I mean. The diminishing returns on larger teams in software development is an absolutely proven idea. But according to what I’m reading, the game is made by one person, which is probably not the ideal size for a game of these characteristics that becomes a hit. Still, expanding a 1-person team is going to be a slow process no matter what, especially for a project like this and right after a successful launch.
Yeah, these projects done by one or two people could be better with a larger team, but it’s definitely not a matter of hiring a big pile of people suddenly.
The ideal size is probably a couple dozen people, but scaling up to even that will take months since the one person currently in charge has to do a lot. And it’ll almost fully pause work on the project for a while.
Cause if there’s one person, they’ve got to find all the candidates, do all the hiring, then bring people up to speed.
The real problem is if the person who made it doesn’t have the skills to manage even a small group of people.
Popular stuff is popular. I try not to post the same stuff too much but I think many people don’t check every day. So I understand if it can get a bit much if you do check everyday. You wouldn’t believe how much Baldurs Gate stuff even I got tired off and didn’t bother posting. I think this is an interesting topic irrelevant of manor lords.
It wasn’t directed at you, friend. Many sources, but not the same sort of coverage you saw for HD2 etc, seems to be business or drama related rather than gameplay content related news.
It’s just the hot new release of the week. Gaming “journalism” sites need to get clicks for their ad money so they pump out shitty filler articles non-stop about whatever is popular. I mean, look at this shit. Before this it was Helldivers.
They could, but they wouldn’t, they would organize their work to be more productive and achieve the stone moving faster.
Paraphrasing Proudhon’s What Is Property :
The capitalist, it is said, paid for the workers’ days; to be exact, it must be said that the capitalist paid as much ‘one day of work’ that he employed workers every day, which is not at all the same thing. Because the capitalist did not pay for this immense force which results from the union and harmony of workers, and the convergence and simultaneity of their effort. Two hundred grenadiers in a few hours erected the obelisk of Luqsor on its base; one cannot assume that a single man, in two hundred days, would have achieved the same feat.
Hiring 50 people to work on a project fundamentally changes the way the project is led compared to how it was by a single person, suddenly you will need additional workers to plan for the work to be done, to organize each task, to keep track of what’s being done, and whatnot. Howard claimed there were 450 people working at Bethesda, and look at the state of Starfield ; Larian Studios allegedly grew from 100 to 400 people, and look at the state of Baldur’s Gate 3 ; ZA/UM reported laying off 25% of their workforce, implying they were a team of 100, and look at the state of Disco Elysium (on release and/or Director’s Cut, the ongoing legal battle is a whole other subject), it’s a lot more complex that just numbers
Some tasks are serializable other tasks are sequential.
A lot of game dev tasks are sequential, the code to do thing X has to be developed before feature Y can be implemented. And you can only have one dev working on one feature at a time, even version control has its limits.
How is it a strawman to compare one set of serial tasks to another? Do you not understand what a strawman actually is? Can you elaborate on your logic?
Because progress would be made faster with additional devs. Not everything is/will be sequential and just because a large task is, doesn’t mean it could be broken into smaller tasks. Doesn’t have to be 50 devs.
Yes, I do: “an intentionally misrepresented proposition that is set up because it is easier to defeat than an opponent’s real argument.”
It seems like both of your analogies are strawmen. Game development is likely to be not like pregnancy or moving stones, in terms of its ability to be sped up by adding manpower. It’s obviously much more complicated than manual labour like moving stones, but not as immune to assistance as passively ‘being pregnant’.
Super, a super simple task you can throw more people at.
The cake one I like because it highlights that this is a complex task where more people are going to get in the way. If you throw 5 more people into baking a cake halfway through it’s going to take 5 times as long because now you have to explain to them what you were doing, what your system is, how they should work together as a team. The overhead of adding them isn’t worth it, and you’d probably just say “go stand over there I’ll finish it”
Now, if you knew ahead of time you had an order for 50 cakes and you were given 5 people, now that’s a completely different problem to solve. You now have a leader, tell this person is on mixing, this person is on frosting, etc etc.
So, in short, it’s clear you aren’t an engineer, and it’s extremely clear you don’t know what a strawman is
It’s not even that more people get in the way. A cake, and a baby, and in some ways dev work, take a set amount of time under which you just can’t do, or you get an undercooked baby, or a miscarried cake.
Feel like I have the same argument at work everyday. Some things just take a definitive time. 20 cooks won’t make a cake faster. Cooking that cake at 1000 degrees won’t make it faster. It will take the time it takes.
I get your point… But I feel like people in this thread doesn’t know how cake making works…
20 people will make a single cake faster. Not 20x faster, but faster. There are multiple part of the work that can be divided out to different people. Like you can have one person make batter while other makes icing. Fancy cakes actually do take multiple people to make simultaneously.
Hiring 50 people. The most effective way to ensure a 3 month delay minimum in whatever it’s you’re trying to accomplish. More realistically between 9 and 18 months of delay. As training, project restructuring, familiarization, meetings and change management meetings take control of all the company’s time, as restructuring always takes longer than pessimistic forecasts. Also known as the MBA induced death spiral.
That’s the interesting part. Massive layoffs is not a rare or extraneous result, it is the only possible result from the “hire 50 people now to get it done faster” mentality.
The only way hiring people will help you develop faster is if either:
ramp up time is insignificant compared to project time and you don’t hire so many you hit communication overhead.
you’re hiring people to do all the other stuff the people working on the project were also doing. I don’t think game devs typically have four systems in the maintenance lifecycle while they also develop new stuff, so that means you’re hiring a few IT folks to wrangle the weird office issues programmers wander off and deal with, a sysadmin, and like, 45 lunch delivery people.
I’ve had the first one work once, when we had a year+ project timeline. Hired one person, took them a week to get started, a month to be properly contributing and maybe another to be up to speed. We were a four person team, so not much overhead.
The second one is the dream of every manager who finds themselves with a contractor budget. I have yet to see it work the way they want. The only way I’ve seen it work is when you tell an established team that some other teams maintenance project is now their maintenance project, and eat the sharp increase in timelines for that maintenance work.
Literally just used that today in an argument lol. I just know execs are going to be mad we’re running behind, I said it to suggest we do bring one person on now so they can be fully ramped up in a couple of months. Of course shot down by them
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