Brain/talent drain in game devs, how to stop it?

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Following the history of game devs like Square, Blizzard, Bioware, Arena Net, CD Projeckt Red, etc, a recurrent major issue seems is that talent leaves. The wisdom/game design choices/knowledge of these original devs is not passed on to their replacements, who then begin mishandling what they have inherited and squander fan goodwill. Actually this isn't a problem exclusive to games - it has been happening to all corporate franchises and TV shows since the mid 20th century. The writers and producers who are invisible to the audience are the first to become dissatisfied and leave a TV show leading to its decline, and by the time the visible actors are leaving, the show is very deep in trouble behind the scenes. You're also seeing old anime producers lamenting that all the good animators had gone and expressing frustration at how the new young animators haven't been taught at all. Etc. But it seems that there are some game dev companies out there who are somehow able to retain most of their talent for decades on end, such as Nintendo. You don't hear stories about how names keep leaving Nintendo to form their own companies. So what's the secret sauce here?

[Bertram_Tung]

Got to somehow educate people that a brand is not important, it's the people who work there. But good luck with that.

[loregamer]

Would be interesting to have info on how much original talent still exists at the companies we know. I’ve heard nothing but bad things from people who worked in game development and I’m sure the turnover is terrible

[anonusername]

Following the history of game devs like Square, Blizzard, Bioware, Arena Net, CD Projeckt Red, etc, a recurrent major issue seems is that talent leaves. The wisdom/game design choices/knowledge of these original devs is not passed on to their replacements, who then begin mishandling what they have inherited and squander fan goodwill. Actually this isn't a problem exclusive to games - it has been happening to all corporate franchises and TV shows since the mid 20th century. The writers and producers who are invisible to the audience are the first to become dissatisfied and leave a TV show leading to its decline, and by the time the visible actors are leaving, the show is very deep in trouble behind the scenes. You're also seeing old anime producers lamenting that all the good animators had gone and expressing frustration at how the new young animators haven't been taught at all. Etc. But it seems that there are some game dev companies out there who are somehow able to retain most of their talent for decades on end, such as Nintendo. You don't hear stories about how names keep leaving Nintendo to form their own companies. So what's the secret sauce here?

Nintendo is Japanese, so they probably started a cult around working for Nintendo and made all the devs join.

[1998]

Got to somehow educate people that a brand is not important, it's the people who work there. But good luck with that.

Most people working in larger studies are replaceable, low talent staff and have next to no contribution of building the respective brands. And the few with actual skills are often being absorbed by them.

[Tweed]

Become the vidya you want to see the in world.

[rusty_shackleford]

You don't hear stories about how names keep leaving Nintendo to form their own companies. So what's the secret sauce here?

Quality control
Telling someone they suck at their job is mean and you're not allowed to do it, therefore the west isn't capable of any real quality control.

[Bertram_Tung]

Got to somehow educate people that a brand is not important, it's the people who work there. But good luck with that.

Most people working in larger studies are replaceable, low talent staff and have next to no contribution of building the respective brands. And the few with actual skills are often being absorbed by them.

Yeah I was obviously talking about the important staff. Was that not obvious? Did you think I was talking about the janitors?

Man you really have to spell things out for some people.

[WhiteShark]

My anecdotal observation is that skilled workers are being treated as replaceable across all sectors, which is causing technological ability to decline across the board.

[ArcaneLurker]

Commies don't believe in genetics/ IQ, so they don't understand how responsible, trustworthy & intelligent people are finite.

[bloodedhunter]

Have they tried hiring people who are NOT discordniggers or redditors and having competent management that doesn't think they're too cool for vidya. Despite working at a vidya company.

[gerey]

I think it's primarily an issue of ballooning team sizes and shifting demographics. Gamedevs are creative people, they want to leave their mark on a product they're working on. When the team size is small, that's easy enough to do, but when the development team numbers in the hundreds (or thousands, as is increasingly the case), you become just another cog in a machine that is producing committee-approved slop. Developing the game ceases to be a creative exercise and becomes just another job.

