Full article here: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/artic...-are-clearly-not-working-the-way-they-used-to
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I think her point is that you can no longer feel safe as a permanent employee in AAA development. Despite record profits, the publishers will still cut you loose at the end of the project to save themselves money to afford making the next game."I personally needed a break from it, but in that break, it's been an opportunity to say I'm not even sure it makes sense to do it that way," Hennig says. "I think we keep doing it that way because we have these established companies and teams, and that's a resource, an asset you don't want to just throw away. But on the other hand, we're seeing news stories left and right where developers are folding and publishers are laying off hundreds of people. It feels like something feels inevitable, because the cost of development and keeping all these people on staff, especially in expensive areas, just doesn't feel sustainable."
"There are all these red flags, canary-in-the-mine moments where things are clearly not working the way they used to"The topic is especially relevant as we speak, with much of the event buzzing about the previous day's news that Activision Blizzard would be laying off 800 people despite posting record financial results.
"I feel like there are all these red flags, canary-in-the-mine moments where things are clearly not working the way they used to, or not working," Hennig says.
As for what might work, Hennig looks to the TV and film industries as a model that makes some sense, as it relies less on in-house production and more on heavy use of external contractors.
"Obviously that would require a big sea change in the industry -- probably towards unionization, too -- but you would have a lot more external partners or freelance developers as part of a team, do more things as distributed development rather than have everything in-house," Hennig says. "It would allow for a lot more flexibility rather than feeling that constant pressure, that churn of salaries.
"And I think it would allow us a little more downtime, too. A lot of what we talk about with crunch pressure is not just the ambition of the titles, it's also just the fact that these people are employees. So we said, 'Thank God' when DLC became a thing, because there might be this huge dip of downtime where you might need 10 people but you have 300, so what are you going to do? They're employees. Now we can shuffle those people onto DLC content, but even then that creates this crunch churn on the staff."
While not having large internal teams might help solve quality-of-life issues, Hennig notes that it raises other questions that still need answers.
"It used to be that we were all jacks of all trades, almost. You kind of had to be""If we're in a studio system but we're all free agents, what would that look like? This is all speculative, because we're still living in a world where big companies have these giant staffs," Hennig says. "But even so, we never really used to do external development. Everything we did was more-or-less in-house. And more and more -- particularly for art, visual effects, and things like that -- we are working with external vendors a lot. It wouldn't be possible to make these big, impressive games if we weren't.
"So it feels like there's already a move in that direction. Whether it just becomes that we still have big teams and more external partners or smaller teams and more things are externalized remains to be seen."
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