Matt Webster, CEO of Star Wars: Galactic Racer developer Fuse Games (or, as we’re about to get to, oneof the developers) should be taking nothing but victory laps this month. He’s helped lead a team to release not just one of the best Star Wars video games of all time, but one of the best racing video games of all time, period.
Sadly, this is not (another) blog about how good this game is, but about how convoluted its development was, and how we’re once again being confronted by a scenario where the hundreds of people who worked on a successful video game are having their hard work obfuscated and downplayed.
In an interview with GI.biz–which states plainly that “Galactic Racer was made by a core team of 75″– Webster goes into surprisingly stark detail about the game’s “three tiers” of development, which yes included a core team working at Fuse in the UK, but also many, many other people working in the UK and worldwide. I’m going to post this entire section so you can read it in full:
What Fuse calls distributed development is split into three tiers, separated in terms of their distance from the core team. Furthest away is traditional outsourcing – involving the creation of art assets, and so on – which typically involves teams in “lower cost locations,” Webster says.
“You give a brief, you get an output back, and you integrate it in. Which sounds transactional, but you shouldn’t treat it as transactional. It’s very important that you build relationships with those folks, you get a better result when you do so.”
Slightly closer to the core team is what Fuse calls external development, which involves giving an outside group a self-contained piece of work. Webster gives the example of Galactic Racer’s photo mode, which was handed lock, stock, and barrel to an outside studio.
“It’s clear to brief, clear to point to a set of features, and you need a cross-discipline team to bring it together, so you need production, art, UI, and code to create that thing. But because we’re in Unreal, it can be self-contained. So someone can go off and build that, and we can slot it in.”
The closest tier to Fuse’s core team is co-development. “Those are people that are in our stand-ups, they’re in our Slack channels, they’re in our code base, they’re in all of our team stuff. They are, to all intents and purposes, an extension of our team. They just happen to work for another company.”
Those people all worked on the game, and where they worked, how long they worked or what exactly they contributed doesn’t matter. Galactic Racer was not made by “a core team of 75 people”. It was made, according to <a href="https://www.mobygames.com/game/251545/star-wars-galactic-racer/credits/windows/?ref=aftermath.site” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>Moby Games (so give or take a couple) by 1109 people, regardless of where they live or how long they worked on it.
Webster says this is an approach that allowed Fuse to “scale capacity and capability”, and even tries to pass it off as a structure that helps avoid the “personal impact to people” that comes with laying experienced, internal developers off whenever a team shrinks in size.
I’d say it helps entrench a permanent underclass of exposed third-party contractors and contracting companies, who are perpetual guns-for-hire at studios like Electric Square and Expression Games in the UK and Mindwalk and Original Force in China (all of whom worked on Galactic Racer), but that’s just me.
What’s really annoying here though is the post on GI.biz itself, which says “the most interesting story is the way the game was made, which, like the game itself, broke away from convention”. Like we’ve seen everywhere fromManor Lords toExpedition 33, there’s a bizarre tendency among both gamers and the media to latch onto these under-reported numbers as if they’re evidence of some kind of heroic feat. But as with those two games, and now this one, those numbers simply don’t add up, and to repeat them ad nauseam is grossly misrepresenting the realities of modern video game development.
Given this approach, where many of those external studios were only brought on for select tasks, I’m sure the 75 people at Fuse worked on the project for longer, but like, why even make that distinction? What is wrong with the video game industry where there’s this constant need to raise drawbridges and selectively focus the spotlight?
It’s weird!
I am once again asking you to respect people’s time and work
AftermathLuke Plunkett
