Shipping Kills Studios: A Study of Indie Team Dynamics

In this 2016 GDC Talk, QCF Design's Danny Day explains how to keep your indie team alive after shipping a successful game.
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[@Cyberfoxxy]

Worked in China with a number of software companies. It's disgusting at how normalized crunch time is. In fact they pretty much do crunchtime from the day the project starts. That gives the higher-ups a false idea of what can be accomplished in a timeframea (and push it). They just head in a downwards spiral until nothing is delivered on time and nobody has freetime. resulting in someone loosing their jobs. Either from downsizing or bankruptcy. The employees are always the losers. The higher-ups gets to walk away unscathed pondering their next exploit.

[@capibaradeluxe9193]

A furry got a job with Tencent?

[@Cyberfoxxy]

​@@capibaradeluxe9193 hahahahahaha

[@wasuddin843]

Pppppp

[@mixiekins]

Man, I wish this existed when I did my first ship, as well as my attempts at shipping. This is fantastic, thanks for posting!

[@AndrewSaul77]

That any of this is a surprise to games teams tells you everything you need to know about games. Everything they are describing is standard practice in any enterprise product. It's why I don't think kids should bounce straight out of uni into a games studio. Go work in everyday software, large enterprise is a good place. See what it takes to take complicated, difficult, often boring software out to deployment and maintain that software. Once you are familiar with how everyone else has to work and how testing is a way of life, because failures cost money and sometime lives if you work on really critical systems, then you'll have the resilience and skills many games veterans still don't have. Take those, with a love of games, back into games industry and make it more sustainable than it is now.

[@basteque_]

Andrew Saul But us kids want to work in video-games to :(

[@sim77210]

That's a talk for indie devs. There's nothing wrong with trying->failing->improving for an independant studio/dev imo. These kind of talks just saves time

[@ddshocktrooper5604]

People would rather try and inevitably fail than try and get their soul crushed by inhumane business practices and shitty management.

[@jopearson6321]

Amen brother.

[@summerWTFE]

I've been a part of many of these scenarios but it's nice to actually have some words for them. I hope I'll be better a realising what situations my teams are in when they happen so we can better deal with it. Great talk!

[@sethstartix]

its never easy. Worse yet its even harder to vent after work to friends or a loved one. But def agree - great talk

[@LuanaSantos-rl4sb]

very useful, the whole thing

[@ciTatic]

what was the talk next door he mentioned?

[@0lionheart]

I think the 2017 failure talk, which is worth watching for the Videoball guy alone his talk is hilarious!

[@Youtube123Viewer]

the videoball guy is a good and entertaining presenter, but his talk had very little useful information, if you value your time, only watch the first guy from that video, who did twitch chat game

[@holosmoss]

kuddos for dresden codak cookie, i use that alot too :P

[@paulstaker8861]

Wish I knew this before i threw myself into game dev. Supporting a game is a real drag. I wish I could do something else with my time.

[@capibaradeluxe9193]

You say this as if you couldnt change jobs

[@paulstaker8861]

@@capibaradeluxe9193 about to :") will probably crash the company tho, but I don't own it.

[@ArchmageRises]

Love Desktop Dungeons!

[@christianmolick8647]

Cherubs. The pineapples come from cherubs.

[@jackoftraes2122]

Very awkward, but really helpful information!

[@brokengames9020]

08:25 I can sell you some XP boosts, are you scam artists interested in them?

[@WildAnimalChannel]

36 hours of travel? Geez. Just watch it one youtube.

[@brokengames9020]

10:00 You just mark your game as DLC and steam don't need to do refunds! Yaaaaaaaaay! That's how successful scam business works. Hurraaaaay society!