Are Game Developers More Savvy?
Looking over the companies that have purchased Pulse licenses, it occurs to me that a fairly large percentage of them are in the games development industry. In fact, it appears to me that game developers are over-represented. This could mean any one of a few things:
- For whatever reason, Pulse is particularly appealing to game developers, relative to developers in general. This could be the case, but given we have not made any special effort to target game developers it would be coincidental.
- I have underestimated the percentage of the industry that is involved in game development. Possible, as I have no hard data to back up my intuition.
- Game developers are more likely to adopt continuous integration than the average development team.
I could be wrong, but I think the largest factor is 3. To me, this means that developers in the games industry are more savvy than the average, at least in terms of applying helpful practices to their development process1. Looking one step deeper, I suppose the next question is why would this be the case? Are game developers smarter than the average bear? I don’t think I would make that sort of generalisation, but I would say I think it helps that they are in a “pure” development industry. That is, their core business is to create software, so naturally as a company they are focused on doing so as efficiently as possible. Development teams in non-software industries surely strive for efficiency too, but do not always have the full backing they require.
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1 I guess I am biased, but to me continuous integration is one of those things every team should be doing.
This entry was posted on Friday, June 8th, 2007 at 3:02 am and is filed under Continuous Integration, Technology, Zutubi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
June 8th, 2007 at 3:32 am
Jeffrey Fredrick says:I think you’re on the right track with why they would be more likely to adopt CI. I think game companies are under similar time to market pressures as drug companies: the sooner they get to market the more money they can make.
For drug companies the driving force is how long until their patent expires. For game companies it is how long until the technology their game is based on become obsolete and the game looks old.
June 11th, 2007 at 4:43 am
anjan bacchu says:Hi There,
Pulse is only one of several open source and commercial CI tools out there in the market. I would like to believe that the Java development world has been the pioneer and hence adopted it more aggressively than other communities.
I’m surprised that the appliance industry(rPath) hasn’t quite made big inroads in this market!
Yes, I agree with you that every team should have CI as part of the process. That way, a developer can concentrate almost full-time on development related activities.
BR,
~A
November 14th, 2007 at 8:10 am
Caleb Cranford says:I do CI work for a game company that has purchased pulse, and I’m fairly new in the game industry, but not to CI.
One thing I’ve noticed is that the game sector of the software world seems to have proportionally more developers familiar with CMM concepts.
This probably has to do with the fact that as a group they have been exposed to a greater number of projects and places (and therefore people).
Turnover and mass migrations are common in the game world as projects end and begin.