Phil Harrison: game projects fail because of rushing
Phil Harrison, former Sony exec and current Atari president, said in a keynote speech that most games that fail in development do so because studios rush it through the development process.
And the lesson to gamers is: if you pressure devs to come out with a product too fast, they may end up giving you a sub-standard game.
More wisdom from Harrison after the link.
Phil Harrison, former Sony exec and current Atari president, said in a keynote speech that most games that fail in development do so because studios rush it through the development process.
The keynote speech was delivered during the Unite Conference 2008, an event that introduces attendees to the Unity game engine. In his keynote, Harrison states:
All of the mistakes I have made in software development have been based around one problem and one problem alone, which is accelerating through this pipeline without successfully and properly satisfying the requirements of each of the stages – and typically it involves going from concept to production in one jump.
That’s pretty much the definition of why projects fail – because you don’t know what you’re building, you don’t know how you’re going to build it, you don’t know who you’re building it for, but you’ve got 60 people working on it and they’ve all running in different directions – that’s how most games fail.
[…] This is the mantra – you want to fail early, to kill those poor ideas, but you also want to do it repeatedly and quickly so that you will eventually find those great ideas, but you want to do it as cheaply as you can so you save money.
He goes on to say that developers should involve gamers early on in the development process:
I believe that a true 21st century business model is to do all of that [production] in the glare of the game-playing public, so you can expose that innovation to your consumers.
You may not charge them for it at this point – but why not deliver your innovations and experimentations directly to your players, and let them be part of the process of deciding which games to make?
And the lesson to gamers is: if you pressure devs to come out with a product too fast, they may end up giving you a sub-standard game. And if you’re in a beta, give constructive comments so devs can improve the game. That’s what betas are for.
In his keynote, Harrison praised the Unity platform for giving devs the ability to “de-risk” the development pipeline, allowing them to be more coordinated with their projects. We should see more of the Unity platform in the future. It currently supports the Mac OS X, Windows, the Wii, and the iPhone.
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