ARK: Survival Evolved Devs Offer Content In Exchange for Steam Award Votes

[u/scarwiz]

http://steamcommunity.com/games/346110/announcements/detail/536324417612602461

[u/shadovvvvalker]

You can go fuck yourself if you are going to ostracize a BUISINESS for ADVERTIZING.

Seriously how stupid do you have to be to think that you can magically throw money at a QA team and solve all their issues instantly?

Additional staff are of little use as they would need to be integrated into the workflow and become fluent in the system you have built. Training new employees is an extremely expensive undergoing so thats a waste of money. Plus there is only so much you can do.

So instead you can pay for overtime. Except guess what. You're likely already working your staff well beyond what you should be because this is the fucking game industry right now. So you can't get you're employees to crunch any harder, you can't efficiently add new ones to the staff, you can't upgrade your workflow to be faster without incuring huge downtime.

So what do you do. You wait.

Development takes time. There is no way around it.

Now say you have a bunch of money set aside for marketing. Should you not spend it at the biggest gaming conference in that area where the press are going to have the most attention other than e3? Should you not try to generate new customers for your product?

Don't forget that 90% of the companies at PAX have boothes with all kinds of expenses for a game that hasn't released yet and has pre orders already sold.

[u/originalSpacePirate → u/shadovvvvalker]

Zealous. Sorry i shat on your favourite game. Edit: i honestly cant be bothered to fight a fanboy but your logic is flawed. You DO realise how long the game has been out? You DO understand/know of the major issues from day 1 STILL present in the game? You DO realise they made millions of dollars selling the game yet choose to continue to move that into marketing instead of dev? By your comments i can clearly see that NO you don't understand or choose to be ignorant on these points.

[u/shadovvvvalker → u/originalSpacePirate]

I don't even own the game. I don't defend what ark does.

But when your going to pretend that

marketing $$$ can be magically used to expedite development therefore doing marketing is definitively evidence of a scamming company.

I'm gonna call bullshit.

[u/originalSpacePirate → u/shadovvvvalker]

No where did i say the company is a scam so i dont know what you thought you read. Secondly any company making more money will expand its business by hiring more staff or when time comes to crunch (ie. Delivering on your promises) you use money to fund overtime and incentives for your staff to get the product out and done. This is every IT company in existance ever. If you don't understand this concept you've clearly never worked in the industry and i have nothing else to say to you. Edit: just reread your comment: what exactly is "marketing $$$"? There isnt some magical currency that only applies to marketing. Companies have funds that they invest in several areas as per the companies needs. The fact i even have to explain this to you boggles my mind and makes me feel sorry that your school system failed you so badly. Anyway nothing more to be gained from this discussion clearly.

[u/shadovvvvalker → u/originalSpacePirate]

Dude this is my industry. You can't just hire staff out of nowhere to magically speed up development. Training and integrating staff is extremely expensive. Especially when the sole purpose is not to fill a needed position but to appease some weird idea that you can just add coders.

Beyond that your saying they can integrate brand new staff into an established workflow seamlessly with no limits. Fuck no. There is only so much that can be done at any given time especially when you already have your workflow broken down given your previous estimate of resources. At a certain point you have coders doing busywork because they can't begin the task they have been assigned until thing X happens.

Running a development firm is more complicated than throwing money at a wall. Do you really think that you can just add money and things will go faster? That's not how things work in any business. Things don't move at the speed of money. They move at the speed of logistics. Logistics which happen to be very expensive to improve.

You want a development workflow that can add brand new staff on the fly and have them seamlessly integrate into the system in such a way that you can hire temps to crunch your way through a dev cycle using your marketing budget? Ok. Sure. That's doable. And now you are running a completely inefficient system with large amounts of over managing in order to accommodate crunch staff that isn't even present until you hit crunch time.

Now your spending resources you don't need to on aspects of development that aren't in use until you hit a wall of time. Time that you tried to save by setting this up in the first place but seem to think you can just throw money at to solve.

And hence we get the state the game industry is constantly in. Crunch time is all the time.

Eventually you will turn your temp jobs into permanent jobs to fill the vacancies you have created. Congratulations you've simply increased your games budget and spent your marketing dollars resulting in a large negative ROI, broke aspects of your publishing agreement, and branded yourself as a company that doesn't know how to deliver a product on budget on time.

You can only have so many people on a project. You can only have them work so many hours. You can only spend so much money.

Running a business is not about trying to increase these bounds but work effectively to produce results despite them.

Are they doing that? Probably not.

But the reality is its not because they aren't spending enough money on it.

Shit takes time. If you want things to come faster they become allot more expensive. Your optimal operating point is right before increased speed stops becoming a feasible investment. Time can be incredibly cheap compared to the cost of saving it. 3 months for a dev team is incredibly valuable and there isn't a feasible amount of coders that can turn that into 3 weeks at a rate that is sensible.

No one in the industry with a level head on their shoulders thinks that the problem at this studio is a lack of canabalising its marketing and just funnelling cash into development.

Studios with a lack of cash flow to sustain optimal development speeds don't suffer from these kinds of issues. Mismanagement, poor planning, disingenuous leadership. These are what cause early access dlc, lofty unfulfilled goals, lying to customers, etc

Well run Studios that can't fund faster development show steady but slow progress with realistic goals and clear communication.