On the topic of demographics, back when gaming wasn't the juggernaut it is today, only the people that were really, really passionate about the medium and its possibilities were willing to gamble their livelihood on making games. That resulted in small, passionate teams of individuals that were willing to crunch like crazy and work themselves to exhaustion, because they didn't view it as a burden, but as an expression of their creativity.

Look at the people that made Doom or Half-Life 1, the weird ways they came to join the project, as well as the impact their past life experiences had on the project, and then compare it to the soulless slop the modern globohomo they/them drones **** out.

And that's another thing - game studios used to be staffed by White and East Asian, heterosexual men, instead of mentally ill sex deviants and sub-85 IQ minorities and women. India has 1.4 billion people, yet 99% of people on the planet outside of India would be hard-pressed to name a book, song, movie or game made there by *****. The competency crisis is real, and as more and more studios get flooded by subhumans, the more actually talented people decide to make a run for it.

I recall reading quite a few anecdotal stories about ******, ******* or ***** being foisted upon a previously predominantly White team, and the impact on morale it had. There's only so much talented people with options will put up with before they decide to bail and move into an industry that hasn't been wokeified.

Concerning Nintendo specifically, I think there's two major factors at play - (Japanese) corporate culture and prestige.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but my impression is that once you are employed at a company in Japan, the expectation is that you will work there until you retire. The unique aspect is that this understanding goes both ways - the corporation also wants you to work for them until you retire. As an example, Toyota is famous for going to great lengths to avoid laying off employees. If you're working in a division or position that is not profitable or needed anymore, they will move you elsewhere, or retrain you for a new job. Loyalty is both sought after and rewarded.

Now, I'm not saying that this is the case for all corporations in Japan, or that their work culture is ideal, but some of the more established and famous companies do seem to wish to nurture such a perception of themselves.

The second aspect is that Nintendo is, well, Nintendo. They're the 6th most desirable company to work for in Japan among undergraduate. Your average Japanese normie might not know who Team Ninja is, but they know Nintendo. Working for the company is seen as prestigious, which in turn allows them to pick the most talented, driven and qualified candidates. This in turn leads to a workforce full of ambitious and motivated individuals that don't just want to work, don't just want to make games, but want to work and make games for Nintendo specifically.

Also, the management tend to allow their development and research teams the freedom to experiment.

EDIT: Oh, and another slightly off-topic thing - it will never cease to be funny to me that a company like Nintendo, with their drab, grey, stereotypical corporate offices and employees dressing like average Japanese salarymen consistently release novel and creative games, while Westen developers whose offices look like an adult daycare and all dress like hipsters consistenly **** out the most banal, boring and derivative slop imaginable.

[anonusername]

I think it's primarily an issue of ballooning team sizes and shifting demographics. Gamedevs are creative people, they want to leave their mark on a product they're working on. When the team size is small, that's easy enough to do, but when the development team numbers in the hundreds (or thousands, as is increasingly the case), you become just another cog in a machine that is producing committee-approved slop. Developing the game ceases to be a creative exercise and becomes just another job.

On the topic of demographics, back when gaming wasn't the juggernaut it is today, only the people that were really, really passionate about the medium and its possibilities were willing to gamble their livelihood on making games. That resulted in small, passionate teams of individuals that were willing to crunch like crazy and work themselves to exhaustion, because they didn't view it as a burden, but as an expression of their creativity.

Look at the people that made Doom or Half-Life 1, the weird ways they came to join the project, as well as the impact their past life experiences had on the project, and then compare it to the soulless slop the modern globohomo they/them drones **** out.

And that's another thing - game studios used to be staffed by White and East Asian, heterosexual men, instead of mentally ill sex deviants and sub-85 IQ minorities and women. India has 1.4 billion people, yet 99% of people on the planet outside of India would be hard-pressed to name a book, song, movie or game made there by *****. The competency crisis is real, and as more and more studios get flooded by subhumans, the more actually talented people decide to make a run for it.

