Honest Publishers are Neat

There's an interesting article (verging on a rant, which is a good thing as far as I'm concerned) over on GameDaily.BIZ about getting a game signed.

I can't say much about it other than that it's a pretty honest publisher's view of the world of game development.

Getting Your Game Signed

Less talk, more action – that's what publishing partners really want to see. You can trot out the biggest, fattest, coolest sounding design document in the world, but if you want to be the beneficiary of a five-, six- or seven-figure check, hoo boy... Brother, you better be able to put a playable demo where your mouth is. (Especially since we're sure as snot not reading a 50-page essay on the spot, let alone while swamped back at the home office...)
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Don't arrive at the bargaining table unless you're willing to negotiate, and open to seeing things from the publisher's perspective. This doesn't necessarily mean accepting less money than anticipated, but it may mean adjusting royalty figures or expectations in terms of marketing and promotional commitments. Fun fact: Everyone's goal is always to maximize return while passing the most possible risk onto the other party. And so, if you want to have any hope of getting signed, let alone landing a deal whose terms are even close to favorable, you have to leave yourself room to maneuver. Deals are always a subtle process of give and take. Offended easily? Perhaps this isn't the right business to be in – you'd be amazed by the proposals various game-making and –manufacturing entities will attempt to float past one another.

Dude, I so called this one (another XNA Post)...

Well, I called this one way back when the XNA Game Studio Express was first announced, or at least said it would be the smartest thing ever if every year Microsoft sponsors a game development competition. Now MS is going to have just about every hobbiest game developer or industry hopeful aiming to for Xbox Live Arcade based on content created in XNA GSE. Surely they're not going to guarantee Xbox Live Arcade inclusion based on the contest, but you can bet that if the winners do live up to the kind of content quality standards they're hoping for, they'll be showing up.

I really think that this platform could be an interesting boon for the Indy Games world. While I don't think it's the only thing the game industry needs to be doing to foster innovation, it's a great idea, and its really based on the model movie studios have been using for a while. Let the hobbiest's and hopefuls play. It behooves you have more people involved in creating things rather than fewer (which current licensing regimes do).

XNA Game Studio Express: Dream-Build-Play Competition

"Create an original game using XNA Game Studio Express. You could win fantastic prizes and global envy! The contest doesn't start till January, but get a head start and download XNA Game Studio Express for free today.

UPDATE:

Ok, then someone has to go and make a stupid comment, as well as some smart ones...

So there is a lot here to comment on, but let me say a couple of things.

1. Not allowing people to use C++ and being forced to use C# is stupid. It's not about "productivity" in this case, it's about getting more people to use an MS run language.
2. I think YouTube is a bad example, there are a few more barriers to entry into this market other than a computer and a webcam or video camera.
3. We should also be asking professionals to make some contribution to pushing their work to be "edgier", which isn't to say it should be about "[s]hoot-em-ups with political characters," that's a pretty weak concept of edginess. As a matter of fact, that is edgily unedgy.
4. (last one) CS programs have bigger problems than games can solve. Part of it is their curriculum. The other thing that needs to be made clearer is that the "recruitment crisis" has to do with design, art, and management as well. For some reason code is the focus for the game industry.

Done.

XNA Express will start YouTube for games, says Microsoft's Satchell // Gamesindustry.biz

"Where our vision's really heading is taking that YouTube concept and bringing it into games. Think about a Community Arcade, being able to share your own games with the whole community on Xbox Live."
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Satchell went on to claim that a vibrant amateur development community would help head off the recruitment crisis threatening the videogame industry, citing "disturbing" admissions figures for computer science courses in the US - which are falling by 30 per cent year on year.

"If you can give people a way to communicate, to talk about content, to rate it and express what's cool, then you start a virtuous cycle, because more people want to get involved, more people create content and more people comment on it," he said.

"I absolutely believe we will find new stars in this industry from that community. I know publishers will be watching for what's cool and who's doing it."

According to Satchell, users will be free to create edgy videogame content that professionals couldn't because it would be "too risky".
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Commenting on the decision to use C#'s managed code, as opposed to the native code used by most professional developers, Satchell noted that with ballooning budgets and team sizes, priorities in game development were changing.

"We're all concerned about performance in gaming, but in the future, in five to ten years' time, productivity is going to be more important than performance," he observed.

Demonstrating the Game Industry as Index

I read this article, having just had a discussion with some folks here about the difficulty in finding the kind of talented help needed by game companies. While this article is (a) all over the place and (b) unclear on specificities , it is quite good at painting a picture of what's going on with work here. I've of course snipped it up a bit, and I'm sure something is lost in that trans(formation/lation). But, it illustrates why I think the game industry makes such a great lens/metric/index into work in a global economy at this current moment.

