Industry Survey 2015 - Studios

edited in Association News
Hi Guys,

It's that time of year again when we run our industry survey for studios, so if you:

Run a game development studio, or
Are a contractor that works for a game dev studio (be it through your own company or as a sole proprietor), be it as an artist, sound guy, programmer, designer, whatever

Can you please fill in this survey? (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Tpsfxg-2Xv820eISPkPLgMJx9fLweQQ3pTSALdrKchU/viewform)

If you are an employee, please do not fill it!

We've expanded on last years survey to get a bit more granularity about employees and better information about the studios themselves.

We will be closing the survey come 31 March 2015.

As it stands this survey is the only one of it kind that gathers data about the game development industry and has been super useful in our talks with government :)

Nick

Comments

  • Gah!

    I was filling this in and the wifi here borked out... Is there now a partial QCF entry in there? Should I re-enter everything? (There were a lot of depressing diversity zeroes)
  • Will you share the info with the studios whom fill it in?
  • I believe aggregate stats will be shared eventually, but individual ones are confidential.
  • @dislekcia No QCF entry in my data pool, so you're gonna need to re do the whole thing
    @Boysano as Elyaradine said we release a report based off the submissions, but it is aggregated and we won't disclose any individual submissions (without getting the consent of the studio first).
  • How many submissions do you have now? And how many more are you expecting?
  • @Dammit, currently sitting at 21. Most of the GDC folk haven't responded. I'm expecting about another 10, maybe more
    Thanked by 1dammit
  • Good to hear that there are that many!
  • Having just done the survey I have to say that it was really long, annoying, and kinda confusing. Like the filling out each role was weird since we have two people which means that we do a lot of hat wearing.
  • The role stuff is really useful, especially if people are forced to pick only 1... As indies we all wear a lot of hats, but whatever our primary hat boils down to is the one that can be safely relied on as a "starting point" for other companies and developers, the other hats can be learned on the job, so to speak.
  • @karuji you needed to indicate their primary role. The form will continue to improve over the years.
  • So, are we going to see the tallied data on Wednesday?
  • @dammit hence the comments. Feedback -> Improvements.

    @dislekcia yeah I get that notion, but when you're a two man team responsible for the entire game the notion of a primary hat no longer exists.

    Like if I didn't do bizdev we won't be able to ship the game, and if I didn't program then there wouldn't be a game to ship. I honestly cannot say which I am more of.
  • Karuji said:
    @dammit hence the comments. Feedback -> Improvements.

    @dislekcia yeah I get that notion, but when you're a two man team responsible for the entire game the notion of a primary hat no longer exists.

    Like if I didn't do bizdev we won't be able to ship the game, and if I didn't program then there wouldn't be a game to ship. I honestly cannot say which I am more of.
    I'm worried now that you filled in the form duplicating your self in multiple roles :(

    And yes, feedback is fine but it seems you were complaining more than offering feedback. I'm sorry the form was long to fill out and confusing. It was also long to create and confusing to create working between two people. Google docs isn't ideal, but we have a better idea of the information we're trying to gather now so we'll be able to create it better in future. There's also the difficulty that not all teams are small like yours and we needed to cater to the large teams who needed more sections. In fact, we had requests after the questionnaire went live to *add* more sections. Yes, we started with less sections.
  • Karuji said:
    Like if I didn't do bizdev we won't be able to ship the game, and if I didn't program then there wouldn't be a game to ship. I honestly cannot say which I am more of.
    This is a no-brainer. If you didn't program there wouldn't be a game to do bizdev stuff for. Thus, primary = programming. It's what you started with, the bizdev only became necessary afterward.
  • @dislekcia so you would classify yourself as a programmer in that case?

    @dammit: no I selected other and then just listed stuff in the text field. Mike is now a couple of people apparently. And yeah like I said: it's confusing.

    Also saying that I'm just complaining isn't useful to you getting feedback: It's annoying. Try instead asking me questions that would yield useful feedback for you instead of just saying that I'm complaining! Like really I just wanted to go fuck it and walk away from the thread because it felt annoying. So here is feedback on why I found this interaction annoying, and why I didn't like the form, and how I think it could be improved.

    A much better interaction would be:

    "I'm sorry that you didn't like how the form was setup. It took a couple of us a lot of work, but we're hoping to improve it for next year.

    Please understand that there is a wide range of studios out there, and we haven't found the best solution for gathering all of this so the feedback would be great.

    Could you tell me what you found confusing, and didn't like, and how would you suggest we improve it"


    Since that would be encouraging me to give constructive feedback, and hopefully in a format that would be helpful.

