Submitted by: Submitted by smalik
Views: 206
Words: 3062
Pages: 13
Category: Science and Technology
Date Submitted: 02/27/2014 02:27 PM
Why Use Scrum?
By Clinton Keith
The Problem
If I owned a game development studio right now, I might not be able to sleep at night. I’d lay awake thinking about how much money it cost to run my studio per day. My typical project has over 60 people working on it at any one time. That’s about $50,000 per day per project. That’s a lot of money. If that project takes two years it will cost well over $10 million dollars. Add the publisher’s cost of marketing and distributing the game and that project would have to sell over a million units to break even. How many games sell over a million units?! Not many. Game development has never been the model of efficiency. It requires very talented people with creative ideas. It’s not the place to set up a factory where you hope to roll out hit after hit. A great game emerges like magic. Creating a great game is not a predictable process. Since the beginning of the video game industry, we’ve been driven by hits. We waste a lot of money making bad games and make it all back (& lots more) when we manage to make a hit game. These days the stakes are different for each game. The “hit or miss” model no longer works because the numbers don’t work the same. A decade ago, the million-dollar budget was rare, because the teams were small and technology was far more limited. Take a look at Figure 1. It shows that although the video game market has grown steadily the past decade, the cost of developing games has skyrocketed at a far higher rate. Ten years ago, a single hit could finance ten failures. We are rapidly approaching the day when each game must make a profit. We may already be there.
Copyright © 2008, Clinton Keith
But let’s back to that $50,000 dollars a day. That’s what is keeping me awake. Did we add $50,000 worth of game today? Will we tomorrow? Today wasn’t such a great day. The build has been very unreliable for a week now…ever since we got that latest version of the engine. We’re bleeding money. The last ten years...