Thoughts on Game Development Culture
Stardock Forums
Happy New Year, everyone!
I've been working on a project in my spare time called the Game Outcomes Project. I wouldn't normally talk about my extracurricular projects on this blog, but this one is important, because it relates directly to our studio and our values.
It relates to a topic I'm intensely curious about: game development culture, and what makes game teams effective.
I post this here because we'll be talking about our studio's values later this year, and this study helps put what we're going to be talking about in context.
Over the 20 years I've been in the industry -- and the few years I spent studying management and organizational behavior at Wharton School for my MSE degree (especially under Professor Adam Grant) -- I've seen enormous differences between game studios, and I've been amazed by the extent to which the internal culture of a game studio has an impact on the success or failure of those studios and the individual game projects they worked on.
I hope you enjoy reading the article. A lot of this has had a direct impact on Mothership's values and the studio that it is today, and hopefully, on what it will be in the future.
-Paul Tozour