Game Production Overview
Having just built a studio for MWM I was reflecting on the various jobs of the game industry, so I made this simple data viz thinking it could help others to visualize what makes a game company.
The most difficult part for me was to think about the central part (with triple overlap). I included CEO & Producers there but I’m not sure it’s really accurate. I think a great organisation requires to divide the powers, and the central part where all three powers reside might be better left empty. Think Lord of the Rings, but corporate style.
The 3 areas that are pure are never 100% pure, there will always be some sort of overlap, some comments on them:
Pure Tech. The technical team provide a service by creating tools. A rendering engine or a physics collision system is a tool. The requirements, delivery and support must include the other teams
Pure Design. Creative Directors, designers and artists must have space for brainstorm and wild ideas, but this freedom must be countered by a realistic business person (producer, CMO…) and by technical limitations (tech director or game director)
Pure Business. The publishing division must understand the design novelties and technical breakthroughs necessary to build the product in order to market it correctly and to understand the production critical parts
Finally they are 3 more areas that have clear overlap:
Tech + Business. There is always room for automation, business tools and to increase productivity. Data collection & processing, procedural generation, optimized tools, better build pipelines, data management…
Tech + Design. Requires people with both analytical and creative mindset, which is unusual. QA is right there, one of the reasons why good QA is hard. The Game Director should balance the dreams of both Tech and Creative Directors, focus on end users and making a great product
Design + Business. Probably the most difficult and critical area and especially difficult for innovative products or F2P. Most companies lean on one or the other, it’s near impossible to find the perfect balance
It does not deal with internal vs external publishing and it does not go very deep into the details of each branch (or the graph would be too big!). I also assumed that C-levels all have a strong relationship to business, but it might not be the case for all organisations.
A game company might not require all of these jobs to be filled by different people, it really depends on the team’s talents, goals, experience and funding stage. Each company might (and should) have a different version of this graph. It is absolutely not a universal truth. Also AAA, mobile or indie companies are widely different so this analysis cannot represent the multitude of different businesses.
Details for the job titles & acronyms:
CEO: Chief Executive Officer ; vision for the company as a whole (probably not that relevant here)
Producers: I did not go into details but usually they are internal and external (executive) producers, associate producers and/or line producers. In charge of the production, management, scheduling, budgeting, reporting, and allocation of resources
CTO: Chief Technological Officer, Boss of Tech with business mindset
Growth Hacking: Can take many forms and is usually tech related, from automation to industrialization, use of AI, data scraping, etc.
CCO: Chief Creative Officer, Boss of Creatives with business mindset
CMO: Chief Marketing Officer, Boss of Marketing with strong business mindset
CFO: Chief Financial Officer, focused on financial results, boss of accounting and mergers
QA: Quality Assurance, bug fixes (tech oriented) and quality checks (design oriented) can also be the ones who organise the play tests and focus groups. Can include customer support
Monetization: choose and refine the many avenues to make money with the product
Marketing: mostly for publishers, with a focus on user acquisition, ads, everything revenues, social medias, packaging, communication, etc.
BI: Business Intelligence (data analysis to improve revenues & usage)
Support: A lot of jobs should be listed here so I will name a few. Office Management, Admin, Legal, Accounting, Procurement, IT, Finance, HR, etc.
