Bioshock Finite: Irrational Games shuts down

[Golden Calf]

Aaronofthe made a point about jumping to conclusions based on little information, that people were assuming the worst without cause, that other humans should be treated with some respect, and that the process of creating a game was being grossly oversimplified, portrayed as a simple task that only a clueless idiot could botch. The response to that was dismissal out of hand as "smarm."

 

Designing an airplane is incredibly complicated, and you can be very intelligent and still do a catastrophically bad job. You don't get a pass simply because the task is difficult.

 

Ken Levine was in charge of ~200 people, and his decisions affected their lives in serious ways. Given that he ran a studio with exceptionally high turnover, that there are hints that he was at least partially responsible for a particularly bad working environment, and that he seems to have run the very popular studio into the ground, I think it's entirely fair that he's the target of criticism, even if it is partially speculative.

 

I obviously don't know him, so I have no idea how smart or good a guy he is, but I think there's something particularly gross, given the above info, that he gets to sail out at the end with the same 'visionary creative' status that he may well have earned after the first Bioshock (and before), ESPECIALLY given how the vision and story of Infinite was (for me and many others) such a garbled mess.

 

In his letter about the shutdown, he wrote "To meet the challenge ahead, I need to refocus my energy" as if he's some font of invaluable insight and should just naturally be keeping his position, giant studio or not. It seems weird that after the failure of the studio, he's the one who is assumed to have value and get to keep his job, rather than being let go and having to find a new job like the rest of the people who poured themselves into the project.

[osmosisch]

Personally I read Ken's post as a tacit admission that he's finally realised that he's not able to run a big studo. It's very unfortunate that he didn't do so before Irrational imploded. Still, better late than never.

I disagree with the tone of the thread implying Levine's a bad person somehow. It appears that he's got more negative traits at least lately and has made some egregious mistakes, but he's still got a lot of credit with me given that I like all his games up til Infinite, and that I've enjoyed every conversation of his that I've heard on various podcasts over the years. I hope he can re-center himself properly again.

I also find it a bit weird that everyone's acting like the people who were employed at Irrational up to this point are innocent victims who were locked into the company up to this point. Everyone was perfectly free to quit before this point, and in indeed many did. Irrational/Take 2's job is to make games, not to employ people for the sake of it. At least that's the impression I get of AAA development anyway: a lot of people get fired once the game and its DLC are launched.

The whole thing is just just kind of weird and sad. Just thinking about the arc from System Shock 2 to Infinite via all the stuff in between... sigh.

[Gormongous]

People don't want to use their real names, ok. Show me some quotes from anonymous sources then. Show me someone saying "I know three people who work at Irrational and they all thought Ken was a terrible person." I work in the gaming industry, I talk to people. I interview people. A lot of people looking for new jobs are unhappy with their old ones. That in itself means very little.

 

...

 

I've managed people. I'm sure a few of them think I was a bad manager. (Hopefully not too many) I know some of them disagreed with decisions I made or how I made them. I may have snapped at someone or been short. I may have been pissed at someone for not working hard enough. I sometimes worked on one thing when I should have been working on something else and missed the forest for the trees.

 

I really don't have anything else to say, except that I've been on the forum for almost two years now and this is the first time I've had someone use their own experience in the industry as an argument from authority against someone else. Maybe fairly, maybe not, but it bums me out. This whole thread bums me out.

[Bjorn]

I would agree with you.

 

Ah, okay, didn't know how to take your previous post. 

 

 

This whole thread bums me out.

The whole thing is just just kind of weird and sad. Just thinking about the arc from System Shock 2 to Infinite via all the stuff in between... sigh.

 

Agreed, to both.

 

 

[Lu]

Hear, hear. Here's dumb story. When I first visited the States, I landed in Boston. Took that day to sight-see the city. Irrational had been renamed to 2K Boston at the time, yet that didn't stop me, my friend and his wife from going to the Irrational office lobby, posing and taking pictures next to the Irrational Games name plate (it had remained unchanged) like a bunch of dweebs. Shit, here come game developer looking dudes! Act natural!

 

The pictures came out horribly thanks to the shiny placard and moving camera, but hey, now I have this dumb story.

[Reyturner]

Games is a weird industry. While comparing movies to games as a medium is controversial, comparing the process of bringing either to completion is apt.

