Work-from-anywhere and distributed teams inherently come with the challenge of collaborating across multiple time zones and dealing with different regional customs and holidays. In this new normal, modern, flexible tools will be an absolute necessity to facilitate and promote collaborative planning, both within teams and across teams of teams.ĭevelopment and marketing working on the same new season game mode 2) Working across regions and time zones
These studio meetups should be held for a long enough duration for people to get to know one another truly and for studio leadership to correctly set high-level objectives for the next extended period of remote work. Moving forward, the ideal situation will be a hybrid studio, where game developers can work-from-anywhere, but the entire studio, or at least some teams, gets together on a regular - possibly quarterly - basis. The trust and accountability necessary for an autonomous team to be successful are much easier to develop face-to-face.
Trust and accountability - It’s challenging to build strong relationships online. Creativity - Being together is good for creative collaboration unless the team is already accustomed to online collaboration. There can, of course, be disadvantages to a fully remote and distributed studio. There also might be family situations that simply prevent people from moving. Some of the best talent might want to work on a boat in the Caribbean or a forest in Sweden. Many people don’t want to be in high-cost parts of the world. Team members can live wherever they choose. Access to talent - With a remote and distributed studio staff, the best talent is much easier to recruit and retain regardless of geographic location. Lower costs - Lower overhead with smaller or no physical studio space, along with all of the other related physical location costs, are only some of the many evident and significant cost savings. Small cross-functional teams, given clear goals and objectives, are simply more effective and are particularly adept at delivering the relatively small and frequent content drops necessary to keep players engaged. Autonomous teams - Done right, autonomous teams are more creative, productive, and happier. They’ve also discovered there are significant advantages to team members working-from-anywhere. Studios have learned what works and what doesn’t and adapted accordingly. While there have been many hurdles to overcome, overall, the worldwide forced move to remote has been a tremendous success. Of course, COVID-19 accelerated this transformation to the extreme for virtually all studios. The combination of improved online collaboration technologies and more agile autonomous teams had already enabled studios like Unknown Worlds to be entirely remote and distributed. 1) Working distributed from anywhere in the post-covid new normalīefore the pandemic, the move towards working-from-anywhere was already happening. However, thanks to our combined decades of experience with game studios worldwide, we can foresee and offer pragmatic solutions to what we consider to be the top five most likely challenges. There are more questions than answers, and only the future will tell where it’s all headed. And, just as important, how can already overburdened game developers as a whole meet these new challenges without team burnout due to constant crunch?. How can game studio leadership manage distributed teams potentially working from anywhere, even across multiple time zones?. How can game developers keep up with the content demands when players expect frequent and continuous releases?. While still to be determined, it’s clear that some variation of hybrid of co-located and remote will be the reality for most studios. In turn, game studio leadership has the parallel challenges arising from a post-pandemic new normal. The focus on always online, live service games and the ever-increasing player demand for more and more content, and a continuous stream of “something new” to experience has created an extremely difficult environment for game developers. The game industry’s success has upped the ante on market expectations.
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