Video game industry IT full of challenges, user base concerns

The video game industry is the biggest entertainment sector in the world. For IT workers in video games, whether developers, security professionals, or others, that success means challenges and hard work.

Software development is going through changes, Chris Anley, a chief scientist with research firm NCC Group, told IT Brew, and the gaming industry is no different. Supply-chain issues plague software, and security is always top of mind. Meanwhile, a demanding user base wants top performance and seamless experiences.

“If you’re writing games, you’re trying to get the most performance out of the hardware you possibly can, you’re trying to provide the richest experience for your users,” Anley said.

No lagging. The user base is demanding. Fastly CTO Artur Bergman noted that’s a part of the incentives of the industry.

“Gamers are more technical and more verbal when things don’t work than most people,” Bergman said. “The patience for slow downloads and for any kind of errors is much lower.”

Slower download rates—a complaint his company encounters as part of providing software services for game developers—are of particular concern. People aren’t willing to wait around when downloading to play, and it’s a challenge that must be anticipated and dealt with.

And those traffic demands can be spiky, correlating to releases: “It behaves much more like a sports live event than it does normal traffic,” Bergman said. In September, Hollow Knight: Silksong crashed a number of digital storefronts, including Nintendo, PlayStation, Xbox, and Steam, due to demand.

AAA rated. Games are getting larger, especially when it comes to blockbusters, also known as AAA games. In addition to being heavy on the download side, they are particularly expensive to develop—2020’s Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War cost $700 million to make. The cost and time to produce new IP presents a risk as well; if a game isn’t financially successful, then the production is a sunk cost. Kevin Janzen, CEO of Globant’s gaming and ed. tech AI studio, told IT Brew that all adds to the pressure for staff, especially in the post-Covid sales landscape.

“There’s been this situation with so many companies having to rethink their plans, and so many others being acquired by larger studios that can’t afford the risk of making a game that doesn’t perform according to expectations, and that’s still not meaning bankruptcy,” Janzen said. “That has caused a state of uncertainty for the professional IT person.”

Cash concerns. Making production more cost-effective will help to reduce studio dependency on just one project, Janzen said. Consumers don’t buy as many new games, meaning that staying profitable often requires delivering new experiences and good gameplay within existing properties. In order to stay viable and profitable—and maybe to develop the next Fortnite—companies often turn to overworking their employees to keep up with competitors, often accelerating the demand during “crunch time” before a game goes to market. Janzen doesn’t feel that’s necessary, though.

“It’s not necessarily working harder or more hours, it’s trying to work more efficiently and trying to think, ‘How can we make sure that we have a good game that satisfies the expectation of consumers without necessarily increasing the expense of game development?’” Janzen said, adding, “It means to think differently and try to understand, how can we offset that risk?”