Almost only counts in Horseshoes and Hand Grenades
Almost seems to count for a lot with "Duke Nukem Forever" as well. Here's piece of a Game Daily interview:
Miller: We've put about $7.5 million into that and we've been working on it since late 1998. So it really hasn't been that much of an investment. And once it comes out, if it's as successful as we think it'll be, we'll make that money back in the first day or two of sales.
THR: 1998? You've been working on it for eight years?
Miller: I know, I know. It's embarrassing.
THR: Maybe you can explain to readers who don't know the games industry why it should take that long to make a game.
Miller: It shouldn't. And I'm dumbfounded myself. A huge part of the problem is that it's really hard hiring good developers to come to Dallas. This place used to be a hotbed of game development. But, nowadays, people seem to want to go to Austin instead.
Hmm. Sounds odd to me. Aren't most game developers young and more easily relocatable? In any event, that game is the industry version of Waiting for Godot.
Comments
Easily relocatble, but...
[Chris Hanson] May 13, 2006 16:17:12.044
Many game developers are young and more easily relocatable. However, they generally want to relocate someplace cool. Given the option of doing a boring job for decent pay someplace fun and interesting or doing a fun and interesting job for less pay in a relative backwater, only a small fraction of people will take the latter.
Why did I bring up pay? People tend to live in backwaters because they like the rural life and because they're cheaper. Many people tend to only want to pay an average salary for "their market" by which they mean their geographic region rather than their industry. They don't realize that they might actually be in the opposite situation; if they're in a backwater they may need to pay more for the same talent than a company in San Francisco or Austin would.
I never fail to be amazed at the unwillingness of companies to understand that the market for good developers is a market like any other. There is not a very large supply of good game developers willing to move to Dallas. Therefore, if a company in Dallas wants to attract good game developers they need to do one of three things: Try to make it more worthwhile for those developers to move to Dallas, move to where the developers are (or want to be), or use a distributed workforce. Not doing any of these and whining that you can't attract good people isn't an option, and investors should hold companies to that.
Re: Programming in Dallas
[James T. Savidge] May 13, 2006 18:01:40.598
As a programmer in Dallas, I can say that there are other reasons why a programmer might not want to move here.
Austin has a better and stronger market for programmers than Dallas does, although it used to be the opposite. If you are laid off, you can find a job faster in Austin than if you lived in Dallas.
Dallas has had a *large* number of telecom layoffs in the past four years, and there are a lot of ex-programmers trying to make livings as plumbers and tax prepares. From the Smalltalk perspective, it is a bit of a wasteland here.
Now, almost all employment is in reality temporary, and you have to be thinking of your next job even as you start a new one. A programmer has a better chance of finding their next job in Austin than in Dallas.
Believe me, I wish that wasn't true. :-(
James T. Savidge, Saturday, May 13, 2006