I had a coworker introduce me to The Five Dysfunctions of a Team[0] as a useful tool for framing problems with team dynamics.
It's easy to draw parallels between what's described and those dysfunctions. In case you're not familiar, this framework by Patrick Lencioni outlines five obstacles that can mess up a team’s flow: absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results.
Particularly relevant to this situation: > Fear of conflict: seeking artificial harmony over constructive passionate debate
Just to warn you though, there is a tradeoff. You can also just act like an asshole and cite a culture of toxic positivity if people take issue with your behavior. The key is collaborate, productive focus on the outcomes with the other human beings involved in the endeavor.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Five_Dysfunctions_of_a_Tea...
The videogames industry is completely paralyzed by fear of conflict. It's in a transition between the old guard who never had any training and revel in conflict (sometimes, but rarely, too toxic levels) and the new starters some of whom seem to have no idea that criticism is an intrinsic part of the creative act.
It's very sad and products are failing all over the place while the industry works it's way through this. It might not make it as the current solution is to homogonize all staff and remove their intrinsic value.
Oh well, I enjoyed the first 20 years in the industry, not so much the last 10 years.
Not only the games industry, we seem to be on a fluffy world where any kind of negativity has direct impact on job evaluation, and can even lead to losing the job.
A couple of years ago I worked on such good vibes project, uff.
There are pockets here and there, even inside of AAA studios. But I agree, I'm unlikely to stay in games once I leave this job or am laid off.
This is a great reference, thank you. To me it was clear that Concord suffered from a deeply dysfunctional creative processes.
The character designs alone are so laughably bad that they border on caricature. They don't only violate the most basic of design fundamentals, they show a shocking amount of incompetence on all levels.
Lots of money, but not vision. It's not a coincident that Concord was a hero shooter. Of course big money doesn't understand what they invested in and everybody was just chasing trends without understanding a single dime of what made Overwatch a success.
>Of course big money doesn't understand what they invested in
Why "of course"? SIE did the due diligence, not just the executives (e.g. Hermen Hulst, the head of WWS, who signed off on the deal, is lauded as the genius of game design with such amazing titles as Killzone and Horizon under his direction during his tenure at Guerilla) but very senior people at the Playstation studios (Bungie, Naughty Dog, Insomniac etc.) checked this out and identified it as a sensible investment into a successful game. These are not some VCs investing into the most hyped thing this week, these are some acclaimed developers closing their eyes on the abomination of a game they purchased with money they don't really have.
There is nothing remotely normal in this process, this is something like Toyota buying Fisker for $10B and putting its badge on Karma.
Acclaimed developers make flops and garbage games all the time, I don’t think involving them is really any indicator of making a sound financial decision, which is further reinforced by TFA.
You don't need to be a genius to tell a flop is a flop. Even at Firewalk there were people who knew what are they making, as stated by TFA.
> Fear of conflict: seeking artificial harmony over constructive passionate debate
What do you do when you don't fear the "conflict" (passionate argumentation in search of better approaches) but having it leads nowhere, because people have different opinions?
For example, I responded to a comment where a person had a difficult situation with a coworker, though I didn't really have any solutions myself either: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41601023
There's a lot of abstract stuff out there, without always having a clear cut "best" answer, but which will have different drawbacks long term, which will impact people differently (e.g. in regards to webdev, that could be using an ORM vs not using it from a type of workload where either could suffice, composition vs inheritance, DB views vs dynamically built queries in the app, using the DTO pattern vs not, using projections for returning DTO data directly from the DB to avoid needing arguably unnecessary mapping in the app code between an Entity and DTO object).
Probably there's dozens of things like that, that apply to game development as well, with people whose opinions have been shaped by differing experiences.
I think that you will probably need to compromise a lot and with outcomes that might feel sub-optimal, hopefully without souring the team dynamics in the process.
I've realized something funny. It should be the company's interest to encourage employees to have productive debates and spend effort figuring out the best course on action, while in reality, from the perspective of an employee, it's an uphill battle to have your voice heard, with no reward at the end. Therefore, what a smart employee does, is shutting the fuck up.
Case in point: in my current team there's one very vocal senior who needs to have things done his way, but other than that, the willingness to participate in discussions is inversely correlated with experience, and the most experienced devs simply ran out of fucks to give because they're not getting paid extra for the time they spent in fruitless discussions. The end result is that the knowledge ends up being unused and we implement stupid ideas.
