Rockstar has announced a partnership with Sydney's Team Bondi to publish L.A Noire, an open-ended interactive detective game set in the late 1940's. The press release is as follows..
Rockstar Games, the world-renowned publishing label of Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. (NASDAQ: TTWO), is pleased to announce a partnership with Team Bondi Pty Ltd to publish the ground-breaking next generation crime thriller L.A. Noire. Developed by Team Bondi, a new Australian based studio founded by Brendan McNamara, of The Getaway, L.A Noire is an interactive detective story set in the classic noir period of the late 1940's. L.A. Noire blends action, detection and complex storytelling and draws players into an open-ended challenge to solve a series of gruesome murders. Set in a perfectly recreated Los Angeles before freeways, with a post-war backdrop of corruption, drugs and jazz, L.A. Noire will truly blend cinema and gaming.Sam Houser of Rockstar Games serves as Executive Producer and Brendan McNamara as Director of Development for L.A. Noire.
"Brendan and I have known each other for a long time, and to finally have the opportunity to work together on a game is exciting," said Sam Houser, Founder of Rockstar Games. "The longstanding mutual respect and the combined experience between the two of us make this a great partnership," added Brendan McNamara, CEO of Team Bondi.
L.A. Noire is a next-generation title and will be published by Rockstar Games. The official trailer will be released October 5th at www.rockstargames.com/lanoire
You can download the (very brief) teaser trailer here, while the full trailer is promised on the 8th of October.
Interesting that Sony America dropped Team Bondi's game, they were initially the publisher for the game. Anyone know anything about what happened and why Team Bondi switched to Rockstar?
Yes - missed milestones and people leaving. Sound familiar?
hmm. But its ok. Its original IP isn't it? So everyone will be rushing to invest, right?
Being positive as usual Grover... :P
I (for one), am looking forward to the full trailer. I know the game has been in development for a while, and what to see what the results are.
seems like a pretty weak concept.. trying to be a bit like godfather.. The only way i can see it doing any good is if it sets a bench mark in graphics and story telling. I'll wait for the trailer before judging though.. is it true grover that people had left bondi and there was missed milestones? It's interesting how many studios miss milestones.. is it over ambitious goals for a time frame.. or a lack of passion and professionalism for meeting the milestone goals? I think it's probably both of those and bad management.. on the part of development studios today
Its a very similar story - and yes I know of the circumstances of quite a few whom left. And it wasnt very nice to be honest, which is a pity because I had previously had quite a bit of respect for projects organised by Brendan Mcmanara (sp?) . I guess its possible that he doesnt really have much control over various HR issues that occurred.
Btw - when was the last time you actually heard about milestones being missed. Ask around, it happens _alot_ in Aus. This isnt negative, this is reality, if you dont like reality, close your eyes and ears then.
Either way, its good to see an original IP being developed in AU, its been awhile. When was the last time, Destroy all humans i think? (could be forgetting something)
Edit - thats if you consider DOH original IP since its from the movie, i still say its original anyway.
I don't remember a Destroy All Humans movie, unless you meant some other game or some other movie, like: Mars Attacks... ?
yeah smarty pants thats what i meant
You get the feeling that anything that Rockstar is associated with these days gets that extra bit of scrutiny and criticism from many conservative groups and politicians, and while it is said that any publiscity is good publicity, I do hope that L.A Noire fares better than the flak that "Bully" (or "Canis Cadem Edit" as it's known now) received even prior to any release of information on what the game actually involved.
I'm sure when those groups read "Rockstar" along with "complex storytelling", "gruesome murders", and "corruption, drugs and jazz", their conservative alarm bells are ringing.
I work for a developer overseas and we rarely miss milestones.. overseas developers get the impression also that in australia the teams are a bit laid back and don't work long hours etc.. I remember when I worked in melbourne for a developer that the hours were very often 9 - 5.. hardly anyone worked past 5.. overseas.. almost everyone is working past 5 and sometimes weekends. Also the resources and teams are much bigger overseas to be able to handle meeting milestone objectives. I find in the states the mentality towards work is a lot different to australia.. bigger emphasis on earning money and working hard in the states than aus.
I work for a local developer and we rarely miss milestones. Missed milestones are not due to people not working stupidly long hours, they're due to unrealistic and inaccurate scheduling.
I lot of the problems I see in local industry (damn, I sould like Grover now) are caused at the higher level. Producers and execs that don't have experience in games production and trying to get too much from too little.
sould == sound. I wish there was an edit on this thing...
