[...] Fuente: Nerfbat [...]

[...] MMO Lesson #1: Do not launch an unfinished product. [...]

[...] http://www.nerfbat.com/?p=201 [...]

Why don’t we plan better? Because game development is still more black-magic art than easily explainable science. When you start having to employ a few hundred people all working together on a creative endeavor, things don’t fit neatly into little org charts and Gantt charts. Beyond that, every group that sets out to do an online game thinks they know everything that the previous idiots that made previous games didn’t think of. But, once you’ve been through the meat grinder a few times, you do usually know better.

Pretty much any software development past a few hundred lines of code suffers from this. You plan, you do charts and flows, and outlines, and detailed specs, you even use Zed for the core stuff…but the specs are often a moving target and planning for that is not easy to say the least.
I’m not in the game / entertainment industry, I write software to test hardware and materials, but as I said, this problem exists in all facets of software development.

[...] MMO Development Lesson #1, more or less just said: Don’t launch before you are done, unless you have to, even though you’ll probably fail unless players can’t tell what’s a bug and what’s by design. Do things that you think are helpful, because then if your game fails, maybe you won’t feel so bad. [...]

Just thought that perspective might color my comment correctly

There are similar requirements in developing major websites: I worked for a number of media companies struggling to get to grips with the fact that developing sites wasn’t just putting up some pages with pictures, for web projects like Stars in their Eyes, Cold Feet, Coronation St; I worked for Page3.com briefly. Designing a good, user-retaining, non-retail, non-product website has some of the same risk. But they generally involve significantly less people.

Its not that games own fun, but fun owns games. Its incredibly difficult to project the “fun” factor of your project until you have significant components of it to work with. Single player games can generally tackle this by having a mockup, perhaps a single level. I think its much harder to do for most kinds of MMOs, and the risk of a major rescheduling of the project.

Take SWG – by the time it became clear that the “individual snowflake” approach to itemisation was going to be a real risk, it was already an embedded part of the design and implementation of most of the game.

What I’m describing is not an abandonment of PM, but based on 15 years of experience in the business/system/banking/military development disciplines fields and 4-5 years of gaming development, the need for a gaming-adapted form of PM.

From everything I’ve seen (experienced, read, heard, discussed at conferences) gaming has a lot of scope to shake off its garage-background an learn concepts from other discplines such as testing, automation *and* project management. Games without decent PM – such as WWII Online, Anarchy Online – and games which followed the rule book for another discipline too closely – Earth & Beyond, AC2 – prove that it needs something else. PM for banking is subtly – but critically – different than the PM that works for, say, a military contract.

Out of curiosity, what other kinds of project would you consider to have “fun” as their primary and critical component?

That’s not to say good project management has no place in MMO Development, but you can’t just lift if straight from, say, business systems development (although it might otherwise seem to share much in common). But the PM systems I’ve had experience with during my 15 years as a business/network systems developer seemed to lack the flexability required to deal with something with such an artsy primary characteristic on such a large scale. (Web development seems another close candidate until you look more closely)