Why is BHG doing so well in their game development

TCO · May 18, 2002, 14:18

We have heard several times from BHG that they are very much ahead of schedule in their game development.

What I wonder is: How did they manage this wonderful result? Lets compare it to Civ3, CTP1 and 2, MOO3. None of these titles said that they were way ahead of schedule! And several really seemed to be behind schedule. Either they shipped late or they were buggy on shipment.

Now, Mark says that the reason for this difference is various problems that the other companies (Activision, Firaxis, and Quicksilver) had. Problems that were not the fault of the design companies. For instance, Firaxis had the Brian Reynolds defection. This is certainly one way of looking at things.

But I wonder if that is the best explanation. Maybe, BHG has been doing things right...and deserves some credit. Maybe it's not just a matter of different "luck" seperating these companies. Rather it is a difference in "skill". Perhaps, Firaxis should have done a better job of keeping Brian Reynolds happy. And perhaps, BHG deserves some credit for keeping their team intact.

Discuss...

Alex · May 18, 2002, 16:41

Interesting point.

I'll speculate that two factors possibly helped BHG in their development cycle. One: BR was already working on RoN before leaving Firaxis. I can easily imagine that BR wanted to try some RTS game and then Sid came and said "Brian, you're going to work on Civ3". And Brian decided to leave shortly thereafter, carrying with him some sketched form of the game.

Two: while BR was in Firaxis working on RoN, he used the Age of Empires engine to give form to his ideas. After he left Firaxis, he then called Microsoft and said: "hey, I've got this cool idea of a game that uses the Age of Empires engine, what do you think of publishing it?".

DISCLAIMER: all the possibilities above described are mere speculations that do not intend to reveal any truth about what really happened. Plus, my words are backed by nuclear weapons.

MarkG · May 18, 2002, 16:50

1) brian left 8 months after the official announcement of civ3. so the "shortly" part doesnt stand

2) a game engine is not something you can easily get your hands at, unless you're suggesting that brian was doing aoe scenarios

TCO · May 18, 2002, 16:51

makes sense.

Also, BR has some good combinations of talent. Both game design and programming (unlike Emrich).

From BR's bio

Highly regarded for his mastery of the art of programming, Reynolds' double specialty gives him the substantial advantage of being able to bring his own visions to life--and he has built a reputation for creating finely tuned strategy games. Moreover, as a founding partner of Firaxis Games, Brian developed extensive experience with the nuts and bolts of the entertainment software business and gained great insight into the unique challenges and opportunities facing an independent software development house. In 2000, Brian sold his stake in Firaxis to pursue his new dream: Big Huge Games.

tniem · May 18, 2002, 23:43

How bout a more realistic answer.

Civ 3 was announced 5/17/99 as Hasbro and Firaxis said they had an agreement to make the game. Realistically, the game started soon after this agreement and not before it because Firaxis would not have known if the agreement would go through.

In 2/00, BR leaves Firaxis to start his own game company. He takes with him members of the Firaxis team that had been working with him and Sid since their days at Microprose. Realistically, BR team that he was assembling began before February and Civ 3 work was probably disregarded. It did not happen over night.

Following this departure, many new hirings took place (Michael Breitkreutz, Soren Johnson, and Jacob Solomon 5/22/02 and Marc Hudgins, Dorian Newcomb, and Kevin Margo 6/5/2000). Plus there was the Jeff Briggs promotion to game designer some time that summer. Effectivel the game had to be restarted from there.

So that gives a timeline of the game's production from summer of 2000 to fall of 2001. Meanwhile, the publishing right's changed hands and they were looking for a quick buck. The game was behind schedule because they never had a realistic one. It was a year and a half for a game that should have taken a lot longer.

Meanwhile, BHG got founded in the spring of 2000. It is believed that they began the game immediately. Even if they had not exactly figured out what RTS game they were going to do, they wanted to do a RTS game. This would have allowed them to begin at least on the engine on the game.

By fall they had a contract with Microsoft. MS is a company with a lot of money. Said, as long as the game sells well and is good, you have a while to produce the game. They give them until Spring 2003.

So from the founding of the company in 2000 to release in 2003, BHG had by my calculation 3 years.

Now, of course a few things may be stretches. Such as Firaxis having to start over after the departure of BR and BHG starting near immediately on the game (after all they had the business stuff to work out). But even if BHG has only been working on the game 2 and a half years, that is a year more than Firaxis had on Civ 3. Without departures, of course BHG is going to have gotten further along.

It is a simple thing. Set a time table that gives some leway for bugs and unforseeable problems and there is a good chance you will meet the deadline. BHG working for a deep pocketed publisher like MS has had every opportunity to get this game right. That is why I think it will be good.

