Comment on Anon is a game dev

• Dudewitbow@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Kojima is an example of giving dev too much freedom that its basically further putting you into the red had he been strung along for the ride during metal gear solid 5’s development and the money spent optimizing fox engine. Theres a fine line between endless crunch time/micromanaging, and letting your devs do work.

  to put up a few examples, The upcoming Metroid prime 4 is an example when a company gives devs too much freedom. The original japanese studio didn’t know what hte fuck they were doing, so Nintendo pulled them off hte project, and gave their project to retro, who was working on the “Project harmony” game, which looked very bad, to the point that nintendo was fed up with the hands off approach and Kensuke Tanabe reinserted himself back as director to get prime’s development back into production getting Prime 4 out later this year.

  Part of the reason for the huge microsoft layoff that happened a few days ago is mainly because of microsofts more handsoff approach they gave their developers. they gave ninja theory 5 years to develop Hellblade 2 (which is a relatively long time). They gave Compulsion games 5+ years to develop South of midnight. neither game remotely probably paid of their development cost, in juxtaposition to a studio like Obsidian, who has in the same time frame, released 5 different games, some arguably more expansive than the previous 2 studios games, due to being well managed.

  and I’m not really pointing fingers here, but keep in mind, its not solely due to unsustainable growth/enshittification and treating devs like shit and endless crunch time causing this problem. It’s mainly lack of better people/resource management because there are countless numbers of studios who get significantly more time than they should on a project with not much to show for it.

  source