You're honestly one of the few I know who have made it this long, everyone I know including myself left the industry after 10-20 years...just too unstable. You should do a talk about industry longevity Tim!
Thank you so much for making these videos ❤ Speaking as an early-30s lesbian working in games, I really appreciate being able to hear all these stories and insights from an older LGBTQ person because it’s just really inspiring to see that kind of representation. I realize this comment is maybe a bit off topic from this particular video itself, but I wanted to let you know you’re really appreciated and making a big impact on at least one person here.
Despite being a "creative" industry, it's jarring how allergic to innovation people are. I hope more industry veterans would make a channel like this so that their knowledge and experience can pass on. Humans always repeat history. The same mistakes and the same failures. Only way to prevent it is to learn from the past, but that's impossible if information is not available for the new generations to see.
Talking about mid range games getting squeezed out I've noticed something similar in movies as well. You have the big blockbusters with the huge budgets and the art house films but you don't have the mid range ones anymore. I personally attribute this to studio's being run by managers who know how to run "a" business but don't really know how to "do" business. They try and apply generic business management practices to specific industries that they don't really understand and see throwing money at a project as a safe bet. So a lot of special effects because those are easy to spend money on and get clear advantages but poor stories and scripts because those require a certain level of discernment and judgement that a generic business manager just can't be expected to have.
Agreed, and it feels that way across so many industries. Mid tier tech companies pushed out by well funded VC giants, mid tier product manufacturing pushed out by huge overseas operations. I feel like we are seeing an unintended consequence of the growth in economies of scale and funding. It's an arms race that smaller companies can't compete with.
Tim, PLEASE publish the autobiography you mentioned! Even if it's self-published and printed on demand! One of the most influential (on me) game design & development books I've ever read has been Postmortems by Raph Koster. I suspect you can publish a book of similar quality, and the up and coming developers & designers would really appreciate a book like that from you!
He’s said in the past that this is the autobiography. He didn’t like the tone of the book after writing, since everyone that gave feedback said it felt depressing. So this is the book, and it’s free lol XP
Interesting talk! As for mid range gaming companies which you mention at 8:55 they do still exist and are fairly prolific in European and Eastern Euro countries, eg. Egosoft (Germany), 11Bit (Poland), Techland (Poland), Rebellion (UK), Paradox (Sweden), Bohemia (Czechia), Dovetail (UK), SCS (Czechia), Quantic (France), Larian (Belgium), and many more.
I loved watching your speeches at conferences. That's one of the many reasons I'm so glad you started this channel. You're really a fantastic speaker Tim, very engaging. In a different timeline I could see you being a teacher.
Would love to hear your experience about estimating and project planning, plus keeping the focus on the goal, thank you! Edit: looking forward to the video about passion!
I went to a bunch on conferences during and after university, wanting to get into games development. Even met Feargus once! But then life happened and took me on a different path. Listening to folks like Tim (which would have been the era of my career start), its interesting to speculate how things might have been. On the one hand I think I could have made a decent enough contribution, but on the other I think the direction the industry took in the 2010s would have been something I would have struggled with. But thats how it always goes once real money is involved.
Thanks so much for the channel, Tim! As an enterprise dev working on indie games as a hobby, I am learning a lot of the commonalities and also differences in game dev. Really appreciate your honesty!
Great video, as always. Looking forward to a video about 9 to 5 and the newer trend of the 4 day work weeks that are being adopted at some studios with very high employee satisfaction. Most veterans I have spoken to don't believe a hit game or a future classic can be made working 9 to 5. I don't know of any on record. Purely from a business standpoint, companies are more profitable if their workers do unpaid overtime (until they burn out). Too many governments allow this because they want the industry in their district, even offering deals to studios to re-locate. If your competitor down the street is also making a dungeon crawler but their employees work 50 hours a week instead of your 40 hours, they will likely have a better or at least bigger product, all other things being equal.
I'm glad you've made this channel to share your thoughts. Tim Cain along with Chris Avellone and Josh Sawyer has been one of the names I have looked for in games and followed since I was young. It honestly seems from what I've seen it really is impossible to create a masterpiece without a lot of passion and crunch.
You loving X Wing was a bit surprising to hear (not because of any reason or so) . I'd love to hear about games that you loved playing. No reviews, not games you were influenced or impressed by, just games you liked as a gamer.
RE:Passion. I watched the C&C postmortem on RUclips, and noticed the team dynamics. They had a team of passionate people walking on eggshells around an "auteur" producer. People would sneak stuff into the game behind the producer's back and hope he wouldn't be too mad when he found out. I've never worked in the games industry but it's hard to believe that such management styles and ways of working would fly today. I have a feeling that the people working in the industry back then had different goals and aspirations than people have today. I was born in 1985 in Finland and I'm just old enough to have my parents tell me that a master's degree in anything would be the golden ticket to guaranteed employment. Just a few years after that the prevailing wisdom changed and you were now stupid to study certain subjects because of poor employment prospects. The bright future that could absorb endless amounts of talent had metamorphosed into a bucket full of crabs. From a consumer perspective since around 2010 games seem to have ossified into a finite number of templates with more and more gigabytes of content shoveled into the appropriate slots. In some of the Atari arcade game postmortems the guys point out that they were encouraged to come up with new kinds of games instead of rehashing old games. This attitude seems that have flipped in the last 40 years. If this is true from the producer's perspective as well, then it could at least partially explain why people are starting to see games more as a 9 to 5 job. They are no longer buying a ticket to a magical ride of discovery, creativity, and crunch. They are sitting on the production line cranking out mountains of content until the bell rings.
