The video games explosion

Dave Waller meets the project manager behind blockbuster video game Angry Birds and other industry aficionados to find out what it takes to manage the production of a megabudget entertainment project. Just how do you maintain a balance between letting the creatives loose and keeping the endgame in sight?

What are you going to do, save the world all by yourself?” In the 2001 trailer for Duke Nukem Forever, one of the most anticipated video games of all time, a cop questions the eponymous hero in the middle of a gun battle, as flames lick the walls in the building lobby around them. Duke Nukem was the irreverently gun-swinging, cigar-chomping, chisel-featured adventurer who’d set the standard for video games in the mid-90s. Funnier, sharper, more violent and more interactive than its rivals, Duke Nukem 3D, released in 1996, sold 3.5 million copies – making its developer, 3D Realms, wealthy and powerful in the process.

But any world-saving ambitions Nukem harboured were soon snuffed out. Duke Nukem Forever, the sequel, was announced in April 1997 and slated for release the following year. Yet aside from the odd teaser, which drew gushing comparisons to Hollywood movies, the Duke’s fans were left tormented. Twelve long years went by, with various iterations developed and scrapped, as 3D Realms’ founder, George Broussard, grew increasingly obsessed with crafting the perfect game – and with staying ahead of rival studios, whose every release moved the goalposts even further. In May 2009, drained of money and talent, 3D Realms finally hit delete.

Shigeru Miyamoto, the founding father of gaming (and creator of Super Mario Brothers), once famously said: “A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad.” Duke Nukem nuked that idea, and gave the rapidly maturing games industry a cautionary project management tale: this is what happens, it said, when game developers fixate on perfection.

A megabucks game

The rest of the gaming world, meanwhile, has kept up its relentless advance. According to Newzoo’s Global Games Market Report, the industry is set to be worth more than $200bn by 2023. This winter, we’re entering the next generation of gaming, with the launch of Sony’s Playstation 5 and Microsoft’s Xbox X and S Series consoles. And with COVID-19 leaving people round the world demanding entertainment at home, gaming’s fortunes couldn’t look brighter.

As for the games themselves, they now boast even more stunning visuals, greater ingenuity and increasingly ambitious and immersive storytelling. Blockbuster games have budgets topping €100m and may require the work of a staggering 1,000 development staff to design fully explorable worlds, render thousands of vehicles and weapons, create sound effects and original music scores, and even light individual doorways.

And someone has to keep that process in check.

Bob David, a producer at Ubisoft Reflections, a Newcastle-based subsidiary of France’s Ubisoft Entertainment, has experienced this evolution first-hand. When he joined the games industry, working on the action-adventure racing game Stuntman, it was the early 2000s, and Sony had just launched its Playstation 2. Back then, a typical games project would have a single project manager, with around 50 to 100 people working on its development. David says they wouldn’t even bother tracking tasks.

Taking a hybrid approach

These days, it’s on a whole new level. At Ubisoft Reflections, development follows a phase-gate process, with each phase using a different project methodology.

“In the initial pitch phase, we follow the four Fs: fail fast, and find the fun,” says David. “We’ll have a team of around 10 people trying to find a USP to build the rest of the game around, and that involves a lot of prototyping, finding what works and what doesn’t.

“Scrum is great when we’re trying to find our path like this. A major challenge is the huge amount of unknowns we continuously have to deal with. Because we don’t know what we’re doing, we take a sprint-by-sprint approach, and from a project management perspective that’s a bit scary. You have to be hands-off and leave the creatives alone to define and test different theories. But if a project was led by a project manager from start to finish, you’d probably get a very safe game that didn’t necessarily drive anything forward in terms of the industry.”

That sense of free-flowing creativity also powers the next phase, conception, in which a team of around 50 aims to compile a full list of features for the game, using the MoSCoW prioritisation framework (Must have, Should have, Could have, and Won’t have).

It’s when the game goes into pre-production and then production that the producers take on more of a project management role. The aim is to reach a version of the game with every element represented in its basic form. Here there are fewer unknowns, and the scrum method is abandoned. “The character artist teams follow more of a Kanban approach,” says David. “They know how many characters they need to make in total, and how much time they can spend on each character, so it’s about keeping an eye on that velocity and making sure they know where their wiggle room is. The tech teams, meanwhile, will generally switch into more of a service provider role, with a waterfall framework. They’ll wait for requests and act on them when they come in, whether that’s to provide specific tools or to fix a bug in the game engine.”

Finally, there’s the polishing phase, where the team makes the game experience as good as possible for the player in the time remaining, and debugging. “Unfortunately, no game is ever truly finished,” says David. “There’s always something that could be better. We could continuously tweak it, and we could spend a lot of money in the process. It’s about knowing when to finish.”

If only the Duke Nukem team could have heeded that lesson. According to a Wired magazine investigation into 3D Realms’ jaw-dropping failure, game developers there said there was never an overall plan of what the finished product would look like, and thus no way to recognise when it was nearing completion. “I remember being very impressed by the features; it was incredibly cool technology,” a developer hired in 2000 was quoted as saying. “But it wasn’t a game.”

Making the most of Scrum

All this must sound like nails scraping down a blackboard to scrum aficionados. Scrum is an iterative or agile project management technique that, by design, reduces the chance of wasting time and resources on the wrong end product by bringing feedback into the process sooner. This is especially useful in such a creative field, where a multi-billion dollar project will start with a scribbled idea and could easily involve hundreds of highly creative people applying their own subjectivity to an as-yet undefined outcome. With scrum, you’d never reach the point of not knowing what that endgame is.

