that studio name is a little on the nose isn’t it?
1 Like
it’s true that it’s hard to scale actual functioning cooperatives and by all accounts they really committed and did it right the first time, so I think there’s an objective case that they weighed the alternatives and took them seriously before deciding that they really wanted to make a game that needed an asset farm…
but it’s obviously still depressing
1 Like
i would have glanced over it if it wasnt for the company name. no one that works in games can actually resist how much money success brings so i expected dead cells to do this eventually… but its on par with amazon lumberyard
3 Likes
1 Like
When you have to defend and justify your every idea to each and every member of the team, you have to be very motivated
Filby pointed towards the concept of “permanent battles,” where Motion Twin’s zero hierarchy model, in which bosses are made irrelevant and everyone has a voice in a creative decisions regardless of their expertise, as “a game of persuasion” and “really taxing.” He pointed towards moments, without specifics, where parts of the team would be “blindsided” when a decision that had once been a “yes” would become a “no” for “uncertain reasons.”
All teams get much, much harder above 5 or 7 people as mind-meld inevitably disintegrates, and I don’t doubt their structure made it more challenging, but they’re fooling themselves if they think they won’t still be spending 70% of their time persuading across disciplines.
You get almost nothing if you order someone to work on something they believe in. The alternative might be an endless slog (I have certain conversations, identically, four times a week), but it actually produces work that people believe in.
Not to mention how often engaging in strenuous debate reveals that the idea from the top was wrong wrong wrong and that fight just made the game better.
9 Likes
“We reward talent and pay people who are extremely good at their jobs more, which makes it easier for us to recruit compared to Motion Twin,” said Filby, “where you sometimes have awkward conversations with people: ‘Yeah, your base salary will be a third of what you could get in London. But if we blow it out of the water, you’ll be rolling in it!’ can be a tough sell for seniors [workers with lots of professional experience] with families who need stability.”
I think this is the toughest part of running a co-op; it basically means you are only offering competitive salaries to junior workers. So it’s a great model for a team composed entirely of juniors, or if you’ve got some senior founders who want to train up a new crew and are willing to take the hit, but hiring becomes much, much more difficult in perpetuity.
2 Likes
On hierarchical development teams, the lower down the hierarchy you go, the better the ideas often are and the better they can be justified. When you have a rigid hierarchy in place, those at the top never have to explain shit, while those at the bottom have to gather copious evidence, construct air-tight arguments, and explain it all to everybody around them constantly, with a 5% chance their idea gets taken up and a 95% chance their explanations backfire and everybody just gets annoyed at them for taking up time.
It sounds like the people in charge at “Evil Empire” were tired of having to justify bad ideas and just want to rule by fiat. That persuasion they find so tiresome will still be a factor for everyone not sitting at the top.
4 Likes
It’s a tradeoff; you have perspective at the top, but lack the details. At the bottom, you know the inner workings, but might be offloading work onto others or making decisions that hurt the product as a whole.
I think you optimally do two things: One, you focus the specificity of ideas to match the place in the hierarchy. From the director level, ideas should be focused on broad direction and specific feedback. Two, you encourage discussion and broad skills among the higher-levels and reinforce that they need to be pushing information down, so the specific implementers don’t step in the wrong direction. And then they need to push concerns up.
It’s a lot of information to move around! And people will always feel excluded and start to feel resentful, that they’re left out, that they aren’t informed, that their voice isn’t heard. And I think a large organization’s primary work is mitigating that, but it will always be an unnatural configuration for humans, who are best suited to creative work in groups under a dozen.
1 Like
the organizational structure of the company I work at is such that the leadership just makes big broad design decisions unilaterally - they decided the entire setting and plot and design of the next project before we had even finished the one that just released
I can say with utmost confidence that I have never been less interested in game dev than I have been with this company
That’s the really tough part – that initial concept stage is so fragile I don’t think it can survive beyond a dozen people or so. And that work is inevitably front-loaded on design; will sound have anything to do for the first year or so when things can shift so radically?
If you were a small team entire than you could represent everyone at the table during concept, but larger?
What do you think they should have done?
this is a really fascinating case study because afaik it’s one of the only functioning co-ops that actually shipped a largeish popular game, and it’s also incorporated in a jurisdiction that has an actually semi-widespread functioning model for co-ops other than purely as a pitched battle for worker ownership as an ideological good (even though it is obviously also that regardless), so it really feels like they decided they just couldn’t make videogame labour scale beyond what they were already doing, and they wanted to scale. I think this might actually be the point at which you have to realize you can’t do the thing without giving up what’s more important.