7:35 "which it should". No it shouldn't! You are a legend in game development. You created Fallout. Shigeru Miamoto is 70 he is still going fast, managing and making big picture design decisions for multiple big projects. So if you want to be working in games, you should be able to! People should respect your authority and expertise in the "big games industry". Now if you want to make indie games, like mentioned the possibility, a few videos ago, of making a Vampire Survivor type of scale indie game I think you definitely should do that instead! Do what your heart tells you, passion is everything! Don't let the politically correct interfere with your relationship with the craft and your passion for it. Also, you know Tim. You will never be able to retire. Every time you pick up a game to play, you will inevitably dream about how that particular game could be done better or differently. So... just give up on this "retirement" thing. 😂
If Tim feels like moving on from making games strongly enough, then he's earned it I'm sure he still has more in him, especially because he's causally mentioned making a few things in videos. I get the feeling he wants to not only share his stories, but knowledge to give back to the gaming ecosystem. He said he's not trying to build up a brand with these videos, but maybe he is looking something as he shares his experience and lessons. Here is where I would offer an idea that is raw and probably dumb. But maybe Tim can start a project to make a few games that catches his fancy and teaches up and coming Padawans. 😁 The notion running though my head is pick something like the Godot engine. Create a game to whatever detail interests him... Say an FPS called What Would John McLain Do? And the player runs around shooting stuff. Others could join and create art, sound, music, or even just play test. These are not necessarily exciting ground breaking games, just a group sharing knowledge and doing something they enjoy. If Tim feels like being hands off the code, I'm sure someone with your enthusiasm would volunteer to herd the kids' code, leaving him to concentrate on giving notes along the way. Who knows, maybe the kid that gets inspired creates the next big franchise, or thinks up the next trend and applies what they learned to make it exist.
I like to think about it in terms of development of the medium - we're coming up on 50 years of videogames, which in terms of films would be the golden age of Hollywood. I feel like we're about to see a huge leap forward in artistry and storytelling. This is a really exciting time. Thank you for creating this channel. Your videos are invaluable, and your advice is the kind of stuff they don't teach in school.
The first home console was actually released in 1972, so we passed 50 years already. Makes a guy feel old hahaha. I hope you are right about the huge leap forward, I am a little more pessimistic about it but it would be great to be wrong.
@@DKarkarov There will be some hard lessons to learn, I'm sure, and the analogy isn't perfect. Games never had to contend with anything like the Hayes Code. But I think in terms of craftsmanship and techniques that it holds up. Someday there will be a Pulitzer category (or equivalent) for videogames. They'll have cultural parity with books, films, and music. I hope I get to see that.
To speak to your point at the end of the video; combining artistry and industry. I'm an outsider to the industry, but the difficulty of maintaining that line can be seen in Hollywood, and the trend towards franchises, sequels, and remakes (which is slipping into video games) shows, in my opinion, what happens when people try to turn art into a 9-5. How do you inspire employees, though? Passion isn't a contractory obligation, and it's not like it's something that you can snap your fingers and call upon; hence why we have muses as a concept. I could talk a lot about this (which I would love to do) but overall, the most reasonable conclusion I've come to is this; if you are involved in the industry enough to get hired somewhere, you almost certainly have enough skill and intelligence to make more money outside of video games, with a better schedule and benefits too. If you want to be a part of creating a piece of art, there will inherently be some sort of sacrifice, even it's a monetary one. Don't debase yourself for a job, but recognize it's hard to create something unique when you're bringing the same amount of passion to it that anybody off the street could. Also, thanks for making me think about this Tim.
Funny memory: I attended your talk at GX 2017 and afterwards asked for a photo with you; it was an old film camera and somehow haven't processed the film (not sure if it's still in the camera or in the exposed film pile)!
If you aren't qualified to talk about trends in the gaming industry than no one is Tim. I felt your comment about imposture syndrome, I have been doing the type of work I do now for almost 15 years, I am definitely one of the older people in my department (maybe the oldest ugh), and I definitely still feel like I am just lucky/faking it half the time.
I'm so glad you are so excited to talk about games again. Never stop doing so 😊 I would love to hear the talks you did in these conferences. The fallout one as well as the reboot one are publicly available but not many others are. Thanks for all this work you put in the channel! PS: I really hope you publish your autobiography one day.