    So my feedback:

    We're a two person company so it would be much easier if I could just fill that in on the form as opposed to have to go through many pages or answers.

    A company of 1 only has to fill in 10 pages, where a company of two has to fill in 18 pages. Also given that we had some friends help us out a bit they technically fall in as contractors which raises the number of pages to be filled in to around 26.

    Since most of this was about employee numbers it would also have been great if you could have given things on a single page spread sheet which asked for people in their roles and diversities as opposed to multiple pages of edits to be filled in.

    Given that we are a small company and the notion of wearing many hats is something we hold very dearly it would also be appreciated if there was an explanation on how you would have liked the number of people in roles to be given, and a guide as to how best fit people into your boxes.

    I felt like I lacked the information required in order to answer the questions in a manner that you wanted them answered.

    ---

    Is that better feedback for you?
  • edited
    Karuji said:
    @dislekcia so you would classify yourself as a programmer in that case?

    @dammit: no I selected other and then just listed stuff in the text field. Mike is now a couple of people apparently. And yeah like I said: it's confusing.

    Also saying that I'm just complaining isn't useful to you getting feedback: It's annoying. Try instead asking me questions that would yield useful feedback for you instead of just saying that I'm complaining! Like really I just wanted to go fuck it and walk away from the thread because it felt annoying. So here is feedback on why I found this interaction annoying, and why I didn't like the form, and how I think it could be improved.

    A much better interaction would be:

    "I'm sorry that you didn't like how the form was setup. It took a couple of us a lot of work, but we're hoping to improve it for next year.

    Did you miss this:
    I'm sorry the form was long to fill out and confusing.
    ?

    and this:
    The form will continue to improve over the years.
    Also, your tone above is extremely patronising.



    Please understand that there is a wide range of studios out there, and we haven't found the best solution for gathering all of this so the feedback would be great.

    Could you tell me what you found confusing, and didn't like, and how would you suggest we improve it"

    You're assuming that I am looking for feedback. I'm really not. I'm quite aware of how the form is set up and having had more time would have done it from scratch differently.

    What I pointed out in the beginning that you came across as complaining about the form rather than offering feedback. And since you're now offering a ton of feedback, I can assume my original assumption was correct and you were just complaining.

    Also, if you were confused while filling in the form, why not contact Nick? You'll probably need to get hold of him now anyway to correct the multiple entries for the single person so that we don't have inaccurate numbers.

    Oh and on this:
    A company of 1 only has to fill in 10 pages, where a company of two has to fill in 18 pages. Also given that we had some friends help us out a bit they technically fall in as contractors which raises the number of pages to be filled in to around 26.
    Without my editing, everyone would have had to fill in 26 pages.

  • Karuji said:
    @dislekcia so you would classify yourself as a programmer in that case?
    Yes. That is what I did.

    Also, WTF? Why are you treating @dammit like crap and I'm getting civil questions from you? I'm a girl gamer too, y'know.
    Thanked by 2dammit dINGLE
  • @dislekcia said I'm a girl gamer too, y'know
    Wait, what!?
  • Wow... Everything must be sexist. Ridiculous.
  • petrolpouredonfire.jpg
    Thanked by 2dammit Kobusvdwalt9
  • Guys, lets keep this on topic.

    @Karuji I appreciate that the way the survey is constructed is not optimal, but it is about as optimized as we can get it given the platform we are using. I'll look into other platforms for the next survey. I tried to signal in the text for each section as best I could how to fill it in. For example the Designers sections says:

    "First we'd like to know more about any designers you have on board. These are people who are primarily employed to design the game, including level design, core mechanics etc. It is likely that they will do other jobs (such as programming or art), if so include them only in this section. Please only list those employed on a full time basis" (My emphasis added).

    I'll try make it clearer in the future. Meg worked wonders on the form to try and make it easier and more user friendly (you should have seen it before she got her hands on it). Also the truth is we simply need more granulated data, and it is unlikely the surveys will get shorter in the future (as the need to collect even more data grows). I just ask that you bear with us as we try to get things going
  • Er... it sounds as if you've changed the form a whole lot since it was first put up. Should I fill it in again?
  • Er... it sounds as if you've changed the form a whole lot since it was first put up. Should I fill it in again?
    Unlikely that you saw anything different to what @Karuji saw. Unless you need to add "freelance producers" the new question won't affect you.

    Thanked by 1Elyaradine
  • Instead of surveys it would have been great to have a way to maintain a corporate profile with all the relevant info :)
  • farsicon said:
    Instead of surveys it would have been great to have a way to maintain a corporate profile with all the relevant info :)
    The survey is for data gathering so that