, says Coats, could just as easily be called the Great Reprioritization. "When you're faced with a potentially life-ending global pandemic, you question why are you killing yourself for all this stuff," he says. "Because you could get sick next week and be in the hospital intubated.". Drew McCoy, game director at Gravity Well, describes himself as a "recovering workaholic." Bosses have long exploited the fact that games are a "passion industry,” he says.
This snowballing is typical. The statement "once your team size crosses 100 people, everything changes" rides near the top of Gravity Well’s website. The team believes that the single biggest shift, and a common complaint of those who have been in the industry for any length of time, is the moment that a team can no longer fit in one room.
With hundreds of developers”"nameless people on a spreadsheet," in McCoy’s words—creative control is dilutedentrenched. You may spend all your time sitting in a cubicle drawing trees, says Sands, or you’re a producer parsing Excel. You become a cog in a machine. Creative decisions trickle downhill, through layer after layer of corporate obfuscation, while there’s a sense that higher-ups hold jobs they don’t deserve.
This process plays out as you might imagine: One person, says Coats, keeps bringing up the "crazy thing." Then they get a reputation around the studio, and everybody learns: "Don't say the crazy thing." This bureaucracy almost killed some famous games–McCoy says that developers had to force Activision to bench WWII shooters for a new, contemporary reinvention of thePublishers also interfere in other, more troubling ways.
WiredUK Not pictured: thousands of failed indie projects that burnt through the founders savings.
WiredUK right! ITs magic. So cool Just happens. You know, Magically.