Love the videos so far, I would love to see some more technical videos talking about programming - the changes you saw in the industry, introduction of the internet and widely available game engines, etc. The industry in your career has shifted so much, from a lot of games being written partially or entirely in assembly to stuff like unreal w/ flowchart scripting!
Every time I went to a game conference I wondered if I would meet you, or someone adjacent to you or from Troika. Not in a "meet your heroes" kind of way (well maybe a little bit) but a "I want to talk shop and work with you someday!" kind of way. I'm both glad and saddened at how you went to Sydney, but I stopped going to conferences at that point. I did manage to meet someone you know and talk about Arcanum though, but that's not a story I want to share here. In hindsight it was probably quite awkward.
8:14 There really isn't a way to get into games. It's 100% who you know if you're a starter with no experience. I spoke with a former Blizzard dev, David Fried, and he talked about how he barely squeaked into game design through QA. This was back in the 90s and it was David Jaffe's experience as well. Ken Levine discussed how he, a failed film student, got into game design because an older man at Looking Glass Studios decided to take a risk on someone with no background in games. That's basically never gonna happen in this day and age. In Fried's case, a senior Blizzard dev hired his friends (shocker) who had no background in games and proceeded to make life hell for Dave and eventually got him fired. Ironically enough, these crony hires ended up being a large source of Blizzard's SA scandal with both of them leaving Blizzard early to avoid the consequences of California investigating the company. A lot of this boils down to economics: games are too expensive to take risks on new recruits or spending time and money to train people. Naturally, the consequences to such practices are low trust organizations that are often characterized by hostile work environments. However, the culture within gaming is also to blame. Underpaid developers who are paranoid of losing their jobs are not in any state of mind to show genuine concern for building the talent of younger people. Instead, talent gets poached from those who also have experience. Blizzard lost a lead dev for WoW recently, I think to Riot and now they're scrambling, as is normal for them now, to fill the void. How is a toxic work environment supposed to cultivate good product experiences? It certainly won't and I wouldn't be surprised that when most of the Gen X developers retire, the under-served millennials and zoomers will not be educated or experienced enough to pick up the slack.
There are mid-level developers, but they get bought by the three or four larger companies, once they make two or three big projects, and become subsidiary studios. You mentioned working on toys. Are you talking about consulting on IP lines you’ve been a part of, or toys that are separate from those things? If you mean separate toys, what toys have you worked on? That could be interesting to hear about, either way. Though, I don’t know if that’s just interesting to me or everyone.
3:28 - Huh. That's definitely a way to differentiate them, and it makes total sense! But I guess you could make an RPG that has every other characteristic of an RPG, except for hit points. Which would be, like, you have ONE hit point (get hit, you're dead, or unconscious, knocked out or whatever), or... You have a different wounding system (so something like "conditions": healthy, bleeding, hurt, badly hurt, etc. stuff without an apparent numerical value), but I guess at that point it would be pretty close to having HP. It's good food for thought, though, trying to change these staples of RPGs. Tim, what do you think of GTA, from GTA3 to Vice City to San Andreas? They sort of feel like RPGs to me, especially San Andreas.
The great thing about knowledge is that its always applicable. So not sure your career needs to wind down unless its something you have decided you want it to. Never the less I really enjoy hearing all your experiences and insights into different topics. I do wonder how many boxes you have stored in your garage though :)
I think the person who greatly values work life balance will necessarily get less done than the person who just wants to work all the time, and you need to consider that when you are planning your life and career.
Watching your videos got me nostalgic, and I've been replaying Arcanum again as a result. I was wondering if you could weigh in on the controversial Half-Ogre conspiracy quest.
8:07 “…and I realized this industry is totally different to people entering it now. Which makes me think that the standard question I get - which is, ‘How do I get a job in the industry?’ - I just don’t think it’s applicable for me to answer that anymore.” In a previous video, your advice was to make a game. Is that no longer your advice? PS - Thank you for this channel and your insights. I love your videos.
Its more of the fact that If you plan, start, develop, and finish a game idea you have, no matter how small, you have the foundational skills needed to start getting deeper into that industry. Tim also made the point that everyone has ideas, and having something to show will set you far ahead of anyone during the initial resume phase.
Hey, Tim. Could you give us more elaborate take on why did you retire? I watched almost all of your videos from start to finish and I wonder why. Getting old is one thing, but as we can see, many game developers from your generation are still working.
I would like to hear Tim's opinion on the budget for games and how now there are fewer big budget games and lots of indies but almost nothing in between.
I learn so much from "old style" development and it doesn't make sense how modern developers do things. I also don't have a job so... Maybe my understanding is incorrect compared to the requirements for hyper specialization.