What is the difference between creating educated "employable" professionals ("employees") and highly skilled corporate assets (I'll use the term "associates" here, a term I'm borrowing from my wife)? I think the answer goes hand in hand with, "We're just not finding enough of the right kinds of people," that I hear from game developers here all the time.

Many people getting hired here to work in games, "employees," are costing companies a significant amount of time, money, and energy to turn them into "associates." What happens when your future working force is actually not coming out into the field with the kinds of skills that you need them to? You have to educate them yourself. I'm also extremely curious why more intern-ing or co-oping is not being done here. It's rare enough in the states the people actually do these sorts of things (though their schools may encourage it, and students ought to be pursuing it more) and it appears even rarer here.

Simultaneously, "associates" are actually assets. They mean more to a company, so it is in their interest to invest in them. I've seen this at my US field sites. Companies seem to be realizing the value of their people and their skills (by and large, there are of course notable exceptions), but I think that broader political, economic, or educational analysis is not understanding that human labor is different than it was a few years ago. You can't really take a software engineer (or artists, or designer ...) straight out of college and toss him in (well, you can, if you really want to) and expect to get much out of them. There are countless other systems, sub-systems, code bases, tools, software packages, etc. that must be learned before they're worth anything significant.

That's part of this article. The other aspect is also important to keep in mind, too. I'm not focusing on "jobs for the underprivileged, the undereducated and the underskilled," but it too makes total sense, and could use some analysis in The States as well.

Engaging India: Demographic dividend or disaster?

With the average Indian now just 23 years old, and with over half the population under 25, many see potential for a big demographic dividend and India likes to projects an image of a vast, English-speaking population of bright and ambitious engineers and scientists.

The reality, for the time being, is actually very different. As things stand, India’s demographics are going to be a source of profound social upheaval in coming years.

I was talking the other day to Dr Ifzal Ali, the chief economist of the Asian Development Bank. His analysis of the situation was bleak. India, he warned, with its working age population set to increase by 71m to reach 762m in the next five years, was heading towards an employment crisis that could lead to social breakdown and a rapid collapse in growth rates.
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The first, in his view, is that there is a “huge global oversupply of labour” resulting from the growing integration of India, China and Russia with the world economy. The second is that this global oversupply has come at a time when companies around the world are pursuing competitiveness with “ideological zeal” and creating fewer new jobs per unit of extra output.

Now the idea has traditionally been that in a global economy it will be the lowest cost country that will win a race to the bottom. As Swaminaphan Aiyar, the economist, has put it, globalisation has for the first time in history made poverty an advantage. As companies are forced to scan the world for ways to cut costs, the lower the wages in any one country, the more competitive it will be, all other things being equal.

The problem is that in India all these other things are not equal. To ride the globalisation bandwagon, a country has to create a good investment climate, in terms of regulation, law and order, physical infrastructure and availability of skilled human capital. India is a very long way from doing any of these things.
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The point I’m trying to make is that unless India makes a dramatic investment in its human capital, its demographic advantages will turn into a demographic disaster in the form of a massive unemployable labour force.
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Although India produces millions of graduates annually, the raw numbers, as company after company finds in its recruitment drives, are a misleading metric for employable skills.

While 3m students graduate from Indian universities each year, only about 25 per cent of engineering graduates and 10-15 per cent of general college graduates are considered suitable for employment in the offshore IT industry, according to a recent study by Nasscom.
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He added: “Our education system is not producing enough people with the skill-sets our economy needs. This could seriously stymie India’s economic growth.”

cent oThe lobby group has warned that the Indian IT sector faces a shortfall of 500,000 professionals by 2010 that threatens the country’s dominance of global offshore IT services. Shortages are kicking in even though, according to Nasscom, only 10 perf an estimated “addressable” market of $300bn for global offshoring is being tapped today.

With the industry as a whole struggling with annual employee turnover rates approaching 40 per cent, wage inflation is rising. Reports out this week in the Business Standard indicate that a shortage of skilled labour has resulted in salary increases of 22 per cent during the first half of fiscal year 2007 for the corporate sector as a whole, That figure is the highest it’s been in over three years, with the biggest jump coming from service industries, including banks, airlines, IT and telecom companies; where salary bills have risen by 30-50 per cent in just a year.
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But none of these, however, has jobs for the underprivileged, the undereducated and the underskilled. A million mutinies are bubbling up across the country, with the most alarming being the ultra-leftist Naxalite movement, and they are deterring much-needed investment.

India will need to create jobs in large-scale, labour-intensive manufacturing to stop these protest movements from turning into something more serious. Only when there are massive Chinese-style factories making Barbies, Kickers and Gap shirts for a global market will there be jobs for those potentially otherwise tempted by extremism.

(7.5)