So, to the best of my knowledge, Rockstar hasn't published any titles from external developers before, does this mean rockstar has bought team bondi?
actually my mistake, State of Emergency was external i believe
I can't remember missing any milestones :P
Rockstar was publishing a game from Ratbag, they both dumped each other from what I hear. Also Rockstar is Ubisoft so, in reality its Ubisoft publishing LAN, in the same manner it is Vivendi publishing Spyro for Krome and not Sierra. Rockstar would bring this game in more $$.
Zax is right, milestones should not be missed if management has their act together. The developers themselves can not and should not be blamed for missed milestones, The developers here work just as hard and are just as passionate about their games as the OS guys. The management in general (there are always exceptions) just don't have the same amount of experience as the US/EU counterparts, and this shows by missed milestones and poorly run teams.
Take2 own Rockstar, not Ubi.
Your completely right... What made me say Ubi?
" The developers themselves can not and should not be blamed for missed milestones"
What if the milestone is based on the developers original estimate of how long the work will take?
If the management is not listening to the developers time estimates, then they should take whats coming to them,
however if the dev staff consitently underestimate the time involved, the management should still accept the blame?
In that situation the Leads and the Producers are not doing their jobs. A junior programmer shouldn't be expected to give a 100(percent) accurate estimate - their Lead will have a better idea of how long a task will take for them, add 50(percent), and then pass that on to the Producer.
If dev staff consistenly underestimate the time involved then the Leads need to adjust accordingly and feed that back to the dev staff. If Leads are getting the times wrong then the Producer needs to adjust feed back to them. If the Producer is messing up then upper management needs to feed that back. So, yeah, ultimately, management is responsible. If anyone in the chain of command can't do what they are supposed to do then they should be replaced with someone who can.
classic :) I soooo love the "we never missed any milestones". warms my heart :) Tetris titles rarely miss their milestones.. though... Try hitting a next-gen milestone thats the challenge these days :) Even previous gen console milestones arent often met here in the land of Oz. "Rockstar was publishing a game from Ratbag, they both dumped each other from what I hear. " bzzt... wrong, but from some peoples perspective you'll hear that. In fact thats the only version you'll hear, because you dont get to talk to the Rockstar execs :) You ought to... youd probably be surprised by what they say ;)
Developer centric mentailities.. everything is not our fault, its the publisher, erverything is not within our control its the publisher, the publisher tries to put too many features in, the publisher wants to be ready by Xmas, the publisher this.. the publisher that... Im sorry, but even as a devhouse in a publishing group, your bosses sign contracts for features, based on designs and schedules layed out by the people in the development team. If they cant accurately manage those things, it aint the publishers fault. As Lubby and Zax point out its the people submitting these contracts that generally cause all the problems, through lack of exp, or lack of understanding, or trying to land the contract on a 'cheaper' schedule (this one is most common - because game companies here arent exactly being innundated with projects ;) ). Nothing much a lower level employee can do - and then when things do go wrong, its usually the lower employees that get the blame, due to poor decisions. Pity.. but hey.. like I said.. just pointing out the realities of Aus dev.
You can't just lump it all on Aus Dev. Look at Team Bondi. *IF* the rumours are true and milestones have been missed, is this indicative of Australian development? Sure Brendan is an Aussie, but he's done most of his work overseas. And most of his staff here are not Australian.
Missed milestones are a problem worldwide in the games industry. I had a friend that left an Autralian games company to work for Rockstar Vienna because it was 'safer'. That company shut down mere weeks after the company he left in Australia got shut down.
Its a volatile industry and inexperience results in failure (more often than not). Being an Aus dev makes no difference in that respect.
Oh yeah. Ratbag got dumped by Rockstar after being dumped by Sony. Sound familiar?
I have worked for three local companies, one went out of business, the other two are still around.
Out of the two that are still active one had a capacity to miss milestones the other didn't. The one that missed milestones was majorly due to poor management, they had no producers, designers and no communication between the artist, programmer and QA teams for most of the project, and even lack of communication between the programmer team developing different modules. To be honest though I think everyone on the project knew it was a issue, and the company in question now has producers and designers on every project coming out of the company, and although there is still quite a bit of overtime (we were working every public holiday and weekend for a while there for the 2 projects I worked on while I was there) they are making significant inroads into making work hours more realistic through smarter working practices.
I think its not down to how much overtime people do, I think its just coming down to only having to do overtime when it's needed and just being smart about how you work to reduce that time.
There are various reasons a developer may miss milestones:
1/ Disagreement between publisher & developer: This is actually quite common, and can be a delaying tactic by the publisher when paying for milestone completion. It should be noted that the majority of developer payments (that I have seen anyway) are completely tied to the publisher officially green-lighting a milestone.