Not sure how to feel about the disappearing middle yet. Seems like a good number of mid size companies are getting bought by large corporations. One would think that with the available tech being midsize would be more sustainable.
just watching this it sounds like your passion thing is already being done, and with passion theirs a difference between passion and boneheadedness and its all about how you balance it out its kind of a chicken and the egg thing and no one knows what came first, plus theirs the hidden factor of ego and the ego rush of seeing ones names in the credits and beating some other guy at his game like I've seen it in gaming, I've seen it in business, and I've seen it with cars, passion is competition in addition to ego as ego is one of the biggest factors in passion that most people forget, and it is both a negative and possitive, IE Greed is good to even touch upon it requres understanding basic human nature and how people value milestones and your never going to be able to do a good video on it because theirs too much to cover and you'd have to break it up into segements, and even then it would be highly subjective by nature just given how people view the work like you like meetings as a way to brainstorm and make a product better, I see them as a waste of time that pulls away from the product, you see this diversity thing as good, I see it as a lack of focus that derails the project given how much everyone is worried about everyone else, and not making a good product so nautrally everyone's approach is going to be different so what I would suggest is simply calling it tims take on passion, and how you handled it so people can take their own things from it and how old you would handle it, and new who would,
The problem with passion I think is that, not just game companies, but companies in general see one or two employees being really passionate, working 13 hour days because they are burning to do so and have a blast doing it, and expect everyone to be able to do that. And of course this is completely unrealistic, and puts really idiotic expectations on people that aren't working in a field they're passionate about. So in essence, being forced to work more than you're comfortable (9-5 for most people) is bad, being able to work as much as you are comfortable with, without being used as an example to shame other workers is good.
If they're not working in a field they're passionate about, they should probably think about trying to switch fields, which is itself nowhere near as easy as it sounds and may actually prove impossible, but worth a try. That said, I kid you not. Big businesses from retail to healthcare -- yep, even healthcare is considered an "industry" now -- are presently requiring you pass what amounts to a psych evaluation before you can even get an interview. When I first came across this, I failed the exam over and over again because I had no idea what they were testing for. I *should* have known because I'd had to work survival jobs in my flaming youth, but had been out of 'the daily grind' for years and didn't even suspect. Then, it suddenly dawned on me: they're looking for people who will do exactly as they're told and never question anything whatsoever. I answered the questions with the responses I fthought were expected and passed with flying colors. Big businesses want mindless drones, not workers who love what they do or just love to work. (None of the people who work for them are mindless drones, of course. Just saying that's what big businesses pretty obviously expect considering they're actively testing for it.) I have to wonder if the same thiing isn't happening in the gaming "industry" because, it seems to me, the moment "gaming" became an industry is the moment it inherited the exact same issues plaguing every other industry. Even if you love what you do, you may be surprised to find that some businesses, counter-intuitively, actively try to beat the love right out of you while expecting it nonetheless. It's insane. What Tim is talking about and a commenter mentioned on the last video that's most relevant, methinks, is that "squeezing the mid-tier" out dynamic. The dynamic is no different than the fact that the former "middle class" in the West is practically nonexistent today. More and more people are slipping into poverty and politicians are scratching their heads trying to figure out what to do about it. Well, it they hadn't handed their authority over to corporations on a silver platter, it wouldn't be happening. The "revolving door" has never spinned so fast. smh Back to gaming, I actually fear what will happen to mid-tier studios like Obsidian now that they're under the X-box umbrella. I'm sure they're breathing a sigh of relief that they'll no longer have to set up kickstarter campaigns and the like to do what they love or fear going out of business every day, but they can't even pretend to be the scrappy underdog anymore. Some people are already accusing them of all kinds of stuff, e.g. " [taking] the language of anti-capitalism to lifestyle-market [Outer Worlds] to an audience that might like to see itself as counter-culture." I honestly don't think that's the case. I think they genuinely wanted to create a great game, but it didn't resonate with people quite the way they imagined it would. Could be wrong, but I sincerely doubt it. When businesses get too big, however, financial decisions start taking precedence over the creative in key areas. That may or may not already be happening at Obsidian. If it is, I sincerely hope they nip the trend in the bud.
I'm not gonna bother checking, some might be indie, some might be large. Piranha Bytes Spiders Klei Battlestate Paradox Also, apparently From Software has 350+ employees so I doubt that qualifies as AA
You're honestly one of the few I know who have made it this long, everyone I know including myself left the industry after 10-20 years...just too unstable. You should do a talk about industry longevity Tim!
I'm just stubborn. :)
Seriously, though, I will add this to my list of video topics.
Thank you so much for making these videos ❤ Speaking as an early-30s lesbian working in games, I really appreciate being able to hear all these stories and insights from an older LGBTQ person because it’s just really inspiring to see that kind of representation.
I realize this comment is maybe a bit off topic from this particular video itself, but I wanted to let you know you’re really appreciated and making a big impact on at least one person here.
Despite being a "creative" industry, it's jarring how allergic to innovation people are.
I hope more industry veterans would make a channel like this so that their knowledge and experience can pass on.
Humans always repeat history. The same mistakes and the same failures.
Only way to prevent it is to learn from the past, but that's impossible if information is not available for the new generations to see.
