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E79: Why AAA is Failing and How to Recover and Other Questions - Our First Q&A Episode!

Building Better Games

Release Date: 12/31/2024

3 Leadership Mistakes Quietly Crippling Your Game Studio show art 3 Leadership Mistakes Quietly Crippling Your Game Studio

Building Better Games

If you’re a leader in game dev who feels stuck, there is a path forward that levels up your leadership and accelerates your team, game, and career. Sign up here to learn more: Are you leading a team that has plenty of people but can’t seem to get moving? You care deeply about your team and your game, but projects crawl and decisions drag in the. It's almost never just a talent problem. Instead, it's three quiet leadership mistakes that choke momentum. In this episode, you’ll learn what those three mistakes are, how they’re showing up in your studio, and what you can do instead so you...

info_outline E107: Stop Hiring “Testers.” Start Doing QA. show art E107: Stop Hiring “Testers.” Start Doing QA.

Building Better Games

If you’re a leader in game dev who feels stuck, there is a path forward that levels up your leadership and accelerates your team, game, and career. Sign up here to learn more: You can't just test quality into a game at the end. You have to build it in from the start. Ignoring your Quality Assurance team's full value is a fast way to lose millions. The state of game development is at a challenging inflection point, characterized by high-risk live service ambitions and a brain drain of senior talent. Host Ben Carcich sits down with Nathan Tiras, former Game Dev veteran (Riot Games,...

info_outline E106: Why Jira Hurts Game Studios show art E106: Why Jira Hurts Game Studios

Building Better Games

If you’re a leader in game dev who feels stuck, able to spot problems but struggling to make a real difference, there is a path forward that levels up your leadership and accelerates your team, game, and career. Sign up here to learn more: Are you inadvertently forcing your team to serve a tool, instead of letting your tools serve your team and game? In a recent conversation with Clinton Keith, Ben asked how Clint would help all of game development. Clint’s response? “Delete Jira” - and Ben laughed to keep from crying. Jira is a powerful tool, but in the hands of uninformed game...

info_outline E105: Your “2-Day” Task Takes 2 Months. Here’s the Fix. show art E105: Your “2-Day” Task Takes 2 Months. Here’s the Fix.

Building Better Games

If you’re a leader in game dev who feels stuck, able to spot problems but struggling to make a real difference, there is a path forward that levels up your leadership and accelerates your team, game, and career. Sign up here to learn more: How much is your bad code costing you, and how much is your team's suffering just a ritual of amateur theatre? In this episode, Engineering and Agile expert Tim Ottinger and Ben challenge the core belief systems that plague software development, from the focus on individual productivity to the self-inflicted wounds of long release cycles. They break down...

info_outline E104: Game Dev Leaders: Save Weeks of Thrash in 20 Minutes show art E104: Game Dev Leaders: Save Weeks of Thrash in 20 Minutes

Building Better Games

If you’re a leader in game dev who feels stuck, able to spot problems but struggling to make a real difference, there is a path forward that levels up your leadership and accelerates your team, game, and career. Sign up here to learn more: How do you save weeks of thrash when your team is busy and perhaps even crunching, but your key goals aren't moving? This solo episode with Ben reveals the hidden cost of avoiding difficult conversations and the simple, 20-minute fix that can unblock your entire game development team. The problem isn't your process, your backlog, or lack of...

info_outline E103: Leadership Under Fire: Surviving a $100M Game Studio Crisis show art E103: Leadership Under Fire: Surviving a $100M Game Studio Crisis

Building Better Games

If you’re a leader in game dev who feels stuck, able to spot problems but struggling to make a real difference, there is a path forward that levels up your leadership and accelerates your team, game, and career. Sign up here to learn more: What happens when doing the right thing could get you fired? Every game dev leader faces this nightmare: being held accountable for results but not empowered to make the decisions needed to achieve them. That tension creates chaos, burns out teams, and kills great games. In this powerful episode, Ben sits down with Clinton Keith, author of Agile Game...

info_outline E102: 5 Game Dev Delusions That Kill Studios show art E102: 5 Game Dev Delusions That Kill Studios

Building Better Games

Stop leaving reality behind and ship better games! If you’re a leader in game dev who feels stuck, able to spot problems but struggling to make a real difference, there is a path forward that levels up your leadership and accelerates your team, game, and career. Sign up here to learn more: Is your studio living in a delusion that will only end in pain? Seemingly great teams burn millions of dollars only to shut down because they left reality behind. This episode breaks down the five game dev delusions that kill studios, which I've seen in well-funded, 100+ person teams, unfunded indies, and...

info_outline E101: How Layoffs Go Wrong—and the Right Way to Do Them show art E101: How Layoffs Go Wrong—and the Right Way to Do Them

