Studio Growth Cases

Three speakers each give a 20 minute session

Jason Coleman, Studio Technical Head for Big Huge Games

Big Huge Games has grown from 60 to 120 over last 3 years

· Start work on open world rpg

· Added a second team

A large number of new things came up over this period

Caught up with someone at a party that had worked for him and figured out that he didn’t actually realize who Jason was – the company had gotten to the point where people didn’t necessarily know everyone anymore

Historically, hiring was occasional – easy to integrate

Now hiring is more rapid so integration is more difficult and requires deliberate action

People can get lost depending on happenstance – where they’re sitting can make a big difference

Assimilating better is important

· Pay more attention to initial seating

· Actively pursue mentoring

· Codify more of the process

Documented processes and systems, kept up to date, which show pictures of key people to talk to about systems etc to make it easy on new people.

A lot of personal growth

· New roles at every level

· Entry-levels can feel insignificant

Helping people adjust

· Clearly define roles

· Give people appropriate room to grow

· Everyone can help mentor

Important to let people experiment and fail – even if it’s something that doesn’t look like it’s going to work when you analyse it.

The Second Team was setup

· Split out all over the place, in different offices and areas

· Less cool? Less important?

· Little momentum?

· Constantly raided for talent for top team

Instead, the way to set up a second team would be more like:

· Not the “b-team” culture

· Give sufficient personnel

· Collectively move to a new space

Problems on the big team

· Never enough information at the right levels

· Big disconnection from making a game

Reorganisation focused on “A more intimate big”

· RPG steering group re-organization

o Departmental representation

o Conduit for accurate information

o Can make forward progress

· Return of Daily Games – rotate everyone in the company through, get them to play the game and remind people of what we’re doing. Helps people see the big picture, stuff outside of what they’re specifically working on (etc)

Anticipating structure requirements, they implemented matrix maps and formalized the structure of the team

Departmental managers and project leadership is separated to ensure that each role is given appropriate focus which has really worked

There’s always something you can do better!

Things like company gatherings and RSS feeds help to bridge the gap between separate departments – sitting in cross-team groups or sitting in on specific team meetings to answer their questions about other areas, etc, helps.

Combat teams have been really successful with collocated cross-departmental teams

Core principals:

· Make best-in-class games

· Practice Intellectual Honesty

· Teamwork Drives Success

Shaun Himmerick, Studio Head Midway Newcastle

From Midway Chicago, been at Newcastle for last year or so.

Formerally Pitbull Syndicate ltd before acquired by Midway, now working on Wheelman

Massive growth!

Growth strategy – kept all the same systems, hired a lot of people, promoted a lot of people. Basically if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Mistakes? All of the above.

· Didn’t account for change and growth

· Weren’t prepared for more people

· Not everyone was ready for promotion – art leads who were working with teams of 5 were now art directors.

Grew so fast that people didn’t have much buy in, people weren’t aware of what the point of the game even was.

Hiring a few people here and there resulted in having a much larger team without actually planning to so there were no systems in place to cope with that. The art director, for example, was also assigned tasks on projects…

Everyone in every position should be planning for their successor – someone should be able to slot in if you leave or get promoted. This isn’t something they had originally considered

Admit something is wrong or just “not right” – easy to just let things slide if you’re not willing to make big changes

Listen to the team to make changes

The goals of “making a game” and “making a studio” are different things – knowing which you’re trying to accomplish is important

Hiring someone because “there’s nothing wrong with them” isn’t necessarily going to result in the right fit – look for someone who is going to make the studio better off by being there, even if that takes longer (it will).

One driven person could successfully lead a small team but when there’s 100, you cannot effectively lead them all yourself. You need to lead a small team of leaders who each lead their own small teams to effectively manage an entire team.

Bottlenecks destroy schedules

There will be people in the trenches that are also leading, despite not having leadership as part of their role. Get them on your side, enable them to help drive the vision – get them to run a meeting, give them training and nurture that frontline leadership.

Despite not being a scrum-guy, Shaun implements strike teams and finds them very successful.

While confidence is contagious, so is lack of confidence (Vince Lombardi quote) – very true.