The difference is that Spielberg isn't expected to roll the entire cast and crew onto the next thing immediately, or have multiple films going simultaneously to avoid having to let people go.

I honestly don't blame Levine for looking back at his time making previous gen games and looking out at what making next gen games will require and saying "no thanks". Most of his contemporaries are either out or working on passion projects. Who can blame him for wanting something for himself.

If Levine is starting a new thing in 2K with 15 people from IG, they are probably the central nervous system of the studio anyways. I'm guessing his choice of team was part of how 2K convinced him to stay, and he probably knew what that would mean. But those people can probably be ranked in the top 1% of the industry (and no, not THAT 1%). Can you imagine passing that up because of how it would look on Kotaku for a week? I'll bet it probably twisted him up, you can read his anxious guilt in his send off, and his awkward Twitter boosting is probably part of that guilt.

He's a creative in the autumn of his career who doesn't want to spend the rest of it as a suit. His decision impacts a lot of people, but a big part of the reason it does is the nature of the industry itself.

You can angry at his choice to not crucify himself upon spreadsheets and meetings and marketing demographics for the sake of his staff, but I don't think you can be shocked by it.

[shammack]

Games is a weird industry. While comparing movies to games as a medium is controversial, comparing the process of bringing either to completion is apt.

 

This is a digression, but I don't really agree that that's an apt comparison. A movie is basically a "work for hire" for pretty much everyone involved. When you make a movie, everyone on the crew is contracted specifically to work on that movie and only that movie. A director doesn't hire a crew saying "hey, come make movies with me indefinitely" and then fire everybody after the current project is done. Everyone knows going in that when the movie is finished they'll have to find another gig. (Also, movies have unions.)

 

Finishing a movie is also generally a much more straightforward process than finishing a game. All the film is in the can already and you just have to put it together. A lot of things can change in the editing room, but you're probably not going to be creating anything new from scratch (unless you do reshoots, which is prohibitive because of the logistics of getting the cast and crew back together after production has wrapped). In a game, there's no distinction between production and post-production, so it's much easier for someone to say "hey, wouldn't it be cool if we threw this out and put in this other thing that I just thought of?" at any point in the process, and that can potentially go on forever if there's nobody who can tell them no.

[Reyturner]

Well, my point is that if a big name director wants too, he can make a little art house movie and not get flack for all the jobs his selfishness has cost. Projects, even big projects, have a waxing and waning need for staff and half the reason games never seem to be finished is a desire to justify not letting people go. 
 
Now, I'm not saying the games industry SHOULD be like movies, just that someone who is a creative first can end up trapped by their own success and unable to do what they want to do without throwing the lives of hundreds into disarray. A lot of other big names have been "lucky" enough not to be put in this situation (usually, their studios get bought and ruined by someone else, they don't need to do it themselves). 
 
Giving up on what you want to be doing for the sake of others isn't fun. All I'm saying is that I empathize with Ken Levine, even if I wouldn't have made the same choice he did.

[Chris]

They are fundamentally different because when you get hired at a game studio you are being hired for full-time, long-term salaried employment, not guild- or union-protected contract work. It often requires relocating yourself and your family, because there is no equivalent to Hollywood (or Vancouver or whatever) where a huge proportion of the work is located, and even if there were, it's a lot more difficult to hire people (and to get hired) for a salary job with benefits than it is to simply bring someone on for a temporary contract. 

 

You CAN get hired at a game studio with the understanding that you'll only have a six-month contract, or you'll just be on until the game ships (this isn't uncommon with testing staff, for example), but that is absolutely not standard for most disciplines and positions. Generally, the understanding is that it is intended to be a long-term position, same as any other full-time professional job.

[Reyturner]

I know

That's my point.

Because of the nature of the studio system, guys who started out making games with a team of 20 on the 90s have found themselves responsible for managing hundreds of people now.

It isn't surprising that so many old school devs have gone back to running smaller teams or that Levine would want to.

[Frenetic Pony]

I know

That's my point.

Because of the nature of the studio system, guys who started out making games with a team of 20 on the 90s have found themselves responsible for managing hundreds of people now.

It isn't surprising that so many old school devs have gone back to running smaller teams or that Levine would want to.

