{"id":49522,"date":"2020-03-16T06:00:21","date_gmt":"2020-03-16T10:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=49522"},"modified":"2020-03-16T04:58:59","modified_gmt":"2020-03-16T08:58:59","slug":"diecast-293-crunch-time-indie-case-study-mailbag","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=49522","title":{"rendered":"Diecast #293: Crunch Time, Indie Case Study, Mailbag"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><br clear='all'><audio controls><source src='\/diecast\/diecast293.ogg' type='audio\/ogg'><source src='\/diecast\/diecast293.mp3' type='audio\/mpeg'>Your browser does not support the audio element.<\/audio><div><small><a href='\/diecast\/diecast293.mp3' download='diecast293.mp3'>Direct download<\/a> (MP3)<\/small><br\/><small><a href='\/diecast\/diecast293.ogg' download='diecast293.ogg'>Direct download<\/a> (ogg Vorbis)<\/small><br\/><small><a href='?cat=287&feed=rss2'>Podcast RSS feed.<\/a><\/small><\/div><br \/>\nHosts: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.peripheralarbor.com\/\">Paul<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/\">Shamus<\/a>. Episode edited by <a href=\"http:\/\/steamcommunity.com\/profiles\/76561198087035658\/\">Issac<\/a>.<br \/>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/diecast\/diecast293.mp3\">Diecast293<\/a><\/p>\n<p><table class='nomargin' cellspacing='0' width='100%' cellpadding='0' align='center' border='0'><tr><td><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/BgLAf6z1j0Q\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen class=\"embed\"><\/iframe><br\/><small><a href='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=BgLAf6z1j0Q'>Link (YouTube)<\/a><\/small><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p><!--more--><strong>00:00 Michael Goodfellow<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.sea-of-memes.com\/\">Here is the Sea of Memes site<\/a>, if you&#8217;re curious.<\/p>\n<p><strong>01:57 Corona<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I just closed Reddit, because I was SO sick of the constant Corona \/ toilet paper memes. Then I remembered we talked about it on the show. This wasn&#8217;t even a planned topic. We were talking about it just before starting the show, and then made a snap decision to add it to the agenda. <\/p>\n<p>Sorry for adding to the pointless media deluge. I realize you probably come here to get <strong>away<\/strong> from this sort of thing. <\/p>\n<p><strong>10:50 Naughty Dog Is Crunching<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/kotaku.com\/as-naughty-dog-crunches-on-the-last-of-us-ii-developer-1842289962\">Jason Schreier&#8217;s latest expose<\/a> is&#8230; not a surprise, but a sad read nonetheless. <\/p>\n<p>During this segment, I commented that it wasn&#8217;t clear if the publisher was even AWARE that this was a problem. The story made it sound like employees were imposing crunch on themselves and the publisher wasn&#8217;t paying attention. But there&#8217;s a bit of the discussion that I overlooked, which is that one of the developers was <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=P6N7FrFY-IA\">threatened to keep quiet about the company&#8217;s crunch practices<\/a>. That sounds bad, but from context it sounds like this guy was threatened by the developer <strong>Naughty Dog<\/strong>, not publisher Sony. <\/p>\n<p>In either case, you have management doing bad things, but I&#8217;d really love to know which management we should focus on. Consider the possibilities:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Sony is deliberately creating unhealthy conditions because they want to ship the next game at any cost.\n<li>One of the higher-ups at Naughty Dog is trying to advance his career by making it look like he&#8217;s a miracle worker, and to that end he&#8217;s squeezing his people really hard.\n<\/ol>\n<p>These are both bad, of course. But for whatever reason I personally find #2 to be more angering. It&#8217;s one thing to harm people on the other side of the world through negligence and apathy, but for me that&#8217;s not nearly as bad as harming the people you see every day due to callousness and personal ambition. <\/p>\n<p>But I don&#8217;t know. As always, we&#8217;re peering through the cracks in the wall and trying to make guesses about what we&#8217;re seeing. Regardless of who is at fault, this is very bad for Naughty Dog. They lost 70% of their creative leads. That&#8217;s the same thing that killed BioWare. If you lose your key people, you lose your identity as a developer. <\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m very curious to see if all of this chaos will impact the final quality of <em>Last of Us II<\/em>. <\/p>\n<p><strong>24:40 Steam sales case study: &#8216;Academia: School Simulator&#8217;<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The article, which is worth a read: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/blogs\/SimonCarless\/20200226\/358784\/Steam_sales_case_study_Academia_School_Simulator.php\">Steam sales case study: &#8216;Academia: School Simulator<\/a>&#8216;<\/p>\n<p><strong>36:21 Mailbag: Director Games in the West<\/strong><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Dear Diecast<\/p>\n<p>Do you think that videos games in the west should adopt the Director role that they have in Japan the try to keep a consistent vision and them for the game? When western games have someone who seems to be the one making the decisions or has a mostly-clear vision of what the game should be, like Ken Levine with the Bioshock games, they seem be a more consistent whole. But they seem the be the rarity, at least publicly.<\/p>\n<p>There are even a few games that seem to have no one of any kind in a leadership role and those games came out very much a mess, like Mass Effect: Andromeda.<\/p>\n<p>Would having someone who is in a more supervisory position to organize teams and team-efforts into a unified direction be an over all benefit? Or would it lead to having too many people being promoted into those positions because of tone-from-the-top and have an unhealthy culture of favoritism and nepotism?<\/p>\n<p>Has there been any past games that you can think of had a director-like role in development, for good or bad?<\/p>\n<p>Horatio J. HooDoo<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><strong>41:21 Mailbag: Risking Minimum Specs<\/strong><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Dear Diecast,<\/p>\n<p>What do you do when you aren&#8217;t sure whether or not a game will be playable on your computer?  Give up on it?  Buy it anyway?  (Hope springs eternal!)  Ask the internet for help?  I always end up comparing the minimum and recommended processors and GPUs to my processor and GPU on benchmarking sites.  I&#8217;m hoping you know a better way.<\/p>\n<p>&#8211;John<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hosts: Paul, Shamus. Episode edited by Issac. Diecast293 Link (YouTube)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[287],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49522","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-diecast-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49522","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=49522"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49522\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49527,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49522\/revisions\/49527"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=49522"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=49522"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=49522"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}