I recall reading quite a few anecdotal stories about ******, ******* or ***** being foisted upon a previously predominantly White team, and the impact on morale it had. There's only so much talented people with options will put up with before they decide to bail and move into an industry that hasn't been wokeified.

Concerning Nintendo specifically, I think there's two major factors at play - (Japanese) corporate culture and prestige.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but my impression is that once you are employed at a company in Japan, the expectation is that you will work there until you retire. The unique aspect is that this understanding goes both ways - the corporation also wants you to work for them until you retire. As an example, Toyota is famous for going to great lengths to avoid laying off employees. If you're working in a division or position that is not profitable or needed anymore, they will move you elsewhere, or retrain you for a new job. Loyalty is both sought after and rewarded.

Now, I'm not saying that this is the case for all corporations in Japan, or that their work culture is ideal, but some of the more established and famous companies do seem to wish to nurture such a perception of themselves.

The second aspect is that Nintendo is, well, Nintendo. They're the 6th most desirable company to work for in Japan among undergraduate. Your average Japanese normie might not know who Team Ninja is, but they know Nintendo. Working for the company is seen as prestigious, which in turn allows them to pick the most talented, driven and qualified candidates. This in turn leads to a workforce full of ambitious and motivated individuals that don't just want to work, don't just want to make games, but want to work and make games for Nintendo specifically.

Also, the management tend to allow their development and research teams the freedom to experiment.

EDIT: Oh, and another slightly off-topic thing - it will never cease to be funny to me that a company like Nintendo, with their drab, grey, stereotypical corporate offices and employees dressing like average Japanese salarymen consistently release novel and creative games, while Westen developers whose offices look like an adult daycare and all dress like hipsters consistenly **** out the most banal, boring and derivative slop imaginable.

American companies used to care about loyalty without all the weird Jap crap. I think all normal cultures value loyalty, and it is the same degeneracy that creates corporate daycares, a lack of any value placed on loyalty by employers, and the inability to create any novel games. The reason companies like Ubishit and Bethesda keep reskinning old games is because they aren't actually capable of making games any longer. They can only keep coasting on the games created by their more competent predecessors. Even the "improved graphics" usually just means taking a hair physics library Nvidia wrote to sell GPUs and outsourcing "high-res" asset creation to Pajeets in India.

[Xenich]

Personally, I think it due to the generational decay caused by bad ideas being made into foundations.

Also, the more recent generations ignore many of the key aspects of past works that made them great while implementing features of modern eras that were bad for game play.

Console designs really screwed the pooch in a lot of things ranging from crappy interfaces, simplified interaction and game play, action based focus, gimmicky systems, Story over game play in games that are not story games, etc...

Removing long term, slow progression, risk vs reward, consequence of choices, etc..., basically the need to treat the player like they should be having "fun(tm)" with "entertainment" rather than actually making a game to compete against them, trying to trip players up, cause them to fail, or provide obstacles that make them think twice about being *******.

They stopped making games and just make various forms of entertainment for *******.

[Vergil]

You can't stop it, it's happening, we're all trapped in the belly of this horrible machine, and the machine is bleeding to death.

[Acrux]

Why contain it?

[Breathe]

Get rid of black and brown people and women and the industry will self correct.

[gerey]

Get rid of black and brown people and women and the industry will self correct.

You're forgetting ****, and most importantly, White liberals and leftists, the male ones especially. They are the primary culprits and need to be viciously excised from the industry.

American companies used to care about loyalty without all the weird Jap crap.

I recall Hewlett-Packard being such a company back when the original owners were still in charge. When the proverbial torch was passed and the human-shaped vermin known as MBAs took over, that's when the company started going down the toilet, ultimately metastasizing into the grotesque tumor it is today.

Console designs really screwed the pooch in a lot of things ranging from crappy interfaces, simplified interaction and game play, action based focus, gimmicky systems, Story over game play in games that are not story games, etc...

