Running Out Of Money

Julia Fields wrote an excellent article for Sunday Herald. Article goes in to the difficulties that British game industry is facing. I won’t provide any summary, but discuss the topic freely, adding my own opinions.

Key problem is the profitability of the industry. To improve the financials, companies have jumped the trend of cutting fixed costs. This means less property and more outsourcing, with these measures, companies don’t need to tie down so much capital and they can have more flexible operation. These moves follow the lessons learned in movie industry.

Underlying difficulty for obtaining profitability is the nature of game industry. Projects can be long and they need all the staff in the company. When project comes to an end, there is typically some free time, before new project can be found. Running the operation during these times of no project to work with are very difficult to manage. Therefore outsourcing is the answer. Core group can be small and go on no matter the times, if things are getting busy, no problem just call McBain.

The industry will towards direction, where everybody has specialties. These specialist companies will be on hire and will hire extra talent to meet project demands. To me this looks like game programmer of the future will do quite standardized job over and over again. There is less room for experimentalism and artistic trials. As game programming is still rather difficult area to master, it makes me wonder how would people like to program games if it is always the same task that they are performing, why not go to financial software that is not so demanding and work hours are tolerable...