The video game industry is often compared to the movie industry, and they especially like to talk about where the profits are. You can draw another parallel between them by comparing them “by race”. Anyone knows that the vast majority of box-office films are created in Hollywood, and Oscar is the most prestigious film award. Similarly, you can see how great is the value of western gamedev: from the good old Doom to World of Warcraft and Minecraft, EVE Online and the Fallout series - thousands of the most famous games were created in the West, and most of them - in the United States. Of course, there are Asian MMORPGs - Lineage and Perfect World, Japanese JRPG and series from Final Fantasy to Dark Souls, and games from the CIS from IL-2: Assault and Allods Online to Mohr: Utopia and STALKER But Western games are still orders of magnitude more.

This article is not about the apparent significance of Western gamedev, but about how it appears after Russian gamedev; or, more precisely, about the author’s personal impressions of working closely with Obsidian and The Workshop Entertainment and meeting many other developers, such as Raven Software or Robotoki, as well as stories from local developers about the overall situation in the industry.

Let's start with the ideological part

The first and most obvious: the overwhelming importance of client and console games. In our game developer, many people have never worked on client (and console console) projects, but developers of mobile, browser and social games are more than enough. In the West, the situation is essentially the opposite. Although, of course, all the platforms are presented, but if you ask an industry veteran with 10+ years of service about a list of projects, most would call a lot of client projects and less - all other platforms. The reasons for this difference are fairly obvious and are easily derived from the age of the industry, economic factors, the size of the audience and the industry itself. And assumptions about how such a ratio could be changed in Russia would require a separate article.



One of the most striking, but less obvious differences is the view that constitutes the basis of the game. If in Russia in large companies, many developers immediately answer: “gameplay”, then in the West you can hear the “game experience” more often - the game experience. How is experience different from gameplay? You can express it like this: gameplay is the “work” of the player’s avatar in the game world, and experience is his “life”. It includes storyline, surroundings, sound, references to pop culture, emotional mood, and much more, and it is considered normal to sometimes sacrifice the depth of gameplay for the sake of the experience being transmitted. Of course, in the CIS there are, for example, projects from Ice-Pick Lodge - therefore, there is more a question about the percentage of developers who put experience above the gameplay. In face-to-face communication, such a simplified sequence is usually expressed: the Japanese put the most experience on the gameplay, then the countries of the West, then Russia and least of all China and Korea. The examples that caused this attitude are obvious (the author also watched for hours of cut scenes and hid for half an hour under the beds in the Metal Gear Solid series).



This difference implies a more respected role of scriptwriters in almost all studios, and more often the screenwriter can “take over” the game designer, and not just follow the principle “think up quests and mob names for a location that we have designed here.” This also leads to a developed institute of “visionary”, where a creative director (or a similar employee in the post) should first of all not even write designs himself, but look through all the suggestions of other game designers for their conformity with the vision of the game - and spread this very vision. However, it is quite common in our country.

The Role of Game Designer

Speaking of game designers, one can even notice a lot of similarities in Russia and in the West - therefore the differences are more in the details and "percentages". In Russia, more game designers have a technical education or, for example, experience working as programmers than in the West — and there, on the contrary, you can more often meet a formal education in game design. Of course, the point here is that game design training programs in Russia have appeared recently: for example, in 2014, the first state program of professional retraining in the gaming industry, “ Internet game management projects ”, was launched at the Higher School of Business Informatics , where I, by the way, teach “Technical Basics of Development” and “Project Documentation in Game Design.”

Another funny difference between Western game designers is that among them you can often find authors of books or scripts for the cinema, which is noticeably less common in our country.

Programmers

If you look at the opposite of game designers - programmers, then the situation is more interesting. According to the sudden opinion of the author of these lines, the “median” qualification of programmers in Russian game devs is higher than in US game devs. Why? First of all, we have game dev - a highly paid career path for a programmer. In the United States, besides the absolute leaders of the industry, payment is significantly inferior to that in industry, in enterprise-development of non-game software, or, say, in private space companies. Therefore, programmers are often “easier” to go into game devs, or because of their passion for games, and not for the sake of professional growth. In addition, in Russia many companies initially formed the “correct” ideologically development - and the principles of “100% test coverage”, “a clear, mandatory code review process”, etc. were adopted.

