Because gaming is not just software development. It’s an intersection of software, technology, art, and entertainment. Collaboration and communication are key. Procedures like motion capture and voice acting are not possible without physical studios. Most AAA studios were set up for office work for those reasons.
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As I have seen mentioned elsewhere: It is a minor miracle that games ever get made.
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I don’t believe everything’s “back to normal” now even. Some jobs are probably WFH forever now and are still in adjusting and figuring out best practices. Some employees might not be able to get back to office for an unvaccinated status for example, or for other complications caused by the pandemic.
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Oh totally, it’s definitely not back to normal. I just see a lot of people saying, “surely they’ve factored Covid in to the development by now” when A.) it’s still unpredictable and B.) 2020 will have set people back literally years.
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To add to those points, the entire art assets and art pipeline has been disrupted.
The size of the art assets are larger than anything normal software development deals with. The American internet infrastructure is absolute rubish where most internet is provided by cable companies where typical packages are 150 mbit/s download but only 10 mbit/s upload and even their upper most top tier is only 35 mbit/s. Some internet providers have changed their top tier from 35 mbit/s down to 15 mbit/s in some neighborhoods because their infrastructure could not handle it. They sold capabilities based on over-provisioning on the premise that not everyone would use it at the same time.
So now when an artist makes revisions at their home workstation it takes nearly the entire day to upload those changes to the work office server. Then everyone else on the team has to spend time to download those changes before they can even review them. If they make a simple change or tweak, they still have to upload the entire asset which takes nearly an entire day. So what normally takes a few minutes when done in the office is now taking days or weeks for a few simple iterations.
Not everyone who works on art assets has beefy machines to handle production at home. They might not even have various tablets or other hardware assist tools either. Their monitors might not even be HDR and might not even be high resolution enough to even display the typical programs used.
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I don’t know why but today on Twitter I see the articles appearing a lot about how Sony was trying to get Starfield as timed exclusive. And how this would have likely meant that Xbox wouldn’t have had anything big and new until 2024. People acting like that’s news when we knew about this ever since the Bethesda acquisition news.
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Also, Sony trying to get timed exclusivity doesn’t mean it would have happened. The cost of Starfield would have been WAY higher than Deathloop and Ghostwire, and you’d like to think Xbox would fight harder to stop them from getting it.
Plus, if Bethesda hadn’t have been acquired, I guarantee you that Starfield would still have come out this year, for better or for worse.
Yeah, true that.
Until 2024? More 2023 not like Starfield is the only big game in 2023 lol
How many terabytes of art are you shuffling around on a daily basis in your software projects?
To elaborate, normal software dev for line of business applications is very different to AAA game dev. If your projects contain almost only text and its dev tools and pipeline are designed and optimized to work over a network (like a db) then this is a completely different picture when you have terabytes of art assets, your deliverables are in the size of hundreds of gigabytes and your tools are not text editors but Autodesks stuff which need beefy PCs.
I have been working from home on and off the last 20 years in my software projects. Even over sometimes shitty internet that worked pretty good. But i only transfer text and db queries or can remote desktop to a text editor. Try this with Zbrush or Maya.
Also, often times tooling and dev pipeline in game dev are very different (and years behind) to business software development. As an example I know nobody who uses Perforce, but its a very common version control tool in game dev.
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I know I mentioned it before but wanted to hilight exactly how limiting upload bandwidth is when working from home.
The main killer is just how weak the internet infrastructure is on the uplink. All offices will be using at least Gigabit networking out to the user workstations. Meanwhile the home internet typically only has 10 mbit/s to 35 mbit/s. That is only 1% to 3.5% of the office bandwidth. Let that sink in.
That task that takes 5 minutes in the office now takes anywhere from 143 minutes [3.5%] to 500 minutes [1%]. That’s nearly 2.4 hours to 8.33 hours!
There are some art workstation clusters that use 10gbit or higher networking because of the vast amounts of data they manipulate. Trying to run similar setup from home is impossible. Something more to think about.
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I’d like to believe so too, but officially we have nothing just yet. But yeah, you know how some folks like to exeggerate. Probably not even a Xbox owner.
Thanks for all the thoughtful replies folks, has been interesting and educational.
I did have a poke about to see if anyone had done any presentations on remote game development but there doesn’t seem to be much out there, all I could find is this one from slightly mad studios and it doesn’t have much about the logistics of large data movement.
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Im not a game dev, but I work in IT, we have on prem jump boxes for any large data moves now that we are all permanently remote workers. Home internet just isnt capable of (in a timely fashion) a lot of workloads/processes.
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Exactly
Starfield and redfall delay is bad for gamepass. But hardware wont be effected. People still need to buy consoles to play Gotham Knights. Jedi fallen order2. Hogwarts legacy, modern warfare 2 and other big 3rd parties we might not know about yet.
Taking teams who have had their entire software infrastructure built around being in the same building and scattering them all over the globe is hugely disruptive. Those individuals have to upload/download builds of enormous games remotely which is a huge time sink waiting for builds to get updated even once the code’s changes are done.
Lots of other stuff depends on things earlier in the chain as well, like working on cutscenes or voice acting or in-game character movements all having to wait for mocap to get done, which is both severely delayed due to COVID and also only a few places that contract out for mocap were even taking on clients for a long time during COVID. Also in a creative project I’d assume a lot of time gets wasted trying to explain things to others that can’t just grab a controller at a work desk to play a mechanic for themselves.
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.I have similar experience with my work, I also have had to think creatively about how I handle some larger files, import jobs etc. as a result of working at home. There are some tasks that even using a workstation on site is too time consuming for me so we have to run it on the system server to get it done faster, and dealing with my home internet on top of a workstation not having as fast a connection to the system means going from a certain task taking about 12 minutes per batch on the server to approximately 25 on an on prem workstation to at least a couple of hours per batch if using my work laptop over VPN and with our upload speed of 20 mbps.