Lack of Gamers in the Game Industry

This article was originally published on my LinkedIn page in October 2020.

This monthly article will be different. While my usual posts are more like “Hello, this is the ordinary contribution to my PM blog”, this one is “Oh my goodness, this really grinds my gears”. I want to talk about something that is extremely important for the gaming industry and people who work in it — a love for games.

The topic came to my mind while I’ve been at another digital conference. This year is filled with great online events for me and the only thing that lacks is the real-life part of that experience. But we work with what we have, right? Anyway, I meet a lot of new people at such events, especially on the biggest ones like Pocket Gamer Connects and White Nights. And when I speak to fellow developers I notice something that makes me worried. I’m talking about playing games.

In the era of games becoming a significant part of the pop-culture, it shouldn’t be a problem — everybody likes games! Everyone knows at least something about it because of movies like Pixels, Ready player one, or Wreck-It Ralph, shows like High Score or 3 out of 10, books like Reality is Broken or Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, etc. Looks like games have become a part of consumption habits and the mobile industry helped a lot with making it more accessible — you don’t need any specific device to play, the perfect entry point in the world of gaming lies in your pocket. Statistic says that one-third of the world plays games…

Then why the hell there are so many people in the game development industry who don’t play games?!

It really gets on my nerve. The more I meet people who want to create games or are already creating them, the more I hear things like: “Oh, I don’t really play a lot but I want to create something outstanding”. How are you going to determine if your creation “outstanding” or not without playing similar games? Oh, I get it, you are creating something unique without any competitors at all. Go read about the “Jobs to be done” framework then, it will bring you back on earth.

Okay, let’s cool down and talk about why this is so important to me.

I can divide the “player levels” of a good game developer into three:

Level 1 — you are playing some games on any platform for 2–3 sessions a week.

Level 2 — Level 1 + you are playing some games from the genre you are working on.

Level 3 — Level 2 + you are playing the game you are working on at least once every 2 weeks.

And you can’t go below level 1, that’s completely unacceptable. Every creative profession requires some vision. You can’t go and cook a delicious meal without tasting anything — that’s not something I’ve made up, it’s a real rule of chefs. You can have a specific taste and that makes you unique but you can’t have no taste at all. My opponent can give some dumb examples like “Beethoven was deaf” — yeah, after 30 he lost his hearing but he heard music before and kept using some special techniques to hear what he composes. Furthermore, that’s a disability, not a relevant example. Developers can play games, they just don’t want to.

Call me naive but I believe that a company with employees who don’t believe in the project haven’t ever seen games that they can refer to and don’t play in the spare time anything but that one particular game — will fall.

For the last two months, I’ve been working on a battle royale FPS with a programmer who hasn’t played any battle royale games before. After he got familiar with the list of games I’ve provided for him, the working process became more meaningful for him. That affects the motivation — not directly but still. It is an engaging part of the daily job that should be first highlighted by the recruiter. Why do you need someone who may be qualified in terms of C#, for instance, but completely doesn’t care about your games?

You might know that there are two types of motivation: extrinsic and intrinsic.

Intrinsic motivation comes from within and is characterized by a deep-seated interest in expanding one’s own knowledge and abilities. Extrinsic motivation, however, comes from without and is sustained by an external reward or punishment.

Yes, employees can be driven by extrinsic motivation only but do you need a car with only rear wheels? I don’t and that’s why I’m so unpleasantly surprised when I see that people don’t care about what they do. Let’s look at hyper-casual games for example. You might think that the developers don’t like to create that type of game but you will be wrong on that. It depends on the person. Where one people see a simple and stupid game, the other see an entry point for non-gamers, a perfect time killer, a way to give your brain a short rest, etc. Both types can work on such projects but the first one is more likely to leave. The fast pace of the development makes you replace the employee with the new one, who might also not be interested in your games. The cycle repeats, creating a terrible turn-over that will get noticed by the engaged employees. Yes, they like what they do but they feel like a minority in not so safe environment — that’s why they will eventually leave too for a more stable company. So you got left with indifferent workers and no motivation in the team. I wonder how that will affect the performance of the company…

I see lots of people who are sitting in the mobile industry and still hate it. It’s especially hilarious to hear statements like “Mobile games are rubbish, best games are on Steam” in the time when many top titles are cross-platform (Fortnite, Hearthstone, Minecraft) or have mobile versions (EVE Echoes, Diablo Immortal, Stellaris). Nowadays even indie games like Among Us have a cross-platform experience while giant corporations try to be present on mobile. Could you imagine Dead by Daylight or Call of Duty for mobile 3 or 4 years ago? These types of pioneers opened a road for AAA mobile games that will merge mobile, PC, and consoles to some extent. Previously mobile was a small part of the market, now it is not.

Getting back to the topic, I think that it is important to keep an eye on the industry. Your hungry brain is what makes you stand out from the crowd of equally qualified IT specialists. And if you see yourself in the game industry in 5 or 10 years, you need to open your eyes and see what’s going on around you.

You need to play the game you are working on to understand weak points and user experience.

You need to play competitors’ games to understand what makes you different.

You need to play other games to shape your mindset, your vision, your gaming erudition.

In the end, I want to give you a simple example, from the mobile segment again. You can find a lot of interesting mechanics as piggy banks or VIP passes in different games from casual to mid-core games. A lot of them came from social casino games. Moreover, Shooters can borrow something for the metagame from Match-3, Hyper-casuals find ideas in the Simulators — in this environment, everything is connected at some point and you can find that sweet point, understand it, and then use it for your own good.

Don’t you want to become the one who will change your company and, maybe, the gaming industry itself? Then go play some games…

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.