I mean ultimately you need to ascertain what point you are trying to make… on one hand, you are trying to argue that you know for a fact, through your career, that he isn’t high on the pole of the studio… wouldn’t be entirely privy to the competence of the leadership.
While simultaneously you state you have no knowledge of the structure of 343 and thus you can’t accurately comment on it.
If that’s latching on to fragments of your post which hugely contradict each other… I guess I’m guilty of that.
No, what we got was reports about the devs. The infighting between teams, the prototype with UE, wasting contractors time by reassigning them before they finished. Those are the ones I can remember from the top of my head.
I think the only fair criticism is the contractor situation and even with that we don’t know if that’s a decision made by 343i leadership or maybe a general rule at Microsoft. Maybe it depends on the profits you make or the headcount of your team. Maybe a certain percentage have to be contractors in each team. If you work at any company leadership always gets critizised, it’s just natural behavior to cope with things that maybe ain’t working out as intended.
The truth is leadership has more variables to consider in their decision making than people on the ground level can see, thats their job. As everyone they maybe make wrong decisions from time to time, their still humans after all. But to stand on the sideline with no information on what variables they had to weigh and ultimately what decisions were even made it’s hard to judge. I don’t want to defend anyone here I just think it’s unwise to judge without knowing all the facts or for that matter any facts at all.
Also Jason Schreier just spreads meaningless words here for clicks sake, tweeting “hit hard” without any context is just clickbait type of journalism. What does hit hard mean? How many people were on the campaign team? How many have been laid off?
This I agree completely. The is one of the biggest issue that is plaguing 343. But its not on them as its MS company wide issue. MS can only hire so many people, I am not sure but there is some regulation regarding how many a company can hire at a particular place, 343 being in the same campus affects them adversely, that why you see many companies splitting into different entities to avoid this situation.
The contract situation is a industry wide issue. Majority of the companies in the US do not provide long term employment, most of them are on yearly contract basis where its renewed every year. Majority of gaming studios follow the same model especially in the Bay Area and hence most of them have long moved to co-development and support studios to reduce production costs. So sometimes the partnerships work well and sometimes it falls off.
Schreier did write an article on Halo Infinite in which he mentions the troubles they had but the framing of the article was more “how 343 overcame difficulties to make Halo Infinite” and generally ended on a positive note about their work rather than out and out being a breakdown of their failings.
Reliance on contractors is ultimately a management decision and it isn’t necessarily a bad one. It could be as simple as not having budget to maintain the level of staff required to build the game post launch. In the scenario, you’d get dragged for hiring and firing people.
If a full production cycle typically takes a couple of years, it is a reasonable assumption that this won’t cause a ptoblem. There is some risk in that though, where development could have been much more troublesome than planned. In that scenario you’re screwed.
Why was it more troublesome? Could it have been avoided? Probably. If the people managing had the benefit of hindsight that the people complaining about management had would different decisions have be made? I’d hope so.