1 Like
-
there’s not even a sense of caring about our creative input at the company, it’s literally just the work we do and that’s it. one of the easier ways to represent people during concept is to like, just have them make the concepts? split off into a bunch of different teams and have a game jam? people pitch ideas/prototypes and vote? meetings with various members of the team that aren’t management? my frustrations aren’t with them ultimately not following up on things I propose, it’s that they literally aren’t asking me for my input on anything - I feel like I’m just receiving commands to implement a thing and suddenly the sound appears in the game. you asking me what I think they should have done is asking more of my opinion about things than I have literally ever been asked here
-
sound always needs to be at the table at the beginning because otherwise everyone forgets about it
3 Likes
more broadly - the idea of having to scale game dev is so frustrating to me because it is doing to games what capitalism is doing to the planet (hint: it’s A MURDER)
the vast, vast, vast majority of the attention people pay to games is consolidated on like 5% of the games that come out, and every one of those 5 percent requires hundreds of people to work unpaid overtime for months so that they can go unnoticed while the 5 people at the top make hella money and get all the attention
we don’t need video game labor to scale. video games don’t need to scale. they never needed scaling. if having a conversation about a creative decision derails your development workflow such that you would rather not have that conversation, I WOULD RATHER NOT PLAY THE THING YOU’RE MAKING BECAUSE YOU’RE PROBABLY NOT THINKING HARD ENOUGH ABOUT YOUR CREATIVE DECISIONS
11 Likes
and the shitty thing is that it’s totally possible to scale in a healthy way - you just do it over a really long period of time adding people and resources at a rate that lets you understand how those additions can be accommodated without exploitation
like, how can anyone look at what’s happened with basically every tech company in the last 10 years and say that massive expansion justified by the need to work really quickly without restrictions is a good idea
I understand there are realities about markets and labor that require people to have to move more quickly - I wonder if they understand what created those realities in the first place
there isn’t even a creative direction or statement for evil empire outside of “more dead cells”
I feel like it’s still possible to have a coop where profits are shared but authority is distributed according to the project’s needs.
1 Like
You could probably run a coop according to Murray Bookchin’s idea of a communalist direct democracy – there are no hierarchies of domination, but there are hierarchies of decision making on a per-project basis. Everyone votes to “elect” someone who will administer a project, gathering their team and making sure everything runs smoothly. But that elected person can’t fire people or do any other kind of significant “disciplinary action”, and can be instantly recalled by a simple majority vote at any time.
Hierarchies can be used effectively when organizing a project or an institution, but the problems really start when they become dominance hierarchies and the people lower down have to obey the people higher up for fear of losing their livelihood.
7 Likes
Yeah, my belief is that creative collaboration can’t exist beyond a certain (small) size and that all efforts to grow beyond that necessarily involve squashing the creative input of everyone you’re adding.
Even the examples we love of Japanese games with strong visions are achieved by being much more dictatorial than the western developers and subsuming many more decisions in a small core team at the expense of everyone down below.
My understanding is that it’s very gradiated, but with some obvious breakpoints. Growing from 20 to 30 and then 50 can be semi-successful at maintaining a coherent culture, but the team isn’t nearly as tight. Going up to 100 is basically impossible without forming a clear leadership caste. Going above 150 means multiple buildings and extreme delegation, and no amount of careful hiring can save it.
I think games are stuck in an odd production balance between films’ tiny pre-production crew and massive short-term production crew, and software’s steady team sizes. Even small games have almost double the work in the back half of the project.
It seems like there’s only two paths:
- The studio scales up at the end of production, which means we need a strong union and protections for short-termers who are not expected to be on the project for its entire life, or
- The studio rolls onto multiple games, so core concept and other pre-production happens with a small staff while the bulk of the studio is supporting the previous game, and other variations like: contract work, 2 projects that trade off the bulk of production work between them, etc. Unfortunately the squeeze on mid-budget projects and the production cost arms race has basically killed this model.
2 Likes
I think it’s totally fine for creative authority to be centralized. I don’t think the economic relationships have to reflect that at all.
7 Likes
yes in principle you can be a worker-owner without being a worker-owner-ideaperson and some people will inevitably do more than others except for when someone wants those relationships to change and your rule structures haven’t anticipated that
i agree and it’s frustrating that 100% correct ideas around unions and labor practices are increasingly misapplied to basically argue that corporate liberal art-by-committee is the aesthetic analogue to equitable distribution of economic resources. but i also worry about the feasibility of implementing coop-equitable creative hierarchies for labor-intensive art like a videogame under an aggressively right wing external economic structure like the one that exists now. it’s not that i don’t think it’s right or possible, it just has a lot stacked against it. communism soon 
8 Likes