That's really only Sony, and to a lesser degree MicroSoft, though even **** central has a more varied catalogue of games and developers than the clown show Sony has become. Nintendo, for all their faults, still manage to publish a wide variety of first-party games, usually reinventing their IPs with each new generation.

And Sony is basically a Western publisher by now - the ******* in charge made sure to purge the company of everything that made it unique and successful, and turn it into the walking stereotype of Western game development.

[Xenich]

Console designs really screwed the pooch in a lot of things ranging from crappy interfaces, simplified interaction and game play, action based focus, gimmicky systems, Story over game play in games that are not story games, etc...

That's really only Sony, and to a lesser degree MicroSoft, though even **** central has a more varied catalogue of games and developers than the clown show Sony has become. Nintendo, for all their faults, still manage to publish a wide variety of first-party games, usually reinventing their IPs with each new generation.

And Sony is basically a Western publisher by now - the ******* in charge made sure to purge the company of everything that made it unique and successful, and turn it into the walking stereotype of Western game development.

Well, maybe within the "console" area of games, rather I was speaking mostly of how consoles drove game design as a whole which set the standard for how PC games were made (likely because PC games really just became ports of console games).

I never had an issue with console games specifically (just not my thing) until their limitations and design focus started directing PC games.

Consoles have limitations due to the controller and those limitations became the standard for pretty much most PC games in everything from interfaces, saves, game play design, to basic style and genre of play.

Generations that grew up playing consoles often don't see those elements as bad, but for many PC gamers who never cared for console, it was like watching your favorite pet die slowly over the years.

[J1M]

It's nearly impossible to keep the same team together for more than 3 years. People move, have kids, get promoted, and change.

[Orvas Dren]

It's nearly impossible to keep the same team together for more than 3 years. People move, have kids, get promoted, and change.

not really, if you have stable work and income people are far more willing to stay in an area and be in a job they enjoy

[Rand]

Console designs really screwed the pooch in a lot of things ranging from crappy interfaces, simplified interaction and game play, action based focus, gimmicky systems, Story over game play in games that are not story games, etc...

That's really only Sony, and to a lesser degree MicroSoft, though even **** central has a more varied catalogue of games and developers than the clown show Sony has become. Nintendo, for all their faults, still manage to publish a wide variety of first-party games, usually reinventing their IPs with each new generation.

And Sony is basically a Western publisher by now - the ******* in charge made sure to purge the company of everything that made it unique and successful, and turn it into the walking stereotype of Western game development.

While I agree Sony is a ruin now, the consolization of games is far more the Xbox's fault than the Playstation.
Microsoft deliberately and publicly got into the market with the intent of taking over gaming, especially western gaming, through their hardware.
Then they made a lot of ****** deals and acquisitions of PC developers (like Bungie) to make their home entertainment console be the primary focus of development.
For example, it's why every Bethesda game post Morrowind has not only a ****** UI that needs mods to fix it for PC, but why there are fewer and stupider systems to interact with.
Don't even get me started on what the 360 did to series like Deus Ex and Thief.
Microsoft IS the real problem in games development today.

[J1M]

It's nearly impossible to keep the same team together for more than 3 years. People move, have kids, get promoted, and change.

not really, if you have stable work and income people are far more willing to stay in an area and be in a job they enjoy

Even something like a person earning a promotion into a leadership role they are not good at can drastically change a team.

[anonusername]

It's nearly impossible to keep the same team together for more than 3 years. People move, have kids, get promoted, and change.

Companies used to keep the same teams together for entire generations. You give people raises and incentives to keep them from taking another job, don't hire women who will leave after having kids, promote them within the team, and encourage loyalty by example and selection. Modern MBAs prefer to treat people like interchangeable cogs because it's less work to make powerpoints based on that.

EDIT: Most people wouldn't care about promotions into "leadership" roles if they can get the same career progression by improving technically instead. Most want promotions for the salary, not the title.

[rusty_shackleford]

It's nearly impossible to keep the same team together for more than 3 years. People move, have kids, get promoted, and change.

