Unfortunately the industry has a ha it of doing this. A project finishes and they let go of a bunch of the staff, this means quite a few good developers are looking for work. Since this happens so often when they staff back up for the next project there is plenty of good talent to pick up.
There is the major downside of loss of institutional knowledge, but its the price they are willing to pay I guess.
Why not just get them working on a new game? This way don’t they have months/years of zero development towards the next release?
Why delay?
If they don’t want it to compete with the fresh release too soon just get them working on a different genre that won’t overlap. Instead of battlefield 7 get them working on something like Spore 3 or whatever.
These are great questions but it often boils down to a few factors. One is do they have the money put aside yet for a new project. Especially larger companies funding has to be secured per project, which means pitching an idea potentially doing a prototype etc.
The other is you generally don’t need as much staff in the pre production stage of a project. Your trying to figure out what technologies you’ll use, what style of art etc. Once you move into full blown production then you end up ramping up on developers, artists, etc.
And that’s if you have an idea ready to go.
Basically to maintain everyone or even a large number of them you’d have to have multiple projects on the go to be able to shift everyone around.
Some studios handle this better then others. And I’m sure there are some higher level executives who don’t really care. It’s beneficial for some of them to save the studio the money between projects I’m sure that reflects in thier bonuses, which sucks.
Unfortunately the industry has a ha it of doing this. A project finishes and they let go of a bunch of the staff, this means quite a few good developers are looking for work. Since this happens so often when they staff back up for the next project there is plenty of good talent to pick up.
There is the major downside of loss of institutional knowledge, but its the price they are willing to pay I guess.
Why not just get them working on a new game? This way don’t they have months/years of zero development towards the next release?
Why delay?
If they don’t want it to compete with the fresh release too soon just get them working on a different genre that won’t overlap. Instead of battlefield 7 get them working on something like Spore 3 or whatever.
Why do that when you can cut raises and hire new people cheaper so that the greedy fuckers at the top can pocket it?
These are great questions but it often boils down to a few factors. One is do they have the money put aside yet for a new project. Especially larger companies funding has to be secured per project, which means pitching an idea potentially doing a prototype etc.
The other is you generally don’t need as much staff in the pre production stage of a project. Your trying to figure out what technologies you’ll use, what style of art etc. Once you move into full blown production then you end up ramping up on developers, artists, etc.
And that’s if you have an idea ready to go.
Basically to maintain everyone or even a large number of them you’d have to have multiple projects on the go to be able to shift everyone around.
Some studios handle this better then others. And I’m sure there are some higher level executives who don’t really care. It’s beneficial for some of them to save the studio the money between projects I’m sure that reflects in thier bonuses, which sucks.
Ironically EA is one of the companies that has more to lose from loss of institutional knowledge because they have an in-house engine.
If you’re running Unreal Engine, you can always find devs, that’s why CD Projekt Red made (or is making) the switch for example.
Even with Unreal Engine studios will build custom systems and tools for it. So you still lose a bunch of knowledge.