The following story is spun out of an episode of the Hit The Limit Break podcast. For the full conversation, check out the the video below.
You can also find the interview on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and Pocket Casts.
“If you look at Suicide Squad, which had so many talented people working on it. A live service, AAA looter shooter is not going to have the same DNA, goals, and construction as a AAA, cinematic story based video game,” says Strange Scaffold’s Xalavier Nelson, comparing Rocksteady’s latest title to their previous Batman Arkham games.
He brings this up as a part of our discussion on one of the biggest and most common mistakes that, in his mind, a lot of game developers make. “When you’re given a time and a budget, you’re defining the project by those things,” he says. “When you make a $150 million movie in Hollywood, you’re making a fundamentally different thing than a $3 million movie.
And in games, we see it almost like it’s on a linear scale, especially on the business development side. ‘Oh if we give you $3 million to make your $300,000 game, then it’s just a better version of that game, right?’ No, because you’re expanding your timeline by 2 years, you’re making a different game. I would love for you to pay someone $3 million to make the $300,000 game, but that’s not what you’re doing.”
Nelson is of the belief that in order for development to be sustainable, studios have to begin restricting their games’ scope to the time and budget that they initially decide upon. “Clickholding was a two month game made for about $25,000. Every decision made for that game was around, ‘This game has to come out in two months. What’s the best we can deliver for players in that time?’ I think there’s a lot of wishful thinking in the industry, and if I’m being blunt, a lack of full accounting,” he says candidly.
“When I’m brought in on certain projects, I’m like, ‘This new feature you’ve included. What’s it going to take to test that? To build that? Does it work with the rest of the game?’ And we walk through the implications of that upcoming decision. That self-interrogation is not a significant part of the game development process from what I have seen from working on about 100 games, from indie to AAA.”
It’s this lack of self-interrogation that, he argues, is partly to blame for the current tumultuous state of game development. Another major element is the lack of sense from decision makers at the top: “Genuinely, in all my research, in all my time [in the industry], experiencing the medium, inside and outside of its walls, there’s nothing quite like this time. There’s no logic that unifies the decisions being made right now.”
He expands on this thought, explaining that the current state of development is one filled to the brim with publishers essentially running scared and as such, acting irrationally. “You still have a lot of factors, but it’s both driving really wide ranging decisions and also deeply confusing ones. There’s a specific lack in connecting logic. I am seeing and hearing about publishers canceling finished games because of a fear that the game won’t be [worth it]. It’s all fear and gambling mentality,” he argues.
Nelson’s own studio Strange Scaffold’s mission statement is “Better, Faster, Cheaper, and Healthier.” Nelson describes the structure of the studio as a constellation model, where he is connected to a web of contract developers that work on projects in a modular configuration. This system has led to the rapid release of numerous games (15 in five years), most of which have been profitable according to the young developer. However, Nelson doesn’t believe anyone can simply copy this system.
“You have to adapt the machine to you as a person,” he says, explaining that Strange Scaffold is specifically designed in a manner that closely aligns with how he himself operates. For someone that is better suited to hunkering down and working on a single project, as opposed to Nelson, who is always working on numerous titles at once, Strange Scaffold, he argues, would not be a conducive structure.
However, he does believe that more creative, outside the box decisions around how to build a development studio can work, as he and his team have proven time and time again, despite being told on numerous occasions that it can’t. “A lot of the assumptions we make about how we make video games, and what is necessary to make video games, and the pains that are necessary to make a video game: those might be erroneous,” he states.
Strange Scaffold’s success has even led to the studio making a deal for a feature film adaptation of its game El Paso, Elsewhere. While development on the project is still in the early stages, something is already painfully clear to Nelson: “One thing that’s different from games is that Hollywood knows how to make a film.”
Nelson goes on to explain that, whereas game development can differ from studio to studio, and even from team to team within a studio, films are, for the most part, all made in the same manner. When asked if game development can learn anything from film production, he had the following to say: “You’ll never be able to have as clear of an assembly line as film because film has fewer variables. They don’t have to worry about crossplay multiplayer! It’s just a movie. But I do think the overall principles apply of having time and a budget, and you’re building something based on prior precedent. I’ve been told, ‘You can’t know what game you’re making till you make it.’ And that’s fine as a philosophical concept. It does not keep you in business very long though.”
While Strange Scaffold isn’t the only studio focused on putting out smaller, more sustainable titles, according to Nelson, there’s one main thing stopping this kind of development from becoming more mainstream. “The thing stopping a double A revolution is that you have to have money,” he says. “And everyone that has money, instead, wants to make a new Fortnite. And that new Fortnite might get canceled before it ever gets released, and that’s just the reality we have to deal with right now.”
For more from my conversation with Nelson, please watch the full episode of Hit the Limit Break. Also, consider donating to help build the Limit Break Network into a video game outlet for the future (more details in our FAQ), and check out our own video game Punctuation Pop!
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