Talking about mid range games getting squeezed out I've noticed something similar in movies as well. You have the big blockbusters with the huge budgets and the art house films but you don't have the mid range ones anymore. I personally attribute this to studio's being run by managers who know how to run "a" business but don't really know how to "do" business. They try and apply generic business management practices to specific industries that they don't really understand and see throwing money at a project as a safe bet. So a lot of special effects because those are easy to spend money on and get clear advantages but poor stories and scripts because those require a certain level of discernment and judgement that a generic business manager just can't be expected to have.
Agreed, and it feels that way across so many industries. Mid tier tech companies pushed out by well funded VC giants, mid tier product manufacturing pushed out by huge overseas operations.
I feel like we are seeing an unintended consequence of the growth in economies of scale and funding. It's an arms race that smaller companies can't compete with.
@@EdgarVeronaunintended? sounds right at home in medeival mechantilism and roman antiquity
@@gordo6908 ha, fair point!
oh yeah, we are in the cusp of entering postmodern- capitalism, or in other words, Cyberpunk times.
@@scoutthespirit1133 Not looking forward to this "Fallout in real life" future, I can't lie 😆💀
Tim, PLEASE publish the autobiography you mentioned! Even if it's self-published and printed on demand! One of the most influential (on me) game design & development books I've ever read has been Postmortems by Raph Koster. I suspect you can publish a book of similar quality, and the up and coming developers & designers would really appreciate a book like that from you!
a publisher has to think its proftable. And 30K subscribers, not many will buy it unfortunately so it would be a waste of time
He’s said in the past that this is the autobiography. He didn’t like the tone of the book after writing, since everyone that gave feedback said it felt depressing. So this is the book, and it’s free lol XP
I'd really, really love to read it, but I respect that Tim would prefer to keep it to himself. But I'd really, really love to read it.
Interesting talk! As for mid range gaming companies which you mention at 8:55 they do still exist and are fairly prolific in European and Eastern Euro countries, eg. Egosoft (Germany), 11Bit (Poland), Techland (Poland), Rebellion (UK), Paradox (Sweden), Bohemia (Czechia), Dovetail (UK), SCS (Czechia), Quantic (France), Larian (Belgium), and many more.
I loved watching your speeches at conferences. That's one of the many reasons I'm so glad you started this channel. You're really a fantastic speaker Tim, very engaging. In a different timeline I could see you being a teacher.
Would love to hear your experience about estimating and project planning, plus keeping the focus on the goal, thank you!
Edit: looking forward to the video about passion!
I went to a bunch on conferences during and after university, wanting to get into games development. Even met Feargus once! But then life happened and took me on a different path. Listening to folks like Tim (which would have been the era of my career start), its interesting to speculate how things might have been. On the one hand I think I could have made a decent enough contribution, but on the other I think the direction the industry took in the 2010s would have been something I would have struggled with. But thats how it always goes once real money is involved.
Thanks so much for the channel, Tim! As an enterprise dev working on indie games as a hobby, I am learning a lot of the commonalities and also differences in game dev. Really appreciate your honesty!
Great video, as always. Looking forward to a video about 9 to 5 and the newer trend of the 4 day work weeks that are being adopted at some studios with very high employee satisfaction. Most veterans I have spoken to don't believe a hit game or a future classic can be made working 9 to 5. I don't know of any on record. Purely from a business standpoint, companies are more profitable if their workers do unpaid overtime (until they burn out). Too many governments allow this because they want the industry in their district, even offering deals to studios to re-locate. If your competitor down the street is also making a dungeon crawler but their employees work 50 hours a week instead of your 40 hours, they will likely have a better or at least bigger product, all other things being equal.
I'm glad you've made this channel to share your thoughts. Tim Cain along with Chris Avellone and Josh Sawyer has been one of the names I have looked for in games and followed since I was young. It honestly seems from what I've seen it really is impossible to create a masterpiece without a lot of passion and crunch.
You loving X Wing was a bit surprising to hear (not because of any reason or so) . I'd love to hear about games that you loved playing. No reviews, not games you were influenced or impressed by, just games you liked as a gamer.
RE:Passion. I watched the C&C postmortem on RUclips, and noticed the team dynamics. They had a team of passionate people walking on eggshells around an "auteur" producer. People would sneak stuff into the game behind the producer's back and hope he wouldn't be too mad when he found out. I've never worked in the games industry but it's hard to believe that such management styles and ways of working would fly today. I have a feeling that the people working in the industry back then had different goals and aspirations than people have today.
I was born in 1985 in Finland and I'm just old enough to have my parents tell me that a master's degree in anything would be the golden ticket to guaranteed employment. Just a few years after that the prevailing wisdom changed and you were now stupid to study certain subjects because of poor employment prospects. The bright future that could absorb endless amounts of talent had metamorphosed into a bucket full of crabs.
From a consumer perspective since around 2010 games seem to have ossified into a finite number of templates with more and more gigabytes of content shoveled into the appropriate slots. In some of the Atari arcade game postmortems the guys point out that they were encouraged to come up with new kinds of games instead of rehashing old games. This attitude seems that have flipped in the last 40 years. If this is true from the producer's perspective as well, then it could at least partially explain why people are starting to see games more as a 9 to 5 job. They are no longer buying a ticket to a magical ride of discovery, creativity, and crunch. They are sitting on the production line cranking out mountains of content until the bell rings.
