Category Archives: Game Industry

Why Is Relocation So Common In the Games Industry?

In the wake of the recent Irrational Games studio downsizing, one of my friends in Boston commented that no one was talking about relocation and why it is so common that it is considered necessary to be successful in the games industry.  My wife and I have lived in 5 states in the last 14 years (since I joined the game industry); the lead designer at my last gig had it worse: 5 states in 5 years.  It is, in fact, so common that for every position above contract work or baseline QA, relocation assistance is considered a standard part of any job offer.  I don’t think that I have an answer, but I definitely know the outlines of the problem.

One contributing factor is that the games industry, while growing, is still relatively small and highly specialized.  There is game development going on all around the country, but if you want a job (rather than being a hobbyist or starting your own indie project), you need to be somewhere with studios large enough to need people.  There are a lot fewer locations where this is happening, and there are a number of places (Boston, Austin) that seem to be shrinking at a remarkable rate.  On top of that, if you’re looking for work, the odds that someone is looking for someone like you at that exact time are slimmer the smaller the amount of game development is going on where you’re at.  The more specialized you are, the more likely you are to find work by broadening your search to include relocation options.

This is not an absolute rule.  I know several people who have spent 10+ years working in games in the Raleigh/Durham area, for example, and scale-wise, the Triangle has nothing on Austin.  Nonetheless, working in games is a lot like working in film.  There are a few places where there’s a critical mass of work, and if you’re not in one of those places, chances are good you’re going to have to move to do the kind of work you want to do.  Again, you can make indie films wherever you like (although ancillary concerns like screening venues, audiences, critical exposure, etc. are still going to be limited), but if you’re looking for work, you either have to go where there is work or go indie.  The people I know who have stayed in the same location for a long period of time have had to make other sacrifices (less advancement, less pay, fewer opportunities to work on diverse titles, etc.) in exchange for location stability.

Another force  here is that advancement is more difficult within an organization than it is when changing organizations.  Particularly in an industry as volatile as the games industry, the people in top positions do not have a lot of incentive to go elsewhere.  If you are a Director of Production, for example, at a reasonably large, stable studio, that’s a tough gig to give up.  There are not many such positions, and if you actually have a stable environment in a volatile industry, going anywhere else can look pretty scary.  So, if you’re working as a senior producer under that Director, you’re going to have to go somewhere else, or outlive the Director.  Even at (maybe particularly at) huge operations like Blizzard, advancement can be difficult, because without massive growth or some other form of instability, there just aren’t going to be many openings.  Let’s say you’re the VP of Product Development at Blizzard; something is going to have to be extremely tasty to lure you away from what is one of the most desirable roles in the entire industry.

It is also true that people tend to get pegged at a particular level of responsibility.  Once you have worked with a group of people for years as, say, a level designer, it’s going to take something exceptional to get them to see you as more than that.  It’s not that it can’t be done, but it’s going to take a lot of work, and not just design work, social work, political work.  For example, you might need to create a new position (“Lead Level Designer” or “Multiplayer Lead Designer”) in order to show that you’re taking on more responsibility without displacing or discrediting the lead above you.  That takes serious cultural capital.  How much easier is it to just apply to a Lead Designer role at another studio, using the portfolio of work that you’ve done as evidence that you’re ready to take the next step.  Hiring managers love up-and-comers; they’re cheap, relative to experienced talent.  But, that other studio also doesn’t have this preconceived notion that you are a level designer first and foremost.  Switching gigs, much like switching schools, is an opportunity for self-reinvention.

Finally, in some ways, this is a classic triangle problem (more on this later): fast, cheap, good, pick any two.  Applying this to work, you can pick your location, your role, or your industry; if you’re very good, you might be able to pick two; only a rare few get to pick all three.  If you want to work in games and you want to be an artist, chances are very good that you’re going to have to go where the work is.  If you have hard skills (like programming), you can choose your location and your role, as long as you’re willing to consider working outside of games; the softer the skill-set, though, the harder those transitions can be.  Part of the reason I started Better Realities is that I want to live in Colorado (where there isn’t a lot of game development) and still work in games.  In order to accomplish that, I’m willing to be flexible about what role I play, what projects I work on, genres, scope, platform, etc.  The more specific you are about these things, the more you limit your own options.  If you want to work in film, but you’re a cinematographer devoted to living in Billings, Montana, you really shouldn’t be surprised if you’re not inundated with offers.