The reward for those things is either more work for no increase in pay or you're in conflict with one or more people who are now bad mouthing you to the boss and you'll eventually be fired or be made so miserable that you'll voluntarily leave.
I did not find that book compelling or realistic.
a super-cynical take would be:
investment banker: for the low low annualized price of $50m/year I’ll sell you this company. it’ll never make money, but it’ll attract lots of your negative marginal product workers from across your company, thus improving the success of your other games. it can run for about 10 years. at the end, you shut it down and it’s a big tax write off.
massive game company: where do I sign?
It still amazes me that a project can fail this hard without anyone speaking up. Based on what was said in the clip, there wasn't a great overarching direction to define the game. I haven't even heard anyone discussing the Concord story, what were they cooking to make them think they would be able to create something comparable to StarWars? Nearly everything I've heard about this game has been that it's a fairly generic hero shooter.
Did they ever do player testing or get outsiders to try it out before release? Were the people working on this game dogfooding it themselves?
I'm not sure it's a play test failure. If it were, you would think there would have been a burst of users and then nothing. It seems to me more like a market appeal failure. I didn't get the sense that anyone was intrigued by the story or characters, and the hero shooter as a genre has Overwatch, TF2, Deadlock and the bodies of Battleborne and others. They didn't showcase any stunning new mechanics in their intro, nor did they manage to make a funny or compelling story.
The marketing seemed to basically rely on "if they see 30s of gameplay, that will be compelling enough".
If we remember TF2, they launched with a bunch of really well conceptualized "Meet the character" videos which built humor and personality into the characters as well as taught some of the mechanics.
Overwatch launched a whole pile of interesting and very fresh player mechanics, as well as about triple the characters available with TF2.
Again, I can easily imagine they had players testing it. I'm not sure they had many people market testing.
> Were the people working on this game dogfooding it themselves?
Well they certainly weren't dogfooding it after launch. The Concord credits list 1,972 professional roles [1] while a week after release the game had fewer than 150 players on Steam. [2] The game was so bad that not even the people who spent 8 years working on it had any interest in it.
--
[1] https://www.mobygames.com/game/229488/concord/credits/playst...
It already happened many times:
Fallout 76, No Man's Sky (at least they managed to improved after release).
The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, Redfall, Babylon's Fall (Dead after release?).
And many games just force player to do meaningless things (for example, cast one magic 100 times for an achievement or unlock an unique item). Do they actually think this is funny during QA or design stage?
> cast one magic 100 times for an achievement
I was playing Bioshock Infinite recently and it had an achievement along the lines of "Loot 200 Containers." Not a huge deal except it pops up every time, 200 times, as you are looting.
> Do they actually think this is funny..
What's funnier is that thousands of players discovered there was a word to describe what they wanted to do to the team: defenestration.
You forgot Star Citizen. "Unlimited" budget but nothing special.
its the same thing with Gemini. if speaking up can get you fired, socially ostracized and black listed there is ample reason to just shut up.
I mean... the game was in development for 8 years and paid the bills for (apparently) 150 people working on the game for nearly a full decade. That's pretty good for a complete failure ;)
I guess they just couldn't find the magic formula to keep the game even longer in development like Star Citizen managed to do.
Disregarding the finances, 150 people spent eight years of their life on this. I don't think they were all just phoning it in and paying the bills. It probably stings more than a little bit.
> 150 people spent eight years of their life on this.
Wasting a huge part of your life for your employer is what you get paid for if you have a job.
This might be hard for you to believe but some people actually want their work to be more than just an exchange of their time for money.
Star citizen has been more or less shipping continual updates, and openly engaging with community.
It’s still a disaster, it’s impressive that concord is somehow doing worse
The difference being that Star Citizen has some very passionate fans willing to put an obscene amount of time and money into the game. Lots of people dislike that game or think it's a grift, but lots of people also like it and throw lots of money at it for things like fancy virtual ships.
Concord basically doesn't have fans, at least in any number that can support a moderately successful game. No matter what they did business wise, the idea and characters and world simply weren't appealing enough to justify the work put into it.
> like Star Citizen
which has amazing content - as judged by the sales of the ships and such in the game, even before gameplay existed.
The problem with concord is that there are a bunch of wokes at the helm, trying to push a personal agenda via this project, but failing to see that gamers aren't buying what they're selling. Gamers who, first and foremost, want fun games, cool graphics and immersion in fantasy.
