#approval process

[askagamedev]

How typical is it for a team member to pitch an entirely new feature or system mid-development and then have it ship with the game?

It really depends on the scope of the feature, when during development it is pitched, and who's actually going to build it.

Obviously, scope on any feature is important. If the feature or system will require dozens of developers or hiring a bunch of new people to build, it's a really big ask and the leadership will have to weigh it against the current scope planned for the game. If scope grows too large, something has to give - we need to cut something in order to make it all fit within our development schedule. As such, any approval must consider the cost, both in resources and time, and whether we have room in the budget and schedule for it. If we really want the new feature or system, then we're probably going to have to cut something else to make room.

Because building a feature or system takes resources and time, the time at which the feature is pitched is important. If there's insufficient time to build, tune, and test the feature/system before the game ships, there's no way it can get a green light logistically. When I first had these sort of ideas mid or late production, my more experienced coworkers would tell me to remember those improvements and file them away for the next game (which later became "save it for a future update"). I return to those ideas now and then, because it's also a really good learning experience to build something and realize that there are better ways you can do it. This is also the answer to the classic interview question about "if you could go back and do something again, what would you change?".

A given pitch also holds a lot more weight if the pitcher is also the builder - I've seen a lot of "wouldn't it be cool if...?" ideas thrown around over the years from a lot of people, but the vast majority of feature or system pitches I've gotten green lighted are the ones that I built myself precisely because the people I was pitching to knew I could do it. I still remember one time when I pitched a feature idea to my boss and his first (and only) response was "Can you build it in two weeks? If so, sure." Blue sky dreams and ideas are fun, but we're always looking to make things real. The ability to back up the idea with action is a really strong argument in favor of any feature or system.

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[noosphe-re]

Make It Bigger, Paula Scher

[buggie-hagen]

As of today I am officially approved for ordination in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America!

[askagamedev]

Provided that you don't release/sell the content: can you start preemptively working on content that uses a licensed IP before you get a license agreement in place? If you have some confidence you'll get the license eventually, acknowledging that you're proceeding "at risk" that you might have some wasted effort if things needed to be reworked based on the agreement (or a lot o waste if you don't get the license) - so that the content is ready sooner.

Yes, you can absolutely start pre-emptively. In fact, a good number of projects in the past have done so as part of the pitch to the publisher. Way back in the day, id Software (then called Apogee Games) famously [pitched a port of Super Mario Bros 3 to MS-DOS] to Nintendo. Nintendo was impressed but ultimately turned them down. The technology was swiftly repurposed into [Commander Keen: Invasion of the Vorticons].

However, it's worth noting that any material made for a pitch practically never makes it all the way to the final product. Remember, a pitch is just a demo to get buy-in from the publisher. It does not need to be fully-featured, it does not need to be optimized, it does not need to be bug-free. It doesn't even have to be reasonably playable - it just has to hold together long enough to demonstrate a solid idea of what the game could be to a roomful of executives for the few minutes it takes to go through it.

The purpose of making the assets with a licensed IP as part of a pitch is more to demonstrate the team's commitment to the brand than it is to get a head start on production assets. If the publisher is looking to use that brand in a game, it is more persuasive to have a pitch tailored to what they are looking for. A large part of any pitch is giving enough direction to show where you're aiming while leaving enough room for the viewer's imagination to fill in the details. Making good use of a license pre-emptively can be a very strong way to secure that mental buy-in.

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[askagamedev]

How are budgets planned for developing work and time, marketing, and selling? It's obvious there's some kind of plan in the works for each budget, but aside from human related things, it's also clear that budgets themselves have limitations. So, how and why are they made as they do?

There's more than one way to approach budgeting, primarily depending on how much relevant information we have to base budgeting decisions on. The more relevant information we have, the easier it is to make budgeting decisions. Examples of relevant information would be business info like how much it cost to make and market the previous title, the demographic data on the previous title, current and projected market trends, but also internal info like what our development team wants to do, what our technical expertise is capable of, how much hiring we would need to do for this new project, and so on. The relevant information is used to set our [budget upper bound] - the numbers we can expect to see if we carry the project out to completion.

This means that the easiest projects to budget for tend to be annual release games like Madden and FIFA and long-running lifestyle games like World of Warcraft or League of Legends, where we have a very well-established audience and very well-established working parameters. We have experienced teams that know how to do the work, we have established metrics for measuring success, we know who our audience is and they generally trust us to deliver a consistent product to them. It is very easy to green light another another Call of Duty or Madden game because it is a reliable workhorse that is about as dependable as they come.

