In today's main Gamasutra feature, UK-based game management consultant Max Meltzer takes a look at team and corporate structure within the game industry, contrasting standard team structures with the emerging 'core' and 'virtual team' set-ups.
In his introduction, Meltzer claims, fairly bullishly, that:
"In a typical business market that stimulates growth in the same way as the games industry has, the number of companies seeing increasing success rises in correlation. However, although the games industry has this outstanding growth, the amount of companies failing, filing for bankruptcy and closing down is shocking in comparison to any other industry on record.
This is because of a well-documented lack of professional management inherent at most development studios. Nowhere has there been a bigger example of this than in the United Kingdom where the amount of development studios closing down in relation to the country's industry growth is staggering.
It is clear that in favorable market conditions, the areas holding back the majority of studios link to Team and Corporate Structure and that not enough thought is going into this very important part of running a business -- a game company."
You can now
read the full Gamasutra feature on the subject, including plenty more detailed analysis of the issues inherent in organizing game development teams (no registration required, please feel free to link to this feature from external web sites).