 

I wonder what it is that makes games so much harder to ramp up in production and budget than movies. Movies had gone from a couple hundred thousand for the Maltese Falcon in 1941 (equivalent 5 million today) to $44 million for Cleopatra in 1963 (equivalent 250 million today) in the span of twenty years. Fifty times the budget and they didn't seem hampered by confused and delayed productions anymore than they ever did.

 

I was thinking maybe they had more time to work it out, but they didn't really. In 1994 Donkey Kong Country was the best selling game, and I can't imagine it had a budget of less than 2 million, a fiftieth of GTAV's. I was then thinking that it was because games are interlocking, changing a single thing can affect an entire 20+ hour experience. But that didn't get me that far, I mean segmentation of work for a game is pretty high. There are contractors for art and sound and even programming.

 

Maybe it's because so many people joined the video game industry to "make video games". A lot of peoples dreams and goals in joining are to have a real, tangible affect on the project they're at. With 100+ that's not really possible. There's not the "just do the work assigned" attitude of movies while the director makes most of the real decisions. But there are people that obviously do that in games too, even with all the people going "indie" that want the former, there are still plenty of people left in the Triple A industry. 

 

The only thing I can guess at is that games aren't really "defined". When you do a movie you've got a script, you've got a thing and you are making that thing, and re-writes aren't actually that common in the middle of movies, and unless you're Pixar you never actually "film" something and you intend to throw away. Games on the other hand aren't defined. There's often no script, no "plan" to follow, at least as closely as a script and shooting schedule and etc. for a movie are followed. Even giant, monolithic design docs get re-written and re-thought and etc. right in the middle of production, and who knows how long that design doc actually takes to make eh? Still, maybe that's something that can be changed. Maybe it would be better for a 30 million+ dollar game to have a design doc, stick with that, and not deviate and re-write. Predictable production time, budget, goals, and etc.

[SiN]

I wonder what it is that makes games so much harder to ramp up in production and budget than movies.

 

Software. Honestly, just software. I've been reading along this thread, tempted to comment (but not wanting to get sucked into it), so I'll try to keep this brief.

 

It's easy to blame Ken Levine for being "irresponsible" for Infinite going over time and over budget. But the truth is software programming and interaction design are unpredictable and difficult professions. This is not a problem unique to games. I've never worked in the games industry, but I work in the software industry (on projects both larger and smaller than Binfinite) and have seen the same thing happen time and again. 

 

Binfinite is an especially hard project to work on because so much of it was new. Look, it's "easy" to create the next Call of Duty on time and on budget* because a majority of the work is "understood" problems with only a few risky areas, and lots of content creation. Binfinite is pretty much the opposite of that (except the content creation part). Games like it, where the devs are trying a lot of new things follow a similar fate... I can't think of too many recent examples (probably because publishers stopped funding them), but Black & White comes to mind (4 years), Half-Life 2 (forever), Ico, Shadow of the Colossus (both 4 years each I believe), etc.

 

* and actually, I'm pretty sure they've failed at that too. That's how hard software is.

 

Given Binfinite's scope and ambitions, I'm not sure anyone could have managed it to be on-time and on-budget. I wouldn't call Ken Levine a bad project manager, "ignorant" or whatever, based on this. That said, I'm sure Irrational is a difficult place to work, but then again that's not surprising to me considering the scope and ambition of the game.

 

And for the record, I didn't even like Bioshock Infinite.

[Gormongous]

Software. Honestly, just software. I've been reading along this thread, tempted to comment (but not wanting to get sucked into it), so I'll try to keep this brief.

 

It's easy to blame Ken Levine for being "irresponsible" for Infinite going over time and over budget. But the truth is software programming and interaction design are unpredictable and difficult professions. This is not a problem unique to games. I've never worked in the games industry, but I work in the software industry (on projects both larger and smaller than Binfinite) and have seen the same thing happen time and again. 

 

Binfinite is an especially hard project to work on because so much of it was new. Look, it's "easy" to create the next Call of Duty on time and on budget* because a majority of the work is "understood" problems with only a few risky areas, and lots of content creation. Binfinite is pretty much the opposite of that (except the content creation part). Games like it, where the devs are trying a lot of new things follow a similar fate... I can't think of too many recent examples (probably because publishers stopped funding them), but Black & White comes to mind (4 years), Half-Life 2 (forever), Ico, Shadow of the Colossus (both 4 years each I believe), etc.

