This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Blood, Sweat, and Pixels" by Jason Schreier. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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What are outside video game development roles? How do investors and business executives affect a video game’s release window?
One of the biggest challenges in making a video game doesn’t relate to the development itself. Instead, it’s a product of collaboration with investors, publishers, and other people out of the game studio whose interests in selling the product might conflict with the developers’ interests in creating it.
Discover how an outsider’s perspective can change everything about the development of a video game.
Games Often Require Collaboration
In Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, Jason Schreier points out that there’s more to making a video game than writing endless lines of code. Developers also have commercial and legal matters to tackle before releasing a game, which usually means getting other people involved outside of the typical video game development roles in the process.
First, studios need to pay their developers and cover overhead costs. Unless a company is large enough to cover all of its costs, that means striking funding deals with people outside of the studio.
However, when investors are funding a game, they have a say in the development process. For example, they might push for a game to be released before developers think it’s ready so they can start seeing returns on their investments. They can also pull their financial support if they’re unhappy.
(Shortform note: Problems like these often come from a lack of a shared vision—developers and investors have different ideas about how their game should be made, so they end up unintentionally working against each other. The solution to this problem is communication and collaboration: Developers should work together with investors to establish reasonable goals and milestones and keep them apprised of their progress.)
Second, developers often have business executives weighing in on their work, and possibly even copyright holders (if a game is based on an existing intellectual property). This can be especially frustrating because developers could find themselves taking orders from people who aren’t experienced in video game development. But without those people’s support, the game can’t get made at all.
(Shortform note: As a counterpoint to Schreier, there are times when outside perspectives and ideas can be beneficial. Someone with no background in game development might come up with a unique idea that people steeped in game development culture and practices would never think of. For example, an executive might provide some insight about how a character in a leadership role should behave, while a copyright holder likely knows key details about the setting that others have overlooked or forgotten. However, as with the “shared vision” principle above, communication and collaboration are key—it shouldn’t just be an outsider overriding developers’ decisions.)
Case Study: Star Wars 1313
Schreier ends this book with the story of the unreleased Star Wars 1313, a game in which players would have controlled a bounty hunter as he tried to make a living in the slums of the planet Coruscant. The developers, working for the company LucasArts, overcame numerous developmental and creative challenges only to see their studio bought out and shut down by Disney.
The first major hurdle that LucasArts’s developers faced was from outside the game studio. Star Wars creator George Lucas (who is, by his own admission, not a gamer) kept demanding creative changes. He thought those changes would be relatively minor, but in reality, they required the development team to redo weeks or months of work.
Schreier reports that before the game was finished, Disney bought out LucasArts and shut down the company. Years of work on Star Wars 1313 had to be thrown away, while developers and fans alike realized that this promising game would never see the light of day.
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Like what you just read? Read the rest of the world's best book summary and analysis of Jason Schreier's "Blood, Sweat, and Pixels" at Shortform.
Here's what you'll find in our full Blood, Sweat, and Pixels summary:
- A rare look into the harsh inner workings of the video game industry
- The four main challenges that video game developers face
- Why Star Wars 1313 never made it to the shelves