7:35 "which it should". No it shouldn't! You are a legend in game development. You created Fallout. Shigeru Miamoto is 70 he is still going fast, managing and making big picture design decisions for multiple big projects. So if you want to be working in games, you should be able to! People should respect your authority and expertise in the "big games industry". Now if you want to make indie games, like mentioned the possibility, a few videos ago, of making a Vampire Survivor type of scale indie game I think you definitely should do that instead! Do what your heart tells you, passion is everything! Don't let the politically correct interfere with your relationship with the craft and your passion for it. Also, you know Tim. You will never be able to retire. Every time you pick up a game to play, you will inevitably dream about how that particular game could be done better or differently. So... just give up on this "retirement" thing. 😂
If Tim feels like moving on from making games strongly enough, then he's earned it I'm sure he still has more in him, especially because he's causally mentioned making a few things in videos.
I get the feeling he wants to not only share his stories, but knowledge to give back to the gaming ecosystem. He said he's not trying to build up a brand with these videos, but maybe he is looking something as he shares his experience and lessons.
Here is where I would offer an idea that is raw and probably dumb.
But maybe Tim can start a project to make a few games that catches his fancy and teaches up and coming Padawans. 😁
The notion running though my head is pick something like the Godot engine. Create a game to whatever detail interests him... Say an FPS called What Would John McLain Do? And the player runs around shooting stuff. Others could join and create art, sound, music, or even just play test. These are not necessarily exciting ground breaking games, just a group sharing knowledge and doing something they enjoy.
If Tim feels like being hands off the code, I'm sure someone with your enthusiasm would volunteer to herd the kids' code, leaving him to concentrate on giving notes along the way.
Who knows, maybe the kid that gets inspired creates the next big franchise, or thinks up the next trend and applies what they learned to make it exist.
I like to think about it in terms of development of the medium - we're coming up on 50 years of videogames, which in terms of films would be the golden age of Hollywood. I feel like we're about to see a huge leap forward in artistry and storytelling. This is a really exciting time.
Thank you for creating this channel. Your videos are invaluable, and your advice is the kind of stuff they don't teach in school.
The first home console was actually released in 1972, so we passed 50 years already. Makes a guy feel old hahaha. I hope you are right about the huge leap forward, I am a little more pessimistic about it but it would be great to be wrong.
@@DKarkarov There will be some hard lessons to learn, I'm sure, and the analogy isn't perfect. Games never had to contend with anything like the Hayes Code. But I think in terms of craftsmanship and techniques that it holds up. Someday there will be a Pulitzer category (or equivalent) for videogames. They'll have cultural parity with books, films, and music. I hope I get to see that.
To speak to your point at the end of the video; combining artistry and industry. I'm an outsider to the industry, but the difficulty of maintaining that line can be seen in Hollywood, and the trend towards franchises, sequels, and remakes (which is slipping into video games) shows, in my opinion, what happens when people try to turn art into a 9-5. How do you inspire employees, though? Passion isn't a contractory obligation, and it's not like it's something that you can snap your fingers and call upon; hence why we have muses as a concept.
I could talk a lot about this (which I would love to do) but overall, the most reasonable conclusion I've come to is this; if you are involved in the industry enough to get hired somewhere, you almost certainly have enough skill and intelligence to make more money outside of video games, with a better schedule and benefits too. If you want to be a part of creating a piece of art, there will inherently be some sort of sacrifice, even it's a monetary one. Don't debase yourself for a job, but recognize it's hard to create something unique when you're bringing the same amount of passion to it that anybody off the street could.
Also, thanks for making me think about this Tim.
Funny memory: I attended your talk at GX 2017 and afterwards asked for a photo with you; it was an old film camera and somehow haven't processed the film (not sure if it's still in the camera or in the exposed film pile)!
Well, now you have a fun project: get the photo developed! I'd love to see it!
If you aren't qualified to talk about trends in the gaming industry than no one is Tim. I felt your comment about imposture syndrome, I have been doing the type of work I do now for almost 15 years, I am definitely one of the older people in my department (maybe the oldest ugh), and I definitely still feel like I am just lucky/faking it half the time.
I'm so glad you are so excited to talk about games again. Never stop doing so 😊
I would love to hear the talks you did in these conferences. The fallout one as well as the reboot one are publicly available but not many others are.
Thanks for all this work you put in the channel!
PS: I really hope you publish your autobiography one day.
Love the videos so far, I would love to see some more technical videos talking about programming - the changes you saw in the industry, introduction of the internet and widely available game engines, etc. The industry in your career has shifted so much, from a lot of games being written partially or entirely in assembly to stuff like unreal w/ flowchart scripting!