2/ Developer underestimated the work involve: Also fairly common. I pin this more on management staff (or lack of), rather than developers. It helps a lot when your management staff ARE developers, so they have some rough idea of whether the dates the programmer/artists are providing are BS (or realisitic).
3/ Developers slacking off: Note that this is *different* from 2 (above). One is related to a bad time estimate, the other to either lazy employees, bad company atmosphere (employees not turning up, etc..). Apart from predictable periods of slacking off (i.e. after a big project), I have never seen this occur at any of the 5 different developers I have worked for. If there is a conception that a missed milestone is due to employees slacking off, its completely wrong.
Another thing that *must* be realised - milestones are almost never set in stone. They often vary - either by delivery date or by content included. A good management team within a developer will always be in discussion with their counterparts at the publisher about upcoming milestones. Even when milestones form part of legal contracts, there can be clauses that allow them to be modified.
Missed milestones can also reflect badly on publishers - depending on the nature of the product. It is true (and fairly obvious) that more ambitious, next-gen projects are more likely to miss milestones than current-gen, simple titles. But that is all part of the risk of next-gen development.
This is the way I see it (within my company anyway).
CEO and head honchos make a deal with little to no feedback from developers. Even worse extra features will sometimes be added in with no budget increase or extra time. I put this down to weak upper managers and good publisher negotiators. And possibly because OZ companies really need that deal signed to stay in business.
Producers and middle managers make no objection or raise any issue as they want to improve their position in the company. They will instead turn their focus on developers - cracking the whip so to speak.
Developers complain to producers, but it falls on deaf ears, or admit its unrealistic but "what can we do about it?"
Final product is rushed, sub-quality, buggy. Developers cop any negative feedback from publishers, managers, gamers. The question remains "what can we do about it?".
Not be so nepitistic when hiring Producers? Actually hiring people who have the experience to do the job, rather than an old buddy from a previous studio...
I will just swing this full circle. There are many development studios in Australia that have good management and good teams.. Putting most AU development teams in the crap box because of a select few is a bad thing. Ratbag fell obviously something went really wrong, and afaik no one left Ratbag to go else where before it fell over, yet the milestones were missed time after time. Now their gone, one less crap studio to tear down Australian developers reputations. Apart from this exceptional case, the quality of games comming out of Australia right now is great, Check out DOH and Spyro both soon to be released, both on schedule and first class, A-Grade products. I wouldnt be snuffing any development team that can turn out this sort of quality work.
Lubyy - indeed that is the case, and there are some good studios in Oz. But in my exp, its not common. In fact its more rare, to hit milestones (due to the issues I mentioned) , even on simplistic little GBA titles (athough sometimes they can be even more complex than console titles - 64K VRam isnt alot of anything). The issues with many studios here in Aus is there are alot of people in positions that think they have some understanding of game development, even though they havent managed to complete an entire project from scatch. And coupled with Anon Cowards comment, this is somewhat true - far too many people hired on 'mates' ratings than actual skill sets. When you put a person into say a lead role, or a manager role, thery had better be very experienced in that role or that milestone problem will crop up again and again.
Shams - not sure if you have worked at many studios, but disagreements between publishers, only occur if the developer doesnt scope the design and feature and requirements for the milestone properly. There are some companies in Aus that do, know how to do this properly, and thus rarely suffer those issues. Its actually rare that a publisher will cut short miletsone payments as a delaying tactic - sure you manager might use that excuse to the lower level employees, but the fact is the publishers 'delaying' tactic has more to do with non-delivery of milestone requirements. I havent yet seen a publisher _not_ pay when milestones are met.
Sadly developers need to get more realistic about their responsibilities - and developers hate hearing that. Developers always seem to think they know best for development and delivery. Also, there needs to be many more better trained people in management roles in Oz. Theres far to much "Us and Them" mentaility in companies. By this I mean, manager feed stories to lower level employees to make it sound that the company is not at fault, and that the publisher is at fault. This is simply ignoring the issues. If the managers consulted more with the actual developers and the managers scheduled accurately, and didnt try an undercut a project on costs terms, there would be alot less problems with milestones in Oz.
Grover, you make it sound like only developers in Aus have this problem. This is not the case. I suggest you have a chat with some developers that have worked OS and see how they've fared.
Yeah, I've worked for a few mixed studios in Australia. I thought there was no hope for the Australian industry and was considering going overseas, I got a job wit ha local company in Brisbane. Didn't know what to expect since at that stage they only had one big hit and hadn't done anything exciting for a while. When I got there the studio was thriving, Management actually look after their staff, and everyone I work with seem to be happy with their positions and no internal bitching goes on like at other studios.
