T w e n t y S i d e d

This week my column takes a look at Microsoft and their recent move to unify the PC and Xbox ecosystems. Actually, I guess it’s not a recent move so much as another re-commitment to an idea they keep flirting with and abandoning. If they could merge the Xbox and PC into a single group by allowing players to take their library, friends list, and save games with them between platforms, then that would make the resulting PC/Xbox hybrid the biggest console platform.

Back in the 90s and aughts, Microsoft’s grip on the PC market was really strong. You used Windows because everyone else used windows and everyone needed to be able to share documents. Your software collection was Windows-based and switching was difficult. Macs were nice, but they were really expensive and they had trouble sharing files with your business colleagues. Linux was free, but it was still a platform for gurus and it had a lot of the same data-sharing problems.

But today? Most programs are either multi-platform by design or universally available through the cloud. You can do word processing, spreadsheets, image editing, video editing, music editing, file sharing, spread sheeting, and web-browsing on any of these platforms and have a reasonable expectation of being able to share files with everyone else. We’re doing more and more on the cloud, and the OS matters less and less.

The two exceptions to this trend are:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Microsoft’s New Plan for Xbox”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

My column this week will be a bit of a re-run for those of you who have been around long enough to remember the last time I brought up crunch mode in video game development. On one hand, it feels silly to cover the same topic again and again. On the other hand, it’s even more silly that this is still a problem after all these years. The news doesn’t stop covering a natural disaster just because it’s day 3 and everyone knows about it. They cover it until the destruction ends and the mess is cleaned upActually, they probably stop covering it when people stop watching, but you know what I mean..

Some people take the hardline stance that “crunch should never happen”, and I just can’t get behind that idea. It’s built on the premise that since all mistakes are avoidable, you can avoid all mistakes. This is clearly not the case. As an engineer, I’m much more comfortable with designing systems with a bit of fault tolerance than designing systems that are perfect as long as nothing ever goes wrong.

This is a world of finite resources, bedeviled by selfish jackasses, subject to entropy, and filled with unpredictability. Jerks will cause problems, misfortune will strike, people will make mistakes, and equipment will fail. You can insist that all game budgets should be mapped out perfectly and then sufficiently padded, but this ignores the way that creative projects will expand to consume available resources. If feature creep is a problem when schedules are tight, then how much worse will it be when everyone has lots of “extra” time?

Saying teams should never crunch is like saying that airbags are a waste of money because accidents shouldn’t happen in the first place. The pursuit of an unattainable ideal will prevent you from building a robust system.

So how would I handle this?

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Crunch is Proof that Video Game Executives Don’t Understand Video Games”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.