Higher quality needn't mean bigger budgets - Capron
And Arkane COO believes more companies are favouring smarter working methods in development
Arkane Studios COO Romuald Capron has told GamesIndustry.biz that while the scale of triple-A development budgets has ballooned to huge proportions, there are smarter ways to work on projects that means companies needn't add "tonnes of guys to your team".
Speaking in an interview at this year's Game Connection event in Lyon, Capron also expressed a belief that more and more studios were looking at ways to maintain "reasonable budgets," questioning whether the market could sustain the current rate of increase.
"It's a personal point of view, but I'd say that there are other ways to grow our market other than just forever increasing our development budgets," he said. "I think there are smart ways to increase the quality - and even the innovation - in your game that doesn't add tonnes of guys to your team.
"At some point, I'd say that hiring a lot of extra people has a negative effect - because you need more management, you have less productivity, and I'd say you lose some innovation."
He went on to explain that Arkane, previously responsible for Dark Messiah of Might & Magic as well as a significant portion of work on BioShock 2 - and which was recently added to ZeniMax's growing stable of developers - tended to favour outsourcing certain elements of a project's work and only retain a "core of senior, experienced and talented people" internally.
"I think that's a good way to maintain reasonable budgets, and I think a lot of companies are coming round to this way of working right now," he continued. "They're realising that having 200 people in a studio - okay, it can work for ten months of scheduled development, but is it the way to make a triple-A game?
"Maybe they could re-organise and say, okay, let's keep to a three-year schedule again, but with less people - and more polishing at the end? At some point I'm not sure the markets can follow as fast as the development costs."
The full interview with Capron, in which he also talks about the reasoning behind the company's deal with ZeniMax, plus his thoughts on the future of core game audiences, is available now.
In terms of art, the best and cheapest method to work is a collection of experienced and trusted freelance artists who can work to a high quality quickly and on flexible contracts. This generally costs the same as outsourcing in terms of quality vs cost and because they are on sight production is faster, not to mention the overlooked cost of internal time sorting out outsource related art. The biggest problem is finding these people at the right time, even getting these individuals can be a very time consuming process.
One of the biggest points I would like to highlight is that outsourcing only becomes cheaper when you don't make half your work force redundant after a project is over, putting that into perspective it is not the cost that is the problem. Its the flexibility, freelance artists who work on sight on short term contracts are a much better solution. The problem is finding and getting them.
Most of the time it makes more sense to hire talented people in the West or Europe for a small time than big teams in India or China (Arkane did that very well on several big AAA games). Actually it works quite well for us too (we are doing a lot of tech consulting for bigger studios, for instance on Kinect).
You need a core of good experienced people and outsource work as is needed.
You don't need to have a team that expands and contracts on a yearly basis.
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Nik Love-Gittins on 30th November 2010 2:42pm
We see it a lot in the localization of AAA titles: it's not always the ones with more resources that work in the most efficient manner.
It works for some better than for others and at the end of the day you have to do what works for the specific studio.
Most car-makers don't make their own tyres. In a sense, yes, they have less control over tyre-making than if they processed rubber themselves, but this is easily outweighed by the advantages of leaving it to people who know all about tyres. The car-maker has more important things to worry about and would be bad (or at least hopelessly innefficient) at tyre-making.
That, amongst all the other componentization (real word?) of car-making, is why we have the absolute miracle (and if you think about the overall complexity, it's truly a miracle) of buying a new car for as little as $10000. Can you imagine the cost of building a working modern car if a single company had to make everything themselves, plastics, electronics, fabrics, engines, etc. ? That's pretty much where a lot of developers are today, but it'll change as the industry develops - we're still very young.
But management has to be sure that a good balance is found when it comes to hiring. Not enough people on a project can cause the senior developers to be over worked and over stretched. Being seniors they can probably handle this anyways but where I caution is in the fact that any studio that wants to continue to be successful will need to hire new, "up and coming" talent that will offer new ideas and new ways of thinking. But they need to be watched carefully by the seniors, if the seniors are overworked, mentoring falls to the side, potentially causing many problems.
I don't think outsourcing is the answer, but general resourcefulness and efficiency.
I won't pretend to know the ins and outs of all companies, but you see some where budgets are allowed to spiral out of control and the product still disappoints, or turns out Ok but fails to make enough money. Some companies (as we've seen reports of) allow millions to be spent only for the game to be cancelled indefinitely.