 

* and actually, I'm pretty sure they've failed at that too. That's how hard software is.

 

Given Binfinite's scope and ambitions, I'm not sure anyone could have managed it to be on-time and on-budget. I wouldn't call Ken Levine a bad project manager, "ignorant" or whatever, based on this. That said, I'm sure Irrational is a difficult place to work, but then again that's not surprising to me considering the scope and ambition of the game.

 

And for the record, I didn't even like Bioshock Infinite.

 

I don't mean this passive-aggressively or insincerely, but we might just have to agree to disagree then because, based on what you said about the inherent problems with the process of developing large-scale software, I find it profoundly irresponsible for Ken Levine to consciously structure a two hundred-man company making a two hundred million-dollar game around a development process that is heavily and wastefully iterative. It seems almost to guarantee that any project beyond a certain ambition and scope will run over time and over budget, without guaranteeing anything more from the end product. I can understand if that process is the one he knows and trusts -- in fact, I'm incredibly sympathetic if that is the case, because that makes him (purely in the context of developing Bioshock Infinite) just the kind of noble failure that I care about enough to write my dissertation on -- but I still can't help but blame him mostly for the fate of the studio he subjected to that process. Is that fair? It feels fair to me.

[Reyturner]

Still, maybe that's something that can be changed. Maybe it would be better for a 30 million+ dollar game to have a design doc, stick with that, and not deviate and re-write. Predictable production time, budget, goals, and etc.

That's what annualized franchises are.

Edit: added quote for clarity. Hadn't F5'd in a while.

[Gormongous]

That's what annualized franchises are.

 

I'm not sure I understand what you mean. When I say a "heavily and wastefully iterative" development process, I'm not just talking about the bloat of AAA game development that's already everywhere. I'm talking about the "developing our games through failing" philosophy that Levine proudly espoused in several interviews three or four years ago. Such an attitude sounds good, which you can tell from all the starry-eyed comments for the interview I just linked, but it seems to double down on all the weaknesses already present in the AAA development model in a way that I'm not sure wouldn't doom any project.

 

The one quote, "You can't care about sunk cost," makes the closing of his studio less than three years later, after releasing a controversial but still wildly popular game, feel a bit more pointed than it otherwise might.

 

 

EDIT: You aren't referring to me! I'm a dumb.

[Frenetic Pony]

So far as I understand it* *Done hobbyist programming, graphics programming, game jams, etc. etc. Never worked at a triple A developer

 

Games usually aren't as unpredictable as other large software products. With other products you are usually, by definition, building something mostly in software that's fairly new.

 

In games you are reusing a lot of code, I mean A LOT of code, that you've used before. So much so that game engines are a fairly unique sort of thing for any type of software. If you're building a video sharing site or something, you can't just grab "youtube kit" that knows how to cache videos in different systems and display them using html or flash and etc. etc. But for games, well that's what a game engine is. Now a game engine is an absolutely massive undertaking, for interlocking systems they're some of the most complex pieces of code on earth. But often the core isn't changed terribly much game to game* *(unless you're John Carmack and just HAVE to rebuild every 5 years). So for a triple A game like Bioshock Infinite, some of it will be custom code, some of it will be a new challenge, but it's built on Unreal Engine 3. A lot of the most basic stuff is there for you, and detailed tutorials and papers and forums and etc. are there for most every other custom problem you might want to solve. You don't have to figure out how to display sound, or load an animation file, or build a shader editor, or even a world editor. That's all there in the package.

 

Often the iterative time comes, even more than waiting for programming, much more even, from "figuring out what's fun". You sit there and toy around with your little man that jumps, and you ask yourself how high he should jump, and how far he should jump, and how fast the jump should go... and that's fine. Any game is going to have to experiment. But the big questions, like "what's the story overall going to be? What's the goal of this section? Can the player even jump?" Those may need to be answered right away. Halo 1 went from being an RTS to an FPS before it was done. And that's great! For a much smaller team and budget that's practical, and awesome, I loved Halo 1! But for a triple A development team? No, that's not practical, that can't be done anymore. You can't go through six months and say "this isn't as good as I would hope, let's ditch it." As apparently BI did.

