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As the video game industry continues to reckon with layoffs and a persistent push toward using AI, one of the co-creators of the Fallout series has some choice words on retaining talent. Plainly, Tim Cain warns the amount of institutional knowledge being sacrificed at the moment could be catastrophic for teams of any size.
Developing games since the '80s, Cain is a legend of the medium who knows a thing or three about what longevity requires. From co-creating the Fallout universe to co-directing The Outer Worlds, he's seen the length and breadth of game development, which is why he's currently dismayed at how publishers and companies are moving with the times.
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This is true for functionality and simple asset management, as he uses broad anecdotes in both cases. He mentions he's left teams and had calls afterward inquiring how he made certain things run, then gives a scenario he "wishes was hypothetical" about pieces of work being stored without update for years on end, rotting on their device because assets need to be moved around every so often to slow degradation.
But then, you can encounter another issue. "Sometimes they have the assets, but they don't know anything about them," he says. "So even if the data is recoverable, they don't know what to do with it. Which just makes it worse. A lot of companies are billion-dollar companies, and they should know this, but they don't because the actual people who do, left."
He wraps it all up by reiterating a simple point: "All of this know-how comes from the people making the game. They're not things in the design doc, they're not things that can be expressed in a handful of design pillars, they're not in the company values. These are coming from the people who are actually there. Change the people, change the nature of those things, change the game."
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