“Applied correctly, agile techniques like scrum are incremental and iterative, and focus on producing a potentially releasable product by the end of each one-to-four-week sprint,” says Helen Garcia, scrum master, agile coach and director of Maykit. “Each small team of five to seven people does everything from design and build to test and release. The idea is to develop a minimum viable product that can be released sooner, to get feedback faster and respond to changing requirements to meet the players’ needs, and gain return on investment faster too.”

By way of contrast, Garcia points to the traditional, more linear or waterfall method, where a team may build a game’s lead character by simply making assumptions about what players want out of it. “You may get what you think is the perfect character eventually, but you haven’t released that game for many months or years, and you’ve got no return on investment. And what’s the point in developing a whole character and how it walks, speaks and interacts if that’s not what players want? You’re developing waste. A truly agile or scrum method would give value to the customer sooner, get player feedback and be able to respond to changes.”

Keeping the Angry Birds going

At Christmas 2006, Niklas Hed, co-founder of Finnish smartphone game studio Rovio Entertainment, received a striking piece of user feedback on a new game he’d been working on: he had watched his own mother get so wrapped up in it that she burned the turkey. “She doesn’t play any games,” Hed is reported as saying. “I realised: this is it.”

The game in question was Angry Birds, released to the public in 2009. It offered simple, if weird, gameplay – you fire birds at pigs that had stolen their eggs – but it proved hugely addictive. Within six years, the game had been downloaded more than three billion times, by fans including David Cameron, Justin Bieber, Paul Gascoigne and Salman Rushdie.

Rovio, which started out by creating games that could be purchased and played in their entirety, was close to bankruptcy when Angry Birds came out. But the game saw the studio shift its focus towards constantly adapting and changing a game’s content to keep it fresh and to engage its players with new updates, new events and new features. This is the way the industry is increasingly heading.

“When you launch a game these days, especially on mobile, you need a lot of content from day one,” says Thomas Ruotsalainen, a producer at Rovio who has worked on the Angry Birds franchise. “I’m talking hundreds of levels on top of an engaging game core with interesting characters, events, challenges and goals. But you also need to have a plan about what to do next. Making games is now a marathon; the global launch is just the beginning.”

Beyond the production of the games themselves, Rovio carries out vast amounts of testing and data analysis. The audience reaction to the first playable versions is instrumental in shaping how the game is then developed. Ruotsalainen describes this as a “push and pull between the development team and the players”. It’s an approach that requires the team to be flexible.

A bespoke hybrid approach

“Typical waterfall methodology or scrum doesn’t really fit our continuous development,” says Ruotsalainen. “Instead, we try to find a good combination of practices – like sprints, retrospectives and Kanban boards – that fits each individual team. We use retrospectives to find out what is wrong, or what’s hindering the team or product from fulfilling the vision, while clear sprints, goals and estimates make sure we don’t get derailed from what’s important.”

David explains that the team at Ubisoft Reflections is moving in this more iterative direction too. Internally, the focus during the production process is increasingly on having a working build of the game that forms a ‘regular heartbeat’ of the project, a minimum playable version that directors can play from the start, which remains in a permanently playable state as the work progresses. The goal is to extend that iterative approach to building that flexibility into the published games too.

“At the moment, we don’t have all the processes in place, or the flexibility or agility to do it in a way that’s efficient in terms of budget or time,” says David. “But that’s the dream, our hope for game development: to make changes quickly enough that it keeps all players engaged, on a long-term basis, by creating a live world for them to continuously explore.”

It’s certainly working for Angry Birds. And for a little free game called Fortnite. Since the game’s release in 2017, Fortnite developer Epic has released micro-updates on a regular basis as a core feature of the game, making the world feel live and dynamic. Crucially, Epic has monetised these iterative elements: gamers can pay for new avatars called ‘skins’, as well as weapons, celebration dances and special missions. As these are available only for limited periods, they become even more desirable. According to VentureBeat, Fortnite’s revenue was $400m in April, when players spent a total of 3.2 billion hours in the game. That same month, Fortnite showed just how flexible a creation it is, when it staged a virtual Travis Scott concert that attracted more than 27 million people.

Game over

All that sits in such stark contrast to poor Duke Nukem. Duke Nukem Forever was finally released in 2011, having been rescued by another publisher with a soft spot for the franchise. But by then it was too late: the industry had moved on. As this new, more responsive era of cross-platform streaming beckoned, Duke felt leaden and outdated. It landed not with guns blazing but with a whimper. The game was destined to go down in gaming history not for pushing the limits of the craft, but by its unfortunate nickname: Duke Nukem Forever In Development.

How to play the game: six tips from project managers in gaming

1 Know your phases. Certain stages may demand freedom for key players to act creatively. Others will need you to keep a close eye on targets and deliverables. And each may demand a different project methodology.

2 Get your priorities straight. As games get increasingly complex, it becomes more important for developers to have a working build of the game that the entire team can access at all times. If that build is offline for half an hour, you might lose 500 man hours waiting for it to reboot. So keeping the working version running is top of the priority list. What’s your equivalent to that working build?

3 Understand your team. Leadership is one of the key pillars of project management in gaming, which involves long, creative projects. It’s about knowing how your team members prefer to approach their work – and keeping everyone safe from burn-out. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

4 Delegate. When you have up to 1,000 people working on millions of different elements and features of a game, no single person can hold the entire vision. Things become a lot easier when you pool the knowledge of your team, rather than taking on all the decisions by yourself.

5 Know when to finish. For many projects, the final outcome could always be improved upon – at a cost. It’s about knowing when you’ve done enough.

6 Stay close to the end user. The latest games take interactivity to new extremes, with user feedback often shaping new iterations of the game in real time. But even if your end product is fixed, user input can still sharpen what you do next.