TCO · May 19, 2002, 00:14

If you are correct, what does that say about publishers? Is microsoft eing stupid or smart by giving so much time to the development? Why couldn't firaxis negotiate a deal the way BHG did? It was even more star-studded than BHG when it formed. And it had a couple games behind it. And why couldn't Firaxis keep Reynolds happy?

DanS · May 19, 2002, 01:30

"How did they manage this wonderful result?"

Judging from their website, they have 26 person team, compared to 34 at Firaxis. Assuming they are focusing those resources on one game, that is quite a large team. Firaxis has been all over the map with different projects and I would be surprised if they ever topped 16 or 18 on the development team for Civ 3 at any one time.

We can only speculate about how those resources came about. For all we know, BHG might have received less of a take of the action, while getting larger advances. Also, they may have been able to pipeline those resources differently on a real time game than is done on a turn-based game.

Further, we don't know what kind of publisher Microsoft is.

Lastly, I'm sure that they were happy to get out of developing Civ 2.5.

TCO · May 19, 2002, 23:05

I wish I could be a fly on the wall in BHG. I think there are some interesting lessons to be learned here. Markos is quick to defend and slow to accuse...

MarkG · May 20, 2002, 03:41

i act as i would like others to act towards me

have a little faith

ravagon · May 20, 2002, 05:22

Originally posted by MarkG
i act as i would like others to act towards me

You should learn to act unto others as a pre-emptive strike before they get the chance to act unto you

BHG being ahead of development at this stage doesn't necessarily mean a whole lot. Regarding content and implementation - there isn't a whole lot of data for comparison to other projects as they won't face exactly the same problems/concerns and not necessarily at the same time either. Give it until a few months before release date and we'll find out whether or not their "being ahead" at this stage counted for anything.

Actually we probably won't find out any such thing .. even then

TCO · May 20, 2002, 11:05

Originally posted by MarkG
i act as i would like others to act towards me

have a little faith

I'd rather have a little suspicion. I'm justified. It's only common sense, Mark.

Alex · May 20, 2002, 13:27

Originally posted by MarkG
1) brian left 8 months after the official announcement of civ3. so the "shortly" part doesnt stand

2) a game engine is not something you can easily get your hands at, unless you're suggesting that brian was doing aoe scenarios

Hmrf... no jokes allowed anymore?

We know the reasons I posted were not real. But it would be funny if...

Bleyn · May 21, 2002, 05:15

Originally posted by GP
If you are correct, what does that say about publishers? Is microsoft eing stupid or smart by giving so much time to the development? Why couldn't firaxis negotiate a deal the way BHG did? It was even more star-studded than BHG when it formed. And it had a couple games behind it. And why couldn't Firaxis keep Reynolds happy?

Well, one likely part of the picture is the factor that MicroSquish has huge reserves of moola. Compared to the amount of money they probably spend on developing their core products, ie. Windows, Office, and the like, their budget for their computer game division is probably a fairly small piece of the pie. So, they can probably afford to give the developers they are working with a fair amount of time to get a game out in.

On the Firaxis end of things, I suspect the deal they originally negotiated was as good as the MS/BHG deal and the release date that they ended up with was probably in the ballpark with the one they probably agreed to with Hasbro at the very begining. Which would have been reasonable, if they hadn't lost the BHG group.

Very likely, when they had lost that large part of their development team, and Infogrames bought out Hasbro, Infogrames would have been more interested in recouping the costs of the buy-out than in giving Firaxis extra time, and made them stick to their original scheduale or something close to it. They probably won't admit something like that happened, but it probably did.

As to why Firaxis couldn't hold onto Brian, well lets see, these are only guesses and specualtion but:
1. Brian obviously really wanted to do an RTS.
2. At the time he left, Firaxis was already commited to doing Civ3, which had to be a TBS 4x game, and still working on trying to get something workable out of the Dinosaurs concept IIRC.
3. For a small development house to be working on three games, especially when the third game would be taking most if not all of the time of a lead designer/programmer strongly needed on game number one would have been a real stretch.
4. Brian probably knew that it would be quite a long time before he had a chance to do an RTS if he stuck it out at Firaxis, considering that Civ3 at least would have to finish development first, if not Civ3 and game number two (which would probably still have been switched from Dinosaurs to SimGolf irrespective of Brians presence or absence from the company). So, if he had been there still, he would have really gotten rolling on an RTS game sometime this year.

All of these things considered, I'm not sure if Firaxis really had much of a chance to keep Brian once they commited to Civ3 and he decided he was truely more interested in doing an RTS.