 

A motto, that maybe any studio should have, is "Fail faster." In terms of gameplay, all game projects will have failures. So get those out of the way as fast as possible, before you build art, before sound, before anything, make sure your basic gameplay loop is solid and fun. This goes a hundred times as much or more, whatever the budget is, for Triple A. You can't afford to decide your game's not fun two years into development. And you can't afford to decide the story should have a major change and half the levels need to be cut and rebuilt partway through. You need to have a plan and execute on it as best as possible, with as little deviation as possible, at least if you expect to keep up your 100-200 person team for four years.

[osmosisch]

Games usually aren't as unpredictable as other large software products.

Absolutely untrue, for the simple fact that most interaction-loop games do not have a clear, functional goal that lets you even attempt to create an accurate plan. A word processor needs to process words. This can be neatly cut up until the functional segments are capable of being estimated and executed. A game needs to be fun. Good luck planning that.

The fact that games still go so massively over time/budget so frequently in spite of the wealth of tools available should be a gigantic red flag that, no, they're not simple at all.

Heck, just look at board games. There's basically zero technology involved there at all and they already can take years to get good. A friend of mine is just getting one of his designs accepted for publishing, and that took two years on and off.

[aperson]

Gormongous, I think you have some wrong impressions of game development, perhaps because you're mentally drawing inappropriate comparisons to other mediums.

 

Most game studios are heavily iterative, and "fail often and fast" is considered good practice. There was a time when people would write up 100+ page design docs then the team would implement them, but that has largely fallen out of favor. The conventional wisdom now is that you may have some intuition that something will work, but you have to try it out, and will often find that it just doesn't work. Then it's off to plan B. Sometimes you hit upon something good completely by accident, sometimes it takes a bunch of takes at something to find the right path.

 

The process that he describes is a common process, and generally understood to be a good process.

 

Some people have brought up an interview with Nate Wells, to contrast Naughty Dog and Irrational and imply that Ken is egotistical etc. But if you read that whole interview Wells espouses a very similar philosophy. (

http://eat-games.tumblr.com/post/55627570901/interview-nate-wells):

 

I think one of the incredible things about the Naughty Dog ethos is this idea of checking in [game content] and asking questions later. So if you want to try something, put it in the game and we’ll see if it works! What we won’t do is have meetings and meetings and meetings about whether we think it’ll work or not.

 ...
An individual designer who may be brand new with an idea can take it to Bruce and he’ll say “Lets try it!” That philosophy is incredible and very different from what I’m used to which is a lot of pre-planning and a little more trepidation about just trying something and seeing if it works. That is mirrored by the technology that is at Naughty Dog, which is very interesting and very scary to when you first join.

,,,

Try something crazy, then build it. Hey let’s try it. Does it work?  I don’t know. If it doesn’t work we can either roll it back to a previous version or change it again.

 

 

He's saying that Naughty Dog is more iterative than Irrational! In fact, he seems to be implying that at Irrational the process wasn't iterative enough. That before trying things out they had to have time-wasting meetings. That Irrational didn't have a good continuous integration setup, didn't have a good source control scheme, or just didn't have the right attitude. That people were too reticent to just throw something out there with the knowledge that they could always roll it back. And if Ken is a control freak it would make sense that rapid experimentation at the individual or small group level would be hard.

 

So I don't think it's fair to say that developing through failing or iteration is irresponsible or dangerous. In fact, let me stress again, this is often considered the correct way to do things.

 

Now, that said....the ideal scenario is that you have a small team doing this rapid iteration to "find the fun", using temporary assets that are cheap to produce. Once you "find the fun" you build out the entire game using temp assets, grey boxes, etc, then you "art up" the game. Similar to how a movie can have years of pre-production and then a shooting schedule of a couple months.

 

That's the ideal scenario. It's very hard to achieve. While this small team works on the rapid iteration what does the rest of your team do? Sit around? Do you let them all go, then hire them back? They can work on DLC, but there's a limit to how much DLC they can work on, and what kinds of people work on DLC. They can work on a second project, but then you need a second project, and to juggle two projects. (This is something Chris has talked about on the cast, how DoubleFine has many projects running at once to alleviate these sorts of issues)

 

In some games where the visual design is very important or where production value matters more than mechanics it may not be possible to "find the fun" without production-quality assets. It's also possible that your boss wants you to produce a vertical slice with production quality assets to get the game greenlit or to demonstrate progress. They may regularly measure your progress in such fashion - and for an upper-level executive a grey-box level probably isn't going to cut it. You may also be required to produce a demo or an E3 build. So you do a lot of work to make something appear production quality, then tear all that work down afterwards because it had a shoddy foundation.

