers and tradies work very hard, but without an architect there to make sure it all is built respecting the physics and engineering principles, that structure will be unsafe. Having an unsafe structure is worse than having no structure.
You don't come as white collar. I appreciate you responding. I love reading your stuff. Deeply satisfying stuff. It's very different to the shallow mainstream and boring F2P often complete nonsense.
Yes and engineers are the ones to take much more credit for the details. There is an old industry joke “engineer knows everything about something but architect knows something about everything”. I spend most of my childhood around construction site with father. The power dynamics in this profession are super fluid. Architects are often portrayed and seen as the guys with heads in clouds. You do need high level as well as low level planning. It’s insane how bonkers things get with early testing, lean startup and MVP methodologies. Never heard this in construction. Let’s built MVP of this house first. It’s almost dangerous. But I do see how they are crucial in software development when applied currently. Just not in design. Most of the mvp design is just unfinished foundations.
Well now that I have my own company it becomes even more clear why an investor might want to see a small/ugly version of what I want to build so I can generate some metrics to support my assertions as to how something might work and how consumers will react to it. A lot of discipline is required to make a simple version of a lofty thing that is in your head. That brief golden age at Wargaming when they went from 40 to 4000 employees in 2 years, with the think tank and a desire to experiment on pro-consumer technologies and designs just has not been repeated again at WG or anywhere else in the industry in the following 10 years. Which... is why almost no design progress has been made in the industry in 10 years.
If you look at how the military does things, and how seriously they take the R&D process and how they budget for it, you can see how they get things done rapidly. Their business is too competitive to do anything slow. Computer games seem very competitive to me, but we don't make games with the same sort of discipline that other industries apply when they face competition. I think they want to copy Hollywood, but be treated like tech companies. We may make things that look like Hollywood, but we aren't Hollywood and Hollywood's business models are outdated and losing money because of it.
That’s funny. It’s exactly what I said on LinkedIn couple of days ago. We are not Hollywood and we have a long way to go. When it comes to understanding the craft, logistics but more importantly player we have shotguns approach to almost every problem.
And again I agree with you. R&D in games is just hilarious. While I love prototyping it’s not a solution to everything. Great and long teram systems have design and model then prototype. Those guys in Hypercasual publishing tested thousands of prototypes every month. They know it doesn’t lead to long term games. Voodoo has made hard pivot from this approach. The rest is still in identity crisis or worst.
Yes it seems that military, aviation and medicine have far greater understanding of R&D importance. Not sure how we are gonna get out of this.
I’m glad u’ve used that example with an architect. As someone who has a degree in it and yet working in game industry, I can confirm that it is spot on. Even in civil engineering, planning is a key and super detailed. As one famous architect use to say “eraser is 1000x cheaper than a sledgehammer” can’t remember if it was Rogers or someone else.
Mike, I really appreciate your comment. It can get a bit quiet here on substack. I'm sure I come across as very white collar but I used to do some assistant work for an architect and I loved it. I also used to do asbestos abatement supervision which required me to climb 15+ meters up walls without a rope or safety to make sure corners that were not easily visible passed the black glove test. A lot goes into making and maintaining a building. The construction workers and tradies work very hard, but without an architect there to make sure it all is built respecting the physics and engineering principles, that structure will be unsafe. Having an unsafe structure is worse than having no structure.
You don't come as white collar. I appreciate you responding. I love reading your stuff. Deeply satisfying stuff. It's very different to the shallow mainstream and boring F2P often complete nonsense.
Yes and engineers are the ones to take much more credit for the details. There is an old industry joke “engineer knows everything about something but architect knows something about everything”. I spend most of my childhood around construction site with father. The power dynamics in this profession are super fluid. Architects are often portrayed and seen as the guys with heads in clouds. You do need high level as well as low level planning. It’s insane how bonkers things get with early testing, lean startup and MVP methodologies. Never heard this in construction. Let’s built MVP of this house first. It’s almost dangerous. But I do see how they are crucial in software development when applied currently. Just not in design. Most of the mvp design is just unfinished foundations.
Well now that I have my own company it becomes even more clear why an investor might want to see a small/ugly version of what I want to build so I can generate some metrics to support my assertions as to how something might work and how consumers will react to it. A lot of discipline is required to make a simple version of a lofty thing that is in your head. That brief golden age at Wargaming when they went from 40 to 4000 employees in 2 years, with the think tank and a desire to experiment on pro-consumer technologies and designs just has not been repeated again at WG or anywhere else in the industry in the following 10 years. Which... is why almost no design progress has been made in the industry in 10 years.
If you look at how the military does things, and how seriously they take the R&D process and how they budget for it, you can see how they get things done rapidly. Their business is too competitive to do anything slow. Computer games seem very competitive to me, but we don't make games with the same sort of discipline that other industries apply when they face competition. I think they want to copy Hollywood, but be treated like tech companies. We may make things that look like Hollywood, but we aren't Hollywood and Hollywood's business models are outdated and losing money because of it.
That’s funny. It’s exactly what I said on LinkedIn couple of days ago. We are not Hollywood and we have a long way to go. When it comes to understanding the craft, logistics but more importantly player we have shotguns approach to almost every problem.
And again I agree with you. R&D in games is just hilarious. While I love prototyping it’s not a solution to everything. Great and long teram systems have design and model then prototype. Those guys in Hypercasual publishing tested thousands of prototypes every month. They know it doesn’t lead to long term games. Voodoo has made hard pivot from this approach. The rest is still in identity crisis or worst.
Yes it seems that military, aviation and medicine have far greater understanding of R&D importance. Not sure how we are gonna get out of this.
*applied correctly. I don’t understand why this platform doesn’t allow comment edits. Sorry for my english.
I’m glad u’ve used that example with an architect. As someone who has a degree in it and yet working in game industry, I can confirm that it is spot on. Even in civil engineering, planning is a key and super detailed. As one famous architect use to say “eraser is 1000x cheaper than a sledgehammer” can’t remember if it was Rogers or someone else.
Sorry I should have used the reply button properly so that you would know I responded.
No worries at all.