There is hope for the aussie industry, and Grover I suspect has just had some very bad experiences with the local industry that is probably tainting him a bit.
So I think the point I'm trying to make is this whole discussion about "the australia industry" is very subjective, it depends on the studio much like overseas, there are probably many badly run studios along with many well run studios overseas.
I did mention there are exceptions. And there are companies in Oz that do treat their teams well, and have good management skills. But they are a handfull (single hand).
Yes, I am in regular contact with all sorts of dev companies in Japan, US and Europe and there is _alot_ more experienced managers OS. We do have issues here hiring experienced game production people into management positions in Oz - mainly because we dont have experienced ppl here to fill them ;) Its a catch 22 of some sorts. And one of the reasons it does benefit people and the local industry to go OS then come back and pass on that experienced gained. Not all studios OS are ideal, but the majority have much better understanding of the production pipeline and how best to manage it - mainly because of their closer ties to publishers and the much bigger resource pool to employ from.
As for experiences I have been lucky enough to have a wide range of experiences, from very bad, all the way to very good. And various inbetween and not just in game dev.. in defense and in other industries too. Its been a fun 20 years. :) The fact is, the Aus industry _is_ quite different in nature, and its very closed in nature too. Unlike many OS cooperative efforts. And the Aus industry lacks the depths of every other OS counterpart, thus lacks the home grown experience. This isnt magic or the rantings of a loon, this is how it is. And it effects the production of games directly, like it or not.
Yeah. There are only a couple of companies worth working for in Aus. And most problems seem to due to inexperience at some level. But what I do challenge is the notion that there is a higher percentage of bad companies in Australia compared to the rest of the world.
So, if your last paragraph is correct, then how does the Aus development industry change that? How do _we_ open it up?
Well its a classic economies of scale thing - as all industries find. The bigger resource pool, the bigger market, the more likely you will have more experienced people. I know thats simplistic terms, and doesnt apply to all, but thats generally the source of the issue - our small local market and dependence on OS 'side contracts' (please dont be offended by this, but short of THQ and Infogrammes most companies have to spend alot of time in US or UK to land contracts to continue operation) causes us to have less depth of experience - its why I mentioned people going OS and bring back experience is a very good thing. But it also relates to my hope that Oz can become more of a game/media centric developer nation. By this I mean create some form of equivalent holywood of games where the rest of the world comes here to source their IP, technology, and art (including sound, anim etc). In that manner there might be a great competitive and resource building edge that Aus could build for itself rather that rely on local markets, and subsistance contracts :) Im sure there are other great ideas too.. there isnt any perfect generic solve, but if it continues on its current way, there isnt any likelihood in change is there? And thus very much less likelihood to improve management experience.. and even developer experience.. As a remote developer, I remain mostly unaffected, and jump from job to job as needed, but I realise a more permanent solution for a viable industry in Aus is a much better solution for most.
Zax, I wouldn't say there's a higher percentage of bad companies in Australia. However, if you take the handful of people with managerial experience (successful or otherwise), and couple it with incestuous hiring tendencies (due to incompetence and/or lack of available talent), there is perhaps not quite as many successes percentage-wise as their would be in a larger population. In very broad terms, it's a numbers game.
How do we open the industry up? You ask a complex question with a multifaceted, and most likely difficult, solution. Most debate seems to rage around whether this question even needs to be asked, but for the sake of the argument we'll say it does. Original IP, Government support, games degrees, business education, knowledgeable investors, and almost any solution that has been brought up in previous arguments are solutions to specific symptoms of broader problems (I consider them problems only in terms of how they affect the games industry): our statistically insignificant population, and a culture endemic of both independence to the point of arrogance and cutting down the tall poppy.
As you can tell, those aren't really problems you can solve in any short period of time. Nor do they necessarily need to be problems. With significant encouragement, you can boost the population of the games industry so that is much higher percentage-wise than industries in other countries. You'll also be better off playing to Australian cultural traits than trying to restrain them - the difficult part will be to play to them in such a way so that it benefits the industry, instead of hindering it.
While what I've said may seem a little abstract, I think scaling back and identifying the causes as opposed to merely addressing the symptoms equips you better for making the best of the situation at hand. Some may think the situation is hopeless; I think it just makes for a more interesting challenge.
Missed milestones.....blah....any good Producer works with the team to create team and individual schedules to meet milestones. If milestones are met, or not, it's the team's fault (the team includes management and all developers).
If you are working at a place where someone hands you a schedule with no prior discussion and assessment - GET OUT!