 

You can be perfectly aware of the fact that you should be prototyping with a small team using temp assets and not be able to do that for a variety of reason.

 

It's also possible to get very far along and realize your game just isn't working. Ideally you "found the fun" so this doesn't happen, but sometimes it does. Maybe your game was fun in small doses but the game as a whole just doesn't work. Maybe you give it to an outside metacritic-prediction place and they come back with "65" and "needs multiplayer."

[Gormongous]

Gormongous, I think you have some wrong impressions of game development, perhaps because you're mentally drawing inappropriate comparisons to other mediums...

 

I'm sorry, but you don't know what's inside my head. Sure, I may have wrong impressions of what you believe game development to be, but it's not like I haven't been an observer of the art and business of making video games for almost two decades. You don't get to talk down to me and write off my opinions because of your vague claim to a position of knowledge and authority. You have just as little idea what went on inside Irrational as me.

 

As for the content of your post, I understand very well that iteration is industry practice, which is why I explicitly didn't ascribe the failure of Bioshock Infinite and Irrational Games to your typical AAA bloat. I am saying that six years and hundreds of people and millions of dollars of large-scale "developing through failure" under a brilliant designer, resulting in a game still widely criticized as half-baked in theme and mechanics, shows a process that does not work (or at least does not scale). Maybe you do not see that, but then maybe you need an outsider to tell you that over half a decade of development shouldn't produce a game that's less successful by any metric than a predecessor developed in half that time.

 

I really do not understand why you are so adamant that the dissolution of Levine's company cannot be Levine's fault, even in part. When I go back and read your posts, I get the sense that making a good game and succeeding in the business is to you almost an accident, in which case I have no idea why we bother paying the big bucks to people like Levine when anyone has about as much of a shot.

[SiN]

I've made indie video games and apps.

 

When I work on games I'm like "OMG, apps are *so* much easier! The design is functional and straight forward! No framerate issues to worry about! Content is so much harder and expensive for games!"

 

When I work on apps I'm like, "OMG, games are *so* much easier! It's easy to scope a game, and things don't need to necessarily be *correct* just *feel right*. No forward/backwards-compatible document formats!"

 

In short, both are difficult in their own unique way.

 

(Reading that over, I guess that's pretty much what osmosisch said.)

[aperson]

As for the content of your post, I understand very well that iteration is industry practice, which is why I explicitly didn't ascribe the failure of Bioshock Infinite and Irrational Games to your typical AAA bloat. I am saying that six years and hundreds of people and millions of dollars of large-scale "developing through failure" under a brilliant designer, resulting in a game still widely criticized as half-baked in theme and mechanics, shows a process that does not work (or at least does not scale). Maybe you do not see that, but then maybe you need an outsider to tell you that over half a decade of development shouldn't produce a game that's less successful by any metric than a predecessor developed in half that time.

 

It was not my intention to talk down to you. Let me be succinct so as to clarify what I clearly didn't do a good job of communicating:

 

1. "Developing through failure" is generally understood to be a good process. If there's a better process (beyond a factory sequel model) people don't seem to know what it is. So I don't think it's irresponsible to adopt that model - it may very well be the most responsible choice. The best heart surgery process can still result in patient death - that doesn't mean following the process was a bad decision.

 

2. I don't know what process Irrational actually used or how they implemented it. I only know how Levine described their process

 

3. The interview with Wells seems to indicate that the process wasn't actually all that iterative. If anything the failure may be that they didn't follow the process Levine described.

 

If this "developing through failure" process does not scale and is an irresponsible way to run a studio what would you suggest instead?

 

I really do not understand why you are so adamant that the dissolution of Levine's company cannot be Levine's fault, even in part. When I go back and read your posts, I get the sense that making a good game and succeeding in the business is to you almost an accident

 

The video game business is volatile. Success is not random but good people and processes can fail, middling people and processes can succeed. Very few publishers or developers have a long-term repeatable strategy for success. What William Goldman said about film, "nobody knows anything", applies to games as well. Nobody in the video game industry knows how to make money. (This is an exaggeration, but not a large one)

 

Who would have thought that Minecraft or Flappy Bird would blow up? That Dark Souls would become a cult sensation? Wii Fit was a huge success, Wii Fit U looks like a flop. After making Minecraft Mojang made Scrolls (say that five times fast) - which did about one millionth as well. Same company, presumably similar methodologies, totally different results. I wouldn't be shocked if Mojang never makes another successful game.

