The Role of a Producer in games development - The good and the bad!

Game producers are essential in games development, especially at the AAA level, where studios have multiple departments with hundreds of staff. However, based on my experience, production can be both beneficial and detrimental, depending on how it's used. Here are my two cents on the job of a producer and where I think we can improve going forward.

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#producer #production #games #gamesproduction #stateoftheindustry

[kromozome]

A good producer fight to give you the most amount of time to deliver the best animation quality you can without crunching. A bad producer is making the company plan a priority and your schedule suffer for it. This is how we have bugged games and rushed released.

It’s an incredibly difficult position to be in but an animation producer needs to understand what it takes to create animation.

The more they know about it the more they can relate and justify the man cost of producing good content. It’s our job to make sure we educate our producer correctly

[Jacob_Ryfen]

Really good, to the point video! There's a serious lack of material on 'the other side' of making games, such as project management, production, directing. There's a lot of stuff on game designers/coders perspective, making it like the organizational part of the development is some marginal, obvious part of the work. Hope there will be more videos like this! Thanks!

[DeJayAnimation]

Thank you for sharing! It's always a pleasure watching your videos here on the channel.

[InwhatOffical]

As a Game Producer myself I appreciate your insight and take on the roles! I've always been told Producers are selfless roles.
"When we success the team successed, when we fail it's the producers fault." - My former Execuative Producer

[at_all_cost]

The Producer conundrum - giant backlogs with frequent interruptions. Being a Producer is a lot like watching someone walk a high wire, but you’re responsible if they fall and die.

[LittleNekoIchigo]

This was an incredibly interesting and informative watch, thank you for this!
I myself am a production person but in VFX, looking to potentially switch over into the games industry and trying to gather as much information as possible beforehand.
I was surprised to hear of the issues of production in games not understanding the departments. This is an essential part in VFX as well of course and we go through multiple roles (PA, Coordinator, Line Producer etc) before we even get to the Producer role. And through this we naturally learn an incredible amount about the pipeline and all the different departments. It would be very rare, or, I want to say close to impossible, to find a vfx producer that doesn't at least roughly understand the needs of every department.
And of course - understanding all the bits of the process makes my job a lot easier.
Not trying to say that the VFX production crew is perfect of course! We have our faults ;)
But I am curious to hear your thoughts - am I right in understanding that a Game Producer often starts with zero experience in the industry? Or are there any roles that come before a game producer? And I don't mean junior/associate game producer but an entirely different role comparable to a coordinator in VFX. I heard that sometimes production starts in QA testing (which I imagine would give them a good base understanding of how Game development works). And if so - do you think the Games industry would benefit from adding an additional production role before the Producer?
Anyways thanks for the great video!

[kennytrammell]

I think that this is a double edged sword in some cases. One of the things about a PM or Producer is that they need to be a "Swiss Army Knife" for the company. Maybe they don't need to be but from the perspective of executive management I would postulate that a Swiss army knife is better than a spoon. If an employee is designed to stir soup and you put them into a job where they are required to turn over the burgers you might have an issue.

In a perfect world (from the perspective of a DEV) it would certainly help to have a producer who is aware of the difficulty of a given task by way of experience. Typically though, in the real world players don't really get to pick their coach and there is a reason for that.

If I were (and I am not) an executive who made decisions regarding who to hire as a producer I would pick a candidate who was versatile over one who was specifically good at producing a single discipline. If I pick the person who was an animator to manage animation element of a project then the animators might be one of two things - upset because this producer keeps meddling in their business or happy because the producer understands their job and gives them more than enough time to complete those tasks which as a negative possible outcome can cause even more delays.

You eluded in the video that as things are produced on time more and more work piles on. That is true for any industry. The sweet spot is to add appropriate caveats and buffers so that your team ends up hero's instead of zero's. What I mean by that is forecasting should always be done with the understanding that things can and will go wrong and should be accounted for not by reaction but by being proactive. If you build space into your timeline and more goes right than wrong, you get to wear the hero hat and take on additional work.

The point is PM positions in any company and in any industry are less about knowing the specific technology than they are about having a GOOD philosophy for producing any "complex" product.

If you only ever hire specifically talented producers to manage particular arms of projects you will end up letting all of them go every time a project is complete or trying to figure out what to do with them. If you hire versatile well rounded individuals who can learn a rudimentary understanding of those things and have an excellent understanding of diplomacy, negotiation and facilitation you will eventually end up with an individual you can throw at any problem and expect a positive result.

I applaud your videos and find them valuable and insightful. This is just an alternative opinion. Thank you very much for doing these!

[quinc]

Thank you for sharing! I am actually in a similar situation recently and your explanation helps me understand more about what the producer are facing and trying to working things out.

So, when you are a game animator and if you ever were in a situation when you suddenly have no animation tasks due to the changes of the production plan, what would you do during that period?

[gibsonrick]

Great video, Harvey! Thank you for sharing your thoughts. You brought up the point that it can be tiring to explain what a department does to a producer and that having a producer that understands the department's processes makes for the best results. My question is what if a producer is either new to the job or new to the department and has, say, production experience in another field but has to get up to speed on the new department's role and processes. If that producer is trying to get up to speed quickly and meeting with other leadership within the department to learn about it, would that still be annoying? Wouldn't that be a good producer who is trying to understand the department's role so that they can best serve its people and advocate for them to upper management? I would think that a producer who needs to catch up on knowledge quickly and seeks out expertise to help them accomplish that would be viewed as a forward-leaning and conscientious producer. What are your thoughts? Thanks!