Well we are very happy you decided, to do this. Hope it brings you joy 😇
Every time I went to a game conference I wondered if I would meet you, or someone adjacent to you or from Troika. Not in a "meet your heroes" kind of way (well maybe a little bit) but a "I want to talk shop and work with you someday!" kind of way. I'm both glad and saddened at how you went to Sydney, but I stopped going to conferences at that point.
I did manage to meet someone you know and talk about Arcanum though, but that's not a story I want to share here. In hindsight it was probably quite awkward.
Just rebought X-wing, no longer having a CD-ROM or floppy drive. Finishing up my Thrust Master mapping. Love the videos, Tim.
As always I am amazed by your stories.
Tim you are one of the pillars of this industry, I would listen to you for hours, pure gold!
I like to think that this RUclips channel is your legacy, Tim.
8:14
There really isn't a way to get into games. It's 100% who you know if you're a starter with no experience. I spoke with a former Blizzard dev, David Fried, and he talked about how he barely squeaked into game design through QA. This was back in the 90s and it was David Jaffe's experience as well. Ken Levine discussed how he, a failed film student, got into game design because an older man at Looking Glass Studios decided to take a risk on someone with no background in games. That's basically never gonna happen in this day and age.
In Fried's case, a senior Blizzard dev hired his friends (shocker) who had no background in games and proceeded to make life hell for Dave and eventually got him fired. Ironically enough, these crony hires ended up being a large source of Blizzard's SA scandal with both of them leaving Blizzard early to avoid the consequences of California investigating the company.
A lot of this boils down to economics: games are too expensive to take risks on new recruits or spending time and money to train people. Naturally, the consequences to such practices are low trust organizations that are often characterized by hostile work environments. However, the culture within gaming is also to blame. Underpaid developers who are paranoid of losing their jobs are not in any state of mind to show genuine concern for building the talent of younger people. Instead, talent gets poached from those who also have experience. Blizzard lost a lead dev for WoW recently, I think to Riot and now they're scrambling, as is normal for them now, to fill the void.
How is a toxic work environment supposed to cultivate good product experiences? It certainly won't and I wouldn't be surprised that when most of the Gen X developers retire, the under-served millennials and zoomers will not be educated or experienced enough to pick up the slack.
There are mid-level developers, but they get bought by the three or four larger companies, once they make two or three big projects, and become subsidiary studios.
You mentioned working on toys. Are you talking about consulting on IP lines you’ve been a part of, or toys that are separate from those things? If you mean separate toys, what toys have you worked on?
That could be interesting to hear about, either way. Though, I don’t know if that’s just interesting to me or everyone.
3:28 - Huh. That's definitely a way to differentiate them, and it makes total sense! But I guess you could make an RPG that has every other characteristic of an RPG, except for hit points. Which would be, like, you have ONE hit point (get hit, you're dead, or unconscious, knocked out or whatever), or... You have a different wounding system (so something like "conditions": healthy, bleeding, hurt, badly hurt, etc. stuff without an apparent numerical value), but I guess at that point it would be pretty close to having HP. It's good food for thought, though, trying to change these staples of RPGs.
Tim, what do you think of GTA, from GTA3 to Vice City to San Andreas? They sort of feel like RPGs to me, especially San Andreas.
The great thing about knowledge is that its always applicable. So not sure your career needs to wind down unless its something you have decided you want it to. Never the less I really enjoy hearing all your experiences and insights into different topics. I do wonder how many boxes you have stored in your garage though :)
I think the person who greatly values work life balance will necessarily get less done than the person who just wants to work all the time, and you need to consider that when you are planning your life and career.
Watching your videos got me nostalgic, and I've been replaying Arcanum again as a result. I was wondering if you could weigh in on the controversial Half-Ogre conspiracy quest.
0:04 Hi Tim!
11:04 Bye Tim!
8:07 “…and I realized this industry is totally different to people entering it now. Which makes me think that the standard question I get - which is, ‘How do I get a job in the industry?’ - I just don’t think it’s applicable for me to answer that anymore.”
In a previous video, your advice was to make a game. Is that no longer your advice?
PS - Thank you for this channel and your insights. I love your videos.
Its more of the fact that If you plan, start, develop, and finish a game idea you have, no matter how small, you have the foundational skills needed to start getting deeper into that industry. Tim also made the point that everyone has ideas, and having something to show will set you far ahead of anyone during the initial resume phase.
I really really wish to have uncle like you Tim :)
Hey, Tim. Could you give us more elaborate take on why did you retire? I watched almost all of your videos from start to finish and I wonder why. Getting old is one thing, but as we can see, many game developers from your generation are still working.
I would like to hear Tim's opinion on the budget for games and how now there are fewer big budget games and lots of indies but almost nothing in between.
the best Tim on RUclips
Thanks, but we wouldn't even be here without Tim Berners-Lee.
I learn so much from "old style" development and it doesn't make sense how modern developers do things.
I also don't have a job so... Maybe my understanding is incorrect compared to the requirements for hyper specialization.
Hi Tim, can you share the story of funny song shuffling coding you talked about in Dubrovnik? 😊
Need that autobiography!!!
