*Planted: 25 April 2025 | Last Tended: 1 May 2025 #todevelop In my time in the industry to date since the late 1990s, I've observed what I think are three generations of game developers. ##### First Generation: The Cowboys This is the 1980s and into the 1990s, maybe ending in the early 2000s. These are the first video games and include the big blockbuster first person shooters of the 90s -- *DOOM*, *Quake*, *Wolfenstein 3D*, and more -- as well as things like the earliest Sid Meier games. The very first online MMOs, like Ultima Online, also began in this era. Nearly all of these were [[🌱 How much “process” is the right amount of process?|auteur-driven games with small teams and little process]]. Most of these developers were figuring out how to even make games at all, never mind make games for an intended marketing segment. They were making games they themselves wanted to play. There was no established process for making games and every developer was figuring it out for themselves. The metric for measuring the success of the game was almost always just, "is it fun?" While the game problems at that time still loomed large because of the newness of the media and technology, compared to games today the mechanic design space was, in general, smaller (with ambitious games like *Ultima Online* being outside the norm). ##### Second Generation: Rise of the Indies Starting around the early 2000s we began to see the rise of indie games. As the industry as a whole began to formalize around bigger developers and publishers, indie developers were going back to the first generation experience: developing niche games either on their own or with a tiny team, usually just doing it in their spare time. Indie developers were a bit like the auteurs of the first generation. ##### Third Generation: Formalized Game Development emerges Around the 2010-2015 era we start to see much more [[🌱 How much “process” is the right amount of process?|process]] emerge in game development. Game development houses get much bigger (example: UbiSoft roughly 800-person team on the *Assassin's Creed* games) and the need for a producer role emerges -- they were no longer only needed to get games published, but they were now needed to wrangle the day-to-day development of getting a game made because of the increase in complexity. Developers begin to take cues from tech companies like Microsoft where process already existed for software development, and games begin getting treated, logistically, as a software deliverable instead of a creative output. The rise of Games as a Service and Free to Play are big during this era, as are a strong emphasis on market fit and metric-based outcomes. Third Generation developers don't necessarily have to have worked for these large companies to feel aligned with this group -- but they are young enough to perceive the process-driven tech companies like Microsoft as the dominant model for shipping a piece of software. *** These three groups exist in a very short timeline of about 35 years, which means that there are developers who came up as young adult developers during the First Generation working alongside younger developers who've been working in the Third Generation. I often perceive a tension between these two groups in how they believe that successful games are made and shipped. The perceptions I have are not "good" or "bad" judgements but simply an observation about where their comforts and discomforts lie and what effect that's had on the make-up of game development companies. The First Generation is much more comfortable with [[🌱 Bounded ambiguity is a natural part of building something new|ambiguity]] and a lack of process in game development -- possibly to their detriment -- while the Third Generation is distinctly uncomfortable with ambiguity and craves process as the solution to it. While the First Generation is more likely to see pivots as either the necessary result of learning and making at the same time, Third Generation developers are harder on themselves as a group, seeing pivots as failings due to processes they didn't follow, or assuming that a pivot that might have come from learning new information is actually because they made a mistake that didn't give them that information in the first place (even if they wouldn't have known it without doing exploration). Third Generation developers tend to view process as the guarantor of success, and that resulting pivots or a failure in a game's success mean the process is flawed -- for them, process comes first, and fun follows if the process was designed right. First Generation developers tend to see process as a last resort, going for fun first and process only if that fails to produce results in shipping the fun. In my experience working with them, First Generation developers seem to have a high affinity for [[🌿 Qualitative measures of done]] -- which correlates to their relative comfort with ambiguity when compared to Third Generation developers. Third Generation developers, on the other hand, have a much higher affinity for [[🌿 Quantitative measures of done]] and [[🌱 Fun-based outcomes and metrics-based outcomes|metrics-based outcomes]]. This seems to me to correlate to the rise of Games as a Service (GaaS) and Free to Play games (F2P) during their working era, where metrics was the only relevant measure of success. Games were no longer being made primarily as quasi-art or an expression of a game that the developers wanted to play and could therefore measure subjectively; instead, games became a commodity with target audiences and relevant statistics in the form of things like Daily Active Users (DAU) and Average Revenue Per Daily User (ARPDAU). In my experience working with Third Generation developers, [[🌿 Qualitative measures of done]] can appear too ambiguous and hand-wavy to measure an outcome against and they want a more measurable success metric when structuring work. *To develop:* - For now this is just a mini-essay on my hunches and observations. But I bet I could go and research this and add weight to it or negate my information and turn it into something more meaty. - Pull in learnings from source note: [[Conversation with colleagues - 1 May 2025]]