It's less about keeping the same team together and more about keeping the same standards. If you replace the ship of theseus piece by piece, but keep the same quality and design, then they're both the ship of theseus.
Obsidian's writing sucks now because they replaced Avellone, Ziets, Fenstermaker, so on and so forth with people who are not anywhere close to their equals, nor are they expected to create the material in the same style as prior.

---

Nintendo probably has the most consistent output of any big developer, and every first-party title they work on requires approval of Miyamoto AFAIK.

[bloodedhunter]

It's nearly impossible to keep the same team together for more than 3 years. People move, have kids, get promoted, and change.

Yeah if you're an impulsive discordnigger or british social climber. Turns out people are more likely to stick around if they aren't treated like ****. Hence why most of the good games of the 2000's had at least 2 entries developed by largely the same dev teams keeping standards consistent.

A shocking revelation to the discordnigger crowd im sure who only care about milking patreon paypigs until they get ousted for the scammers they are and why crowdfunding sites have a bad reputation.
Don't really need to get into the corporate slave driving mentality and nepotistic class warfare ******** that seems to have dedicated themselves to destroying their host cultures over the 2010's. That basically engineered the discordnigger plague of short sighted fools who genuinely believe things can't ever get better and only care about stamping out creativity with militant moderator abuse and being greedy.

[J1M]

It's nearly impossible to keep the same team together for more than 3 years. People move, have kids, get promoted, and change.

Yeah if you're an impulsive discordnigger or british social climber. Turns out people are more likely to stick around if they aren't treated like ****. Hence why most of the good games of the 2000's had at least 2 entries developed by largely the same dev teams keeping standards consistent.

A shocking revelation to the discordnigger crowd im sure who only care about milking patreon paypigs until they get ousted for the scammers they are and why crowdfunding sites have a bad reputation.
Don't really need to get into the corporate slave driving mentality and nepotistic class warfare ******** that seems to have dedicated themselves to destroying their host cultures over the 2010's. That basically engineered the discordnigger plague of short sighted fools who genuinely believe things can't ever get better and only care about stamping out creativity with militant moderator abuse and being greedy.

Counterpoint: games of the 2000s had development cycles of 2 years or less. Enough time for more than one title to be largely completed in the ~3 year window.

[bloodedhunter]

It's nearly impossible to keep the same team together for more than 3 years. People move, have kids, get promoted, and change.

Yeah if you're an impulsive discordnigger or british social climber. Turns out people are more likely to stick around if they aren't treated like ****. Hence why most of the good games of the 2000's had at least 2 entries developed by largely the same dev teams keeping standards consistent.

A shocking revelation to the discordnigger crowd im sure who only care about milking patreon paypigs until they get ousted for the scammers they are and why crowdfunding sites have a bad reputation.
Don't really need to get into the corporate slave driving mentality and nepotistic class warfare ******** that seems to have dedicated themselves to destroying their host cultures over the 2010's. That basically engineered the discordnigger plague of short sighted fools who genuinely believe things can't ever get better and only care about stamping out creativity with militant moderator abuse and being greedy.

Counterpoint: games of the 2000s had development cycles of 2 years or less. Enough time for more than one title to be largely completed in the ~3 year window.

Most of the decent games had around 2-3 years of development per entry and they had some kind of a plan for making something fun. Shipping a complete game was the #1 priority instead of the cliquish ban happy ******** that is prevalent today. There's definitely been a significant cultural shift for the worse since then and we can't go back/things will never be the same.

Creativity seems to be demonized and seen as a threat these days and most studios are filled with ban happy cliques more than happy to sit on their *** doing nothing but driving out talent with the backing of management until the company goes under or they get promoted and **** off to LARP at GDC about being "veterans" who do nothing but make pretty photorealistic concept art at best.

[J1M]

Yes, it is easier to make a good game when you also don't need to build several expansions of additional cosmetics for the whales, a digital microtransaction storefront, and your designers are worried about something other than how to induce those purchases.

[bloodedhunter]

Its really not that hard to come up with microtransactions for whales....