On the opposite end of the spectrum are the experimental and brand new ideas that the executives aren’t so sure about. We aren’t sure who the audience is yet, we aren’t sure how much work it’s going to take, we aren’t even sure if we have the expertise to make the kind of game that we’re trying to make. Rather than commit multiple millions of dollars to building and marketing an unknown new game, the publisher often takes a Venture Capitalist-like approach to these experimental games. What this means is that they don’t fund the entire project at once, but instead fund the project milestone by milestone (e.g. build a prototype to show the core gameplay, build a [vertical slice], etc.). 

Whenever a milestone is reached, the executives and the team leadership hold a milestone review where the executives can see the progress made over that milestone period and decide whether the project continues. This way they can cancel the less promising projects without spending too much on them. The reasons can vary - it could be that the project isn’t turning out the way the executives expected, it could be that market trends have changed, people have gotten sick of this type of game, or even external events happening like the Russia-Ukraine war, a terrorist attack destroys the world trade center buildings, or a massive economic recession happening. This also means that projects can alter their direction based on feedback from these milestone reviews, like taking on a license, adding major requested features, changing core gameplay, and so on.

As you might guess, most games fall somewhere in between these two cases, usually on the milestone-by-milestone side. Many games get cancelled early on, like when their prototype or [vertical slice] doesn’t turn out to be very compelling. Many others get the plug pulled due to external factors beyond their control, like the company running into cash flow problems or market trends changing. Generally, the budget is mostly locked by the time the game is announced to the public. The initial game announcement is the publisher committing marketing money on top of development money, which means they are pretty serious about it. 

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[askagamedev]

Since mid-budget games basically don't exist anymore due to the high levels of profitability from AAA games and the relative safety and diversification of revenue available from creating long-term experiences, what do you believe the upper limit is on the decline of new releases every year?

Firstly, I can’t agree with your premise. Mid-budget games still very much exist. Franchise games like Street Fighter V, EA's non-Madden non-FIFA sports franchises (NBA, MMA, PGA, NCAA), the annual WWE game, the non-mainline second-tier Mario Activity games (Party, Strikers, Golf, etc.), Just Dance, Tony Hawk, Crash Bandicoot, and so on are all examples of today's mid-budget games. Their budgets are significantly smaller than the really big titles like Call of Duty, Assassin's Creed, Resident Evil, FIFA, etc. but their overall market footprint is also smaller. They have established and reliable niches.

Secondly, I think that what you’ll see from the big publishers is that major franchises (COD, GTA, FIFA, Battlefield, RE, AC, etc.) will continue to get regular sequels on a regular basis until they are no longer consistently profitable or sustainable. In addition to that, because not all franchises can reliably run forever, AAA publishers will, on occasion, green light new IPs, popular licenses, and more experimental AAA titles in hopes of discovering/establishing a new franchise to grow or at least sustain their business. That is the baseline. There are other compounding factors, like how a new console hardware generation makes it easier to establish new IPs since players are more willing to try out new things at the start of a new console generation. The financial situation of the publishers also affect things - if the company is in financial trouble or the economy is bad, they will tighten belts and stick to what is safe. If the economy  and/or company is booming, they will be much more likely to green light more experimental games.

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[askagamedev]

When game developers and collaborating IP owners work together for a game, how much money goes into developing assets (models and animations) in comparison to assets being made for IPs the devs themselves own?

I'm sure you've noticed that visual assets between licensed IP and our own are pretty much the same in quality, so the basic cost of asset creation is pretty close - the cost of creating and animating each asset for 3D models at a given level of detail costs about the same, whether we’re creating Batman or our own creation. We still have to build out the [model, rig, textures, normals, animations, and so on] for each character.

That said, there can be additional costs for creating licensed assets primarily because of the external approval process. Any licensed property will typically have an approval process included in the contract. This usually means that we have to submit the in-progress assets to the licensor for approval who can then either give us the thumbs up or down. If they approve it, we can move on. If they disapprove, they usually provide some notes for us to fix what’s wrong (e.g. Dr. Doom’s costume is not the right shade of green). For those who read the blog or are somewhat familiar with the game development process, this is not unlike the [certification process] on a smaller scale.

The pickiness of the licensor is the real determining factor for how much more expensive these assets can become. The old adage “time is money” directly applies here because we might need to wait for days to get an approval response from Disney’s Star Wars licensing team after submitting. If that response is a thumbs down, we have to fix the problems they have with the item and resubmit them again for approval. Some licensors are very quick and/or lenient with their IP and the process goes quickly and smoothly. Others are very exacting or capricious, making the approval process painful and slow.

P.S. These licensing rules can also apply to projects under the same overall umbrella, depending on the IP. For example, there are strict rules on what kind of characters may be created in spinoff Mario games compared to mainline Mario games, despite them all being published by Nintendo. 

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