Not sure how to feel about the disappearing middle yet. Seems like a good number of mid size companies are getting bought by large corporations. One would think that with the available tech being midsize would be more sustainable.
I think this is obvious, but you should do a round table on here with some of the fallout people.
5:00
Tim, I know you said it as a joke, but I unironically would like to see you make an entire video on how you can make entire videos.
just watching this it sounds like your passion thing is already being done, and with passion theirs a difference between passion and boneheadedness and its all about how you balance it out
its kind of a chicken and the egg thing and no one knows what came first, plus theirs the hidden factor of ego and the ego rush of seeing ones names in the credits and beating some other guy at his game
like I've seen it in gaming, I've seen it in business, and I've seen it with cars, passion is competition in addition to ego
as ego is one of the biggest factors in passion that most people forget, and it is both a negative and possitive, IE Greed is good
to even touch upon it requres understanding basic human nature and how people value milestones
and your never going to be able to do a good video on it because theirs too much to cover and you'd have to break it up into segements, and even then it would be highly subjective by nature just given how people view the work
like you like meetings as a way to brainstorm and make a product better, I see them as a waste of time that pulls away from the product, you see this diversity thing as good, I see it as a lack of focus that derails the project given how much everyone is worried about everyone else, and not making a good product
so nautrally everyone's approach is going to be different so what I would suggest is simply calling it tims take on passion, and how you handled it so people can take their own things from it
and how old you would handle it, and new who would,
Any chance meeting you at Gamescom this year :)?
those who are allowed money are not able to learn or make real games .....
so hope for people like you....
I miss E3.
Love Indie games, so I like the current scene. Do miss those mid tier games though.
The problem with passion I think is that, not just game companies, but companies in general see one or two employees being really passionate, working 13 hour days because they are burning to do so and have a blast doing it, and expect everyone to be able to do that. And of course this is completely unrealistic, and puts really idiotic expectations on people that aren't working in a field they're passionate about. So in essence, being forced to work more than you're comfortable (9-5 for most people) is bad, being able to work as much as you are comfortable with, without being used as an example to shame other workers is good.
If they're not working in a field they're passionate about, they should probably think about trying to switch fields, which is itself nowhere near as easy as it sounds and may actually prove impossible, but worth a try.
That said, I kid you not. Big businesses from retail to healthcare -- yep, even healthcare is considered an "industry" now -- are presently requiring you pass what amounts to a psych evaluation before you can even get an interview. When I first came across this, I failed the exam over and over again because I had no idea what they were testing for. I *should* have known because I'd had to work survival jobs in my flaming youth, but had been out of 'the daily grind' for years and didn't even suspect. Then, it suddenly dawned on me: they're looking for people who will do exactly as they're told and never question anything whatsoever. I answered the questions with the responses I fthought were expected and passed with flying colors. Big businesses want mindless drones, not workers who love what they do or just love to work. (None of the people who work for them are mindless drones, of course. Just saying that's what big businesses pretty obviously expect considering they're actively testing for it.) I have to wonder if the same thiing isn't happening in the gaming "industry" because, it seems to me, the moment "gaming" became an industry is the moment it inherited the exact same issues plaguing every other industry.
Even if you love what you do, you may be surprised to find that some businesses, counter-intuitively, actively try to beat the love right out of you while expecting it nonetheless. It's insane.
What Tim is talking about and a commenter mentioned on the last video that's most relevant, methinks, is that "squeezing the mid-tier" out dynamic. The dynamic is no different than the fact that the former "middle class" in the West is practically nonexistent today. More and more people are slipping into poverty and politicians are scratching their heads trying to figure out what to do about it. Well, it they hadn't handed their authority over to corporations on a silver platter, it wouldn't be happening. The "revolving door" has never spinned so fast. smh
Back to gaming, I actually fear what will happen to mid-tier studios like Obsidian now that they're under the X-box umbrella. I'm sure they're breathing a sigh of relief that they'll no longer have to set up kickstarter campaigns and the like to do what they love or fear going out of business every day, but they can't even pretend to be the scrappy underdog anymore. Some people are already accusing them of all kinds of stuff, e.g. " [taking] the language of anti-capitalism to lifestyle-market [Outer Worlds] to an audience that might like to see itself as counter-culture." I honestly don't think that's the case. I think they genuinely wanted to create a great game, but it didn't resonate with people quite the way they imagined it would. Could be wrong, but I sincerely doubt it.
When businesses get too big, however, financial decisions start taking precedence over the creative in key areas. That may or may not already be happening at Obsidian. If it is, I sincerely hope they nip the trend in the bud.
you wrote an autobiography? why hasn't it released yet? >.>
Can people tell me what are the current "mid level" companies he talked about? Only one I can think of are like From Software.
I'm not gonna bother checking, some might be indie, some might be large.
Piranha Bytes
Spiders
Klei
Battlestate
Paradox
Also, apparently From Software has 350+ employees so I doubt that qualifies as AA
passion? hr wants to know your location.
hi tim
First? 😂
962th!!
thankyou for the insight boss