TCO · May 21, 2002, 08:49

Bleyn, but he was a partner with Sid. He would have been involved in the discussions to take the Civ3 project. It doesn't all add up your way...

WarpStorm · May 21, 2002, 09:44

Why can't I delete messages?

MarkG · May 21, 2002, 09:58

BR wanted to do Civ3 as an RTS

i highly doubt Brian would want to make an rts called "civilization 3"...

DanS · May 21, 2002, 13:32

Could somebody with a less simple mind than mine explain what GP is implying?

Peter Triggs · May 21, 2002, 14:00

Maybe the guys who left just wanted to set up their own company and be their own bosses. It's happened before.

TCO · May 21, 2002, 15:15

I'm just implying that there might be valuable lessons to learn in looking at why RON is ahead of schedule. Mark is getting defensive at the implied slight of Firaxis and QS. But I think its better not to be defensive, rather to look at these types of situations and see what one can learn...

MarkG · May 21, 2002, 15:23

i'm not defending anyone. i'm simply trying to find logical answers to the questions instead of taking the easy path and imply incompetence

DanS · May 21, 2002, 17:35

"I'm just implying that there might be valuable lessons to learn in looking at why RON is ahead of schedule."

It appears that you're implying something a little more personal. Care to elaborate?

WarpStorm · May 21, 2002, 19:45

Why are they so successful? Time, money, and talent. They have the luxury of time; they aren't trying to rush it out on a too tight, arbitrary schedule. They have the luxury of money, they had enough funds to keep their company going for quite a few months before lining up a deal with Microsoft. Microsoft does have deep pockets and will give a sure fire hit product the time it needs to be polished. Time and Money. As for talent, we are talking about the people who made Civ2 and SMAC.

TCO · May 22, 2002, 00:27

You have one entity that is successful in a fahsione serveral others are not. One possibility is incompotence, sure. Another is different levels of compotence. Another is different business practicses or organization/design control which others would do well to learn from...

Capt Dizle · May 22, 2002, 01:16

BHG hasn't done anything yet. Period.

DanS · May 22, 2002, 02:10

Yeh, I think it's hard to start writing the business case just yet, don't you think GP? Firaxis has a couple of solid doubles under its belt (Gettysburg & SimGolf). Others liked SMAC and it sold well. And Civ 3 isn't a bad game, although it really isn't fun for me (yet). They were merciful in killing Dinos when it wasn't showing enough promise. The only real failure I can remember is Antietam--do they even make those games anymore?

Overall, Firaxis is a resilient company that is making good games and lots of people good cash money.

With RON, we might have a fun game, but maybe not.

MarkG · May 22, 2002, 03:48

The only real failure I can remember is Antietam--do they even make those games anymore?

actually, the made a collection of the two games, which according to jeff morris in the last chat has gone very well

WarpStorm · May 22, 2002, 07:01

Most of the work on Antietam was done by Breakaway Games, not Firaxis. If memory serves, one of the leads on Antietam was Joe Balkoski, who now works for BHG. Antietam may not have sold all that well, but it was highly praised in the wargaming community and the magazines. That is one of the problems with doing a niche title.

DanS · May 22, 2002, 09:43

When I bought Antietam it was fairly buggy and was only available on the web site (got a signed copy, no less). If Antietam was successful in its direct sales, I'm guessing that Firaxis would have turned into Microprose...

"the made a collection of the two games, which according to jeff morris in the last chat has gone very well"

If so, has Firaxis ever had a true dud? I can't think of one. GP?

TCO · May 22, 2002, 12:38

Originally posted by jimmytrick
BHG hasn't done anything yet. Period.

Good point. I am agreeably trying to look a little forward...and am reading things into a single data point. Since we don't get much official scoop from the gaming companies alot of our development discussions are hypothesis-rich and data-poor. Still fun to try to analyze this stuff and learn some lessons.

TCO · May 22, 2002, 12:46

Originally posted by DanS
When I bought Antietam it was fairly buggy and was only available on the web site (got a signed copy, no less). If Antietam was successful in its direct sales, I'm guessing that Firaxis would have turned into Microprose...

"the made a collection of the two games, which according to jeff morris in the last chat has gone very well"

If so, has Firaxis ever had a true dud? I can't think of one. GP?

Firaxis has done ok...They've gotten stuff out of the door and seem to be maing money. I don't think they've had a true hit, though. And some birthing pains have been evident.

I've got a good feeling about RON. Firaxis probably should have let Brian make this game, in house.

I take the "did extremely well" with a shaker of salt. Firaxis has been rather political in terms of what they share with us. I sense that they would be hesitant to be frank about dissapointments. Regardless, I think Antietam was a more minor project.