When I talk about a rock, tree, shrub, in our case I'm talking about photogrammetry pipelines. But maybe folk consider that generative AI at this point.

I mean of course it is, but a rock, in itself, is rarely the experience, as is a tree, a shrub etc. I don't want to speak for them but as an example, I think our environment artists are far more excited about building an environment that is the experience, than building solely rocks for six months.

..around 80-90 for production. That was very much about going slow and being agile until we really understood the system we were building, then we could press ahead with speed with a little more confidence.

I think we'd agree. Marginal gains in some places are not necessarily a solve for the practicalities and dynamics of others, but they can at least free up some capacity to allow more effort to be applied.

On The Finals the team ran with just 12-14 devs for almost two years before we ramped up to..

Content in our vocabulary is very specific to visual assets, not experiences, dynamics, gameplay, moments. This isn’t quite the contradiction it might initially seem like. Much of our ambition is to reduce some of the more mundane elements of production to free up more time for the experience.

..is still at the mercy of bad strategic decisions made by folk who don’t really understand the ecosystem they make their careers and live in.

And that’s not to say devs aren’t incredibly smart or don’t k ow what they’re doing, not at all. The issue is that knowledge and expertise is largely dependent in the realm of creativity, craft and production, not market dynamics, not player needs. So for all our skill, much of the game industry…

…break out successes are a result of luck, fortunate moments or fleeting changes in the games ecosystem and can’t be reproduced easily, but people try to copy anyway.

Only a fraction of success comes from understanding the state of play, making a plan and executing on it.