There has never been more game development going on than there is now.  There have never been more opportunities to be a game developer than there are now.  But, it’s still a small industry; it’s still highly specialized, highly localized.  The more particular you are about location, role, and other details, the more limited your options are going to be. The volatility of the game industry just makes this more visible.  The opportunities for other highly specialized fields (like, say, being a tenured professor of Music) are similarly challenging, but you don’t see constant relocation because the jobs themselves are stable.  It is possible that the industry will grow out of this, but it is just as likely that, like other entertainment industries (film, TV, theater) if you want to work at the highest levels, you have to survive the instability and go to where the work is.  Nobody said it was easy.  Relocation expands opportunities.  At the end of the day, I think that’s why it’s so common.

Balloon-Class Problems

If you’ve ever played with balloons, you know tangibly how the elasticity of the balloon is a key characteristic.  Until you’ve filled it to the breaking point, you can squeeze one part of a balloon, and the filling just moves to another part.  I use this as a shorthand to describe the class of problems where there is a fixed amount of work that has to be done but multiple resource allocations that can handle it.

For example, when I was working at THQ, the accounting/finance department rolled out a new purchasing/reimbursement software package.  It was a high-end package from a company that worked with a lot of big, enterprise-level companies, and it could handle everything from requisitioning a dev kit to making milestone payments to filling out expense reports.  We spent days getting trained on how to use this software, from lowly QA folks all the way up to the VP level, and I’m sure that it made things much easier for the accounting/finance department by eliminating policy violations at the input level.  However, at the same time, it shifted that work from the accounting/finance folks to everyone else in the company.  The overall amount of work didn’t change; it just got pushed around and re-distributed.  The productivity numbers for accounting/finance probably skyrocketed, because they had (knowingly or not) drafted everyone else in the company to help do their work.

Tools development is a classic balloon-class problem.  Whenever you run across work that is highly repetitive, is executed according to well-known rules, and will take a lot of hours to do by hand, it is natural to look at tools-based solutions.  You can do a simple algebraic cost-assessment on this kind of work (artist/designer time saved per unit times number of units minus tools developer time); you can even get into a finer calculus involving the cost differential of programmer time vs. artist/designer time, throwing in variables for debugging, interface improvements, and other iterative aspects of toolchains.  At the end of the day, though, you are re-distributing work, and more often than not, there isn’t a clear “win-win” scenario because the marginal difference isn’t significant in the face of all the other work that has to be done on a project.

As a project manager, you constantly have to assess, balance, and re-assess the effectiveness of your resource allocations.  Balloon-class problems are a real headache because they tend to muddy the waters rather than bringing clarity.  So, when I recognize a balloon-class problem, one of the first things I look at is where the best match is between the workflows of the people who will have to do the work and the type of work that is required.

For example, populating levels with enemies is a common balloon-class problem in RPG’s.  You’re never really going to be able to eliminate the designers from population (not if you want solid gameplay), but it is a tedious, repetitive task, and optimizing your toolchain so that your designers can focus on refining gameplay rather than simply implementing it can be a huge win. However, when push comes to shove, I would rather have my designers implement and refine the populations rather than develop a toolset that can populate automatically, for the simple reason that the designers need to be hands-on with all of the gameplay experiences.  Particularly when you’re trying to develop large amounts of content, the natural inclination is going to be to go for systemic, broader solutions, but your gamers are better served by less content that is better tuned over more content that is systemically, programmatically generic.

At the same time, designers are generally creative people and want to be problem-solving and creating in interesting ways, not doing the same rote tasks over and over.  If you can afford to support them by providing appropriate tools so that they can spend more time raising the quality of the content you have rather than churning out content from scratch, you would be well-advised to do so.  But, in a pinch, give the work to the people who are best suited to achieving the best result.

Designers craft gameplay; accountants can run numbers and policies better than anyone else.  As a project manager, you have to know when to ask your team to swallow the bitter pill, even when they think there is a better solution, especially when that better solution is just redistributing the work rather than substantially reducing it.