“The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint to keep from meddling with them while they do it” – T. Roosevelt

Being the smallest midget is not an achievement

Kelly Zmak, President of Radical Entertainment

Recently laid off half of their staff as a result of acquisition by Activision Blizzard – this talk is about growth that preceded that

Having a workable goal was important – leveraging tech process and leadership, scale (breadth and depth), studio planting. All of these goals needed to match the corporate objectives or there’s no point.

What we do starts at “hard” and goes up from there – temper enthusiasm with reality, this is 90% sweat and 10% talent.

What worked?

· Hired 100+ people in 12 months (50% growth, from 220 to 320)

· 10% attrition rate over that period – the staff believed in what was happening

· New Leadership opportunities

· Middle management advancement (promotions)

· New people brought new ideas with them

Must find a way to make it fun, thrilling and fulfilling to ensure engagement.

Great success in hiring from Britain – the brits loved the Vancouver / British Columbia environment.

What did not work?

· Underestimated the cost (both real cost and opportunity cost), such as relocation from the UK

· The time it takes

Some people suck at interviewing – no matter how much training you give them. Some people just don’t like talking to people, which means you tend to leverage the same small set of people to interview. People that are suddenly spending a lot of time interviewing and not much time making games.

What did they learn?

· It’s hard to learn fast

· It’s REALLY hard to grow well!

· It’s BRUTAL to grow FAST & WELL!!

· Make sure your staff knows “WHY” you’re doing it – that doesn’t mean saying why, it means checking that people get it and doing what it takes to ensure that people do get it. Don’t assume they do just because you said it. CHECK.

· What you sell MUST be what you are – there’s no “bait & switch”, don’t trick people into a role as they won’t stay

· Know what you need, understand what you want

· Let the staff make the decision as to whether they want to be a part of what you’re doing by being honest about what you’re doing

· New people with new ideas – what a pain in the ass! All these new ideas take time to consider, don’t underestimate it

· Do not underestimate the cost of a bad hire!

You can embrace, you can resist or you can ignore change it but you can’t avoid it. Everyone’s involved in it. You have to be personally invested in it and your people need to believe that you are 110% behind it.

They never hid decisions or ramifications from their staff – honesty and open communication helped people transition.

Q&A session

Retaining top talent is about making your organization the place they choose to be – their role will be the same wherever they are so what about your culture ensures yours is the company they want to work for? That’s what you need to focus on to retain your best people.

Defining your culture is the first part of protecting it. Giving people ownership of an individual area helps to protect that small-team cultural buy-in even when your team is much larger.

Preserving your culture is not hiring anyone. It’s the antithesis of change. Culture should be dynamic, adaptive and a biorhythm – it has natural highs and lows, you don’t want it snapping between them but to have them is fine.

Outsourcing is an opportunity to flatten out the ebb & flow of internal team scaling. Radical have averaged 12% of asset production outsourced over the last few years. For them, it’s not about cost saving, it’s about flattening spikes and ensuring solid delivery.

Internal teams that define a tight vision for the product enables outsourcing asset production without compromising the product goals.

Outsourcing is a bigger and bigger part of game production as games move to larger, more open worlds that need more content – expanding the team temporarily is less suitable in the game space than it is in the movie space.

Promoting someone into management just because that’s the next step up the chain isn’t necessarily the way to do it – some people are better if they keep doing their role so look for ways to provide advancement opportunities that don’t result in your people suddenly having to do something else

The common thread in these discussions for Shaun was open and honest communication with their teams.

Giving people opportunities as a group and seeing how people handle it is the best way of identifying future leaders – don’t tell people this could happen, simply enable it and see who stands up.

Employee evaluation should be less about numbers and more about assessing the employee’s impact on the team and the project; we’re doing stuff that people have often never done before so comparing to a preset scale has limited relevance.

Employee evaluations, the formal ones, should be a summary – there shouldn’t be any surprises in there. Problems and praise should be raised in real time or at least far more frequently. Having epic scary meetings once a year basically ensures real, good communication can’t happen.

Sharing tech across teams during development is harder than pulling cool stuff out of a finished title and putting that back into a shared tech base that other teams can start from. Sharing tech in real time across disparate teams and products is hard / not a good idea in practice.

If the only tool in your toolbox is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail – it’s important to have lots of tools in your management toolbox.