Building Better Games

Ready to take your game development career to the next level? Join the Game Dev Leadership Accelerator: https://forms.gle/nqRTUvgFrtdYuCbr6 Do layoffs mean studio leadership is bad?  While the popular answer is often "yes," the truth is more complex. Layoffs can reveal many things, from bad times in the market to failures to manage finances to corporate greed. But if you’re a leader, the real test is how you behave when your company’s survival is on the line. Trent Kusters, the co-founder and Studio Head of League of Geeks, joins Ben Carcich for a deeply personal and frank discussion...

info_outline E100: Don’t Hire Until You See These 3 Signs show art E100: Don’t Hire Until You See These 3 Signs

Building Better Games

Ready to take your game development career to the next level? Join the Game Dev Leadership Accelerator: In this special Q&A episode for Episode 100, we're answering your most pressing questions from the Game Production Community Discord! Join Ben Carcich as he dives into critical topics that every game development leader faces, from navigating project pivots to building a healthy team culture. We'll explore: ✅ When to scale your team up (or down) ✅ How to prepare for meetings and ensure they are actually valuable ✅ Why "safe" project pivots don't exist and what to do instead ✅ The...

info_outline E99: Stop Using 2-Week Sprints - Here's Why They’re Failing You show art E99: Stop Using 2-Week Sprints - Here's Why They’re Failing You

Building Better Games

Stuck in slow loops and broken systems? The Game Dev Leadership Accelerator can help you make lasting change. Sign up to learn more:   Why do most teams default to two-week sprints, even when they're wrong? In this episode, Ben Carcich breaks down a simple model with three dials that you should use to tune your iteration length. He explains why iteration length is a product lever, not a calendar convenience for your leadership, and how choosing the right rhythm for your team can reduce thrash, increase learning speed, and improve value delivery. What you’ll learn in this episode: The...

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No guests today! Instead, I'll be taking questions from the Building Better Games discord and answering them. I cover10 questions including the challenges with AAA dev, the rise of co-dev, and what production careers look like. Enjoy!

Question #1 : How do you ensure that you (the royal you) are making a game that will be fun for players, not just fun for its designers to make? (Or maybe in this context - what are the ways in which production can support product management and ensure the sprint-to-sprint goals align with what internal player advocates are asking for?)

Question #2 : What would you say needs to happen to make the big players more competitive / successful again?

Question #3: Do you think there’s an observable trend towards an increased amount of codevelopment as a way to mitigate costs/risk? What issues do you see this posing for coherent design and production if there is an increasing reliance on external development partners?

 

Question #4: There are clear signs when certain aspects of a game are lacking - incoherent design, low quality assets, buggy software. What are the player-facing symptoms of a game that is lacking in production or leadership competencies? 

 

Question #5: Production organizations at larger game studios often suffer from issues of structure, such as a substantial number of producers, senior producers, and even lead producers all rolling directly up into an overburdened production director, because there doesn’t seem to be an understood space for a “producer manager” between frontline production and executive/director-level production leadership. What is the rationale for this gap when <discipline> manager is a well-understood conceit in other gamedev disciplines (e.g. designers will have design managers reporting to a design director, artists will have department managers reporting to a director, engineers have managers between them and directors, etc.)? 

Is it just that production is typically not a large enough organization to merit managers? That producers are seen as organized and not in need of more traditional personnel management?



Question #6: How can you become better at your role as a producer when you aren’t at your job? Or in other words, how can you get better at what you do aside from getting more experience?

 

Question #7: For mid- and senior level producers: What does a career development track look like? Often it seems like the only future for a highly competent producer is executive producer (a stretch for many and not a realistic path for most) or production director, which itself is a rarified commodity at larger developers. What are the progression opportunities an IC producer should be considering?

Question #8: As the only Production guy on my team (and 1 of 3 "operations people"), how would you deal with getting questions and answers when you have nobody around to rubber ducky with?

 

Question #9: When talking about the past, how can you learn to abstract experiences and look past the specifics? Are there any resources you recommend for learning how to tell stories so that you’re not bogged down in the details of history?

 

Question #10: How are game developers selecting and setting up test groups to see their players are enjoying the game and it’s a good market fit? Are there aspects of this process that could see refining and improving? Or common pitfalls other developers tend to see in this process?



Our discord community is live! Join here to engage with leaders and producers in game dev looking to make our industry a better place that makes better games: https://discord.gg/ySCPS5aMcQ

 

If you’re interested in an online course on becoming a better game producer, head here: https://www.buildingbettergames.gg/succeeding-in-game-production

 

Subscribe to our newsletter for more game development tips and resources: https://www.buildingbettergames.gg/newsletter

 

Ben's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjamin-carcich/

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@buildingbettergames

Spotify Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/6QD5yIbFdJXvccO8Z5aXpm

 

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