 

Remember Castle Crashers? Huge XBLA hit, a poster child for the most successful period of XBLA. The followup game made no splash and was quickly forgotten.

 

I'm sure the dissolution of Irrational is at least partly Levine's fault. What I don't see is how that makes him an idiot, ignorant, incompetent, guilty of adopting an irresponsible process, etc.

[SiN]

I had a whole thing written out, but basically what aperson said. This:

 

I'm sure the dissolution of Irrational is at least partly Levine's fault. What I don't see is how that makes him an idiot, ignorant, incompetent, guilty of adopting an irresponsible process, etc.

 

I think that the process failed on Binfinite, but I don't think one can assign that failure to Ken Levine alone. Binfinite obviously had buy-in from the business folks at 2K, and the entire management structure, both from 2K *and* Irrational. The best laid plans can go astray.

 

Further, Ken/Irrational/2K acknowledged that the process failed through their actions. Shutting down Irrational, while it's totally a crappy thing to do, is also the right thing to do. The alternative would be to have this massive team repeat the same mistakes over another 5 year period, or make the kind of video games that nobody at Irrational would want to make anyway.

 

It's clear to me that Levine is remorseful over the whole situation, even from the letter alone. I don't think anyone comes out of this looking good, or being entirely satisfied, but (from our limited knowledge) it genuinely seems like the best thing that could come out of the situation.

 

Of course, if anyone could have predicted Binfinite's outcome this could have all been avoided. That's really the part I'm sympathetic (and yeah, a little defensive) toward. In hindsight, it's *so* 20/20, but in software (and *especially* video games) these outcomes are so hard to predict that it frustrates me when someone goes "why didn't they do x, y & z it's so obvious."

 

[Erkki]

I wonder what it is that makes games so much harder to ramp up in production and budget than movies.

 

Although I don't work in the game industry I also think it's because games are software. Software development is very unpredictable except in the simplest cases where you are doing something that has been already done several times. And even then it still surprises me every time how quickly Ubisoft can release new AssCreed games.

 

3. The interview with Wells seems to indicate that the process wasn't actually all that iterative. If anything the failure may be that they didn't follow the process Levine described.

 

 

Uh, did you just make assumptions about how Irrational worked based on Nate Wells interview about Naughty Dog? I thought that wasn't allowed.

[Erkki]

After making Minecraft Mojang made Scrolls (say that five times fast) - which did about one millionth as well. Same company, presumably similar methodologies, totally different results. I wouldn't be shocked if Mojang never makes another successful game.

 

Mojang was only formed when (and formed because) Minecraft was already well on its way to be a huge success. I think how those two games started could not be more different. But I think your point is still valid -- even if Notch went solo again and tried to replicate Minecraft's success he probably couldn't do it. Whether the circumstances wouldn't be the same again or he just would get as lucky with a good idea.

 

Which makes me think back a couple of pages...

 

There's a common saying in the industry: "ideas are cheap." (Personally I don't like that saying) People good at hatching ideas get mocked. Hatching ideas is not even considered a real skill! The idea that someone founded and ran a successful video game business when they are only good at hatching ideas is monumentally dumb.

 

I also kind of don't like that saying, but then I sometimes use it against people who seem to think that ideas matter by themselves. What matters is having good ideas and doing the hard work to realize those ideas. One without the other is not enough.

[syntheticgerbil]

When I was laid off I don't see how "your former boss is a fat cat idiot!" would have helped me. There is this weird thing these days where people act like petty, ignorant asses but that's somehow ok because they dress it up as liberalism or concern for their fellow man or fighting for the proletariat or something.

This attitude is ridiculous. I'm sure the guy was getting paid over 100k or more in terms of salary, so he's definitely a fat cat. Idiot is probably not true, but some people may feel that way. Nor are they "petty, ignorant asses" for feeling that way because they've been on the brunt end of that before. Some people are just incompetant, in charge, and well paid in the worst way.

 

I'm pages behind this conversation, so maybe you already apologized for this attitude. EDIT: Nah.