Concord didn't even sell enough for "people aren't buying it because it's woke" to be plausible lmao
I guarantee you that was not the actual problem with this game. The more inclusive part of this game was barely talked about because most don’t care and have realized they the world is bigger than their narrow view.
Most games today are diverse, some more than others. Including many Sony games that sell incredibly well.
> The more inclusive part of this game was barely talked about because most don’t care and have realized they the world is bigger than their narrow view.
This is never the problem with games that fail due to "woke" things. You, probably like the Concord devs, have a different definition of "woke" to the critics, and until you realise that you'll continue to make this mistake.
You’ve made a valid point mainly because, for a significant portion of people who use the term, "woke" has become a blanket term for anything they don’t like.
The word has lost any specific meaning. “The game is bad because it’s bad”.
You've just made the same mistake as the OP.
Ok.
So educate me.
What exactly is the critics definition of “woke” that somehow is anything other than diverse?
The lottery has amazing content - as judged by the sales of tickets and such.
I don’t think developing a new PvP shooter is a viable business, particularly if you take 8 years to do it. And if you expect people to shell out a lot of cash up front when the successful competitors are mostly free.
A single player game can succeed if you do something remarkable in terms of graphics, story, gameplay, etc. Not necessarily all of them but some of them. A PvP game has fewer factors you control (less story) but requires absolutely that you create a two-sided market of players —- it’s like saying you’re going to make Facebook in 2024. Even if the base game was better than Overwatch 2 or Fortnite it would a struggle, but the fact that they wanted to make another hero shooter proves they don’t have the vision or creativity to make something better. Is that toxic positivity?
> I don’t think developing a new PvP shooter is a viable business
Valve is currently working on Deadlock and seems to have no issues getting players despite its still unfinished state.
Indeed, but Valve has already other viable business and a lot of fans that will be more easily convinced to try the game. It's not the same situation.
Sony also has other viable business and a lot of fans that will be more easily convinced to try the game. Concord isn't some random game, it's a massive bet by Sony, a giant in the gaming industry.
And Sony doesn't ?
> particularly if you take 8 years to do it. And if you expect people to shell out a lot of cash up
The time and cash is key here. Time in that if you are just doing what your competitors are doing with nothing new to show for it AND to expect people to pay for it. Deadlock is neither
If nobody listens to well-founded criticism like yours and just says "nah, people will love it" -- yes that would be a good example of toxic positivity.
> I don’t think developing a new PvP shooter is a viable business, particularly if you take 8 years to do it.
Funnily enough Overwatch 1 came out just over 8 years ago, so Concord was probably pitched as a "me too" clone of that from its inception.
Maybe Overwatch seems to exist solely for Blizzard/Microsoft to screw up, but it seems odd that they seem to be constantly on the verge of shutting down OWL, despite it being a top 20 Twitch game. They got so much right while creating a completely new set of characters, and then constantly leave players with the uncertainty of whether they care about the game at all.
I see this story is on Forbes now, but apparently without any additional details:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2024/09/21/new-report...
Personally I don't see any difference between toxic positivity and the environment my parents grew up, where any possible remark could land on PIDE/DGS office, followed by a state policy security offices visit to clarify one's ideas.
Lol exaggeration much? Comparing an office with little criticism to the Portuguese political police.
Nope, one might not be sent to jail or war frontline on the colonies, yet can get their career completely ruined.
And if you don't like that comparison, I would make the political correctness one from McCarty days, where talking about worker rights was a very bad idea in US.
How did Sony drop the ball on this one? If they were the publisher then they should have been on top of the feedback loop.
No experience in games, but I’ve seen first hand how a thick layer of ladder climbing middle management can create a culture where all important signaling mechanisms become internal, isolated from the outside world. In such a culture, what faceless hypothetical users[1] think slowly fades away, and what other “important people” within the org thinks is all that matters. Basically high school popularity contests – quite banal. However, the emerging behavior of such an organism can be very perplexing.
[1]: Dehumanizing the customer comes in different forms, I suspect. I’ve seen a lot of “we can’t care about individuals because we are web scale so we need to look at user metrics instead”. Perhaps in the gaming world there is more of “gamers are trolls and toxic boyroom loud minority, so their criticism isn’t worthy of attention”.
"web scale"?