Producers

The answer about “test engineers” is a part of another noticeable difference: noticeably greater specialization of employees, at least in completed studios (the article as a whole is about them, not about start-ups). There are possible “a programmer who only writes tests”, “a game designer who sets up motion physics 100% of the time - and nothing more”, “a lighting designer”, etc. On the one hand, this contributes to greater qualification at the level of specific tasks, on the other hand, it complicates team-to-team interaction, overall employee development, and development organization.

As a result, there is a much more advanced production institute, where each team has a producer, whose tasks include managing the working time of employees, drawing up reports, setting priorities and interacting with other teams. Often, a senior programmer cannot, for example, set a task to another programmer directly or adjust the priorities of his tasks — he needs to do this through a producer. At the same time, there is a leader in the team, who mainly deals with technical management in terms of the quality of task execution and makes strategic decisions. That is, for example, the lead can decide on which technology to make the browser built into the game, and evaluate the implementation later, but the task will be set and will be monitored by the producer of the programmer’s team. In addition to the producers of the teams,

Process automation

This “producer-oriented process” is often combined with low automation (or lack thereof) of working time accounting at the software level — at the process tracking level exclusively with the help of kanban leaflets and producers notebooks. However, this is more characteristic of the “old” studios, where the process of “developing with a human face” has been formed historically and was supported by publishers who mostly accepted the versions, rather than tracked in detail the work of the employees.

A similar “historical” phenomenon can be called the popularity of the version control system Perforce, which is not widely spread in the Russian Federation. Many publishers demanded to use this system in the USA - and it became a kind of standard in game dev.

Testing and optimization

However, there is a much more interesting and pleasant historical phenomenon - frequent team playtests (usually daily), where the whole team plays its project and leaves comments on the results of each one - both on the gameplay, on their own general impressions, and on the errors found. Here is the exact opposite of high specialization in the work: opinions are accepted and reviewed from all. In a similar way, game designers and technical executives are invited to every new feature development meeting.

Version testing is often quite weak, since the calculation is based on the fact that the publisher will carry out the “technical” acceptance of the version. This leads to the position "we will make a great game with the whole team, it is our responsibility, and then the publisher will study the bugs and optimization and issue a list of correction requirements." If in Russia the QA-department often gives an assessment of both the version as a whole, and the “quality” of the gameplay and offers options for changes to developers, in the US most of it - or all of it - is usually occupied by monkey testing.

As for optimization, it differs markedly from the RF: a lot of effort is put into improving quality and speed in medium and high-end configurations, and owners of weak configs (usually using the expression “wooden PCs” or “toasters” as an analogue of the Russian “calculators”) are simply cut off minimum system requirements. Here again, the reason is another average PC performance and audience income.

About money

The question of audience revenue leads to the topic of business models. Although in recent years the personal attitude towards F2P monetization among game designers has noticeably improved (often due to experience with titles that have switched to F2P models some time after the start), it remains cautious. It is considered to be far more harmful to reputation for selling “money for money” than, for example, releasing a promiscuous version with less than 10% of full content to paid early access (in Russia the situation is largely reversed).

In general, such differences can be found at most stages of both the design study of the game and the production of features and content - however, it is quite easy to understand them, and there is still no radical difference. Once in a western studio, it’s not so difficult to figure out what is happening at all; rather, it’s a lot of small changes in development than a completely different approach. Therefore, mutual understanding between Russian and Western game devs is really - and not very difficult.

Summing up the brief excursion into western game development, you can see that most of the differences cannot be assessed as a definite plus or minus of the Russian or western approach “generally” - rather, they are shaped by historical reasons and types of games developed, as well as by different audience of players. This difference is another factor explaining why some genres and business models of games are made in Russia, and others in the West, in addition to audience income, the prevalence of consoles, the level of competition, industry volume and other “statistical” differences. Perhaps Russian developers who are oriented towards the Western market can adopt a number of Western solutions in game development and try to combine the best of both approaches.

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Thanks for attention! I remind you that this article is entirely based on the personal experience of the author, so readers may doubt the correctness of a number of comparisons - as they say, your mileage may vary. I will be glad to discuss the article, the description of the readers' own experience and comments in general.