Look up "MongoDB is web scale"
That’s right I was referencing the meme. However the scale argument seems to apply to faang and those inspired or derived by them. “We do things at scale” can become an excuse to ignore individual voices, whether it’s users, customers, or external criticism. Which in turn enables all kinds of delusions.
for me, toxic positivity is basically everyone pretending that everything is running smoothly even though it's not.
could happen because of either of these two reasons:
- they really don't know the ideal state
- they are afraid of the backlash if they speak up
Bad leadership.
Leaders should ocasionally take time to listen to bad feedback.
i wonder if $400 million dollar was worth the improved ESG score
Hubris: The videogame
I believe the Challenger and Columbia disasters can be largely attributed to toxic positivity and intolerance of dissent.
I don't know about that. The slide the engineers sent to management for Columbia warning that the problem had never been simulated was, shall we say, not brimming with positivity. It just was incredibly unclear[0].
[0] https://mcdreeamiemusings.com/blog/2019/4/13/gsux1h6bnt8lqjd...
It’s not so different from mid 2000s BioWare culture (where many hits were created). Games looked like a shitshow right till the end and the general answer to these conceran was faith in “BioWare magic”.
Sure, different track record but still, this kind of mindset is the norm more often than not because of an industry where failure of the project also means loss on job - so there’s no incentive whatsoever for studio level people to flag in progress failure that may lead to a studio closing.
even reddit was laughing so hard at that game that moderators had to purge and lock threads about it all the time. this was the first one I recall seeing: https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1d4ylfi/concord_mig...
it is blatantly obvious why that game has failed as hard as it did, just from that screenshot alone - tumblr-tier design, twitter-tier writing, targeting the virtually non-existent "modern audience". the talk about market saturation and such is just a cope - this game could come out before Overwatch was even announced and be F2P and it still would've failed just as spectacularly.
"Evil cannot create anything new, they can only corrupt and ruin what good forces have invented or made". yes, you can take a franchise with an existing following and "reimagine" it for "modern audience" and succeed (financially) to some degree, but Concord had neither a following nor positive studio reputation to burn, and the result was painfully predictable for anyone with two brains cells to rub together from the moment they saw a glimpse of that steaming pile of shit.
People don’t play games because they look good. Pubg looks like garbage and uses off-the-shelf assets but still has millions of players. I suspect that if Concord was fun and/or sufficiently novel, the visuals would have made no difference.
Toxic positivity is just a new way of saying it was a "Emperor's new clothes" situation. Everybody could or should have been able to see that the emperor had no clothes but was too scared to speak out. Only somebody not constrained by the system, a naive child in the story or in this case consumers who weren't in the corporate structure, was able to point out the obvious truth.
I still think people are tip-toeing around this a bit though. Suggestions that Concorde failed because the genre isn't popular anymore seem like they're trying to avoid some hard truths in particular. I am uninhibited though so I'll say it. Overwatch has characters people want to fuck or see themselves as, and gamers like that. Concorde has characters designed to make people squirm uncomfortably, daring people to criticize their design so they can be called toxic gamers. The character design is deliberately offensive to gamers, defying them instead of pandering to them.
Agreed in general. Though the points on character design may be a bit too reductionist. Concord didn't really need characters with clear sex appeal. Or even characters people immediately want to be like. The original characters aren't that bad! At least judging from the concept art. They just suffer from extremely poor and downright unprofessional execution.
Take this redesign for example https://www.reddit.com/r/TopCharacterDesigns/comments/1fdz1m.... The results are pretty close to originals and do not pander to any specific demographic. But there are just enough interesting and unusual details in the new designs that make you want to learn more about those characters. That's what the released game is missing entirely.
My pet theory is this had to be nepotism in hiring. I struggle to find another explanation for how they botched the execution so badly that the characters can be legitimately seen as "designed to make people squirm". Which I don't believe could be any executive's intention.
Is any of the original concept art public? I've seen some images purporting to be that but if you track them down they're actually redesigns made after the game flopped to show how it could have been done better.
The first redesign you link to isn't really "my type" but even so I think that's a viable character with sex appeal. They ditched the ugly lipstick, redistributed her mass to give her wide hips, and swapped out her depressed "I just want to die" facial pose with a big smirk that's full of life. They changed the gross loser into somebody who looks fun and lively.
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I think it's wrong metrics: gameplay vs woke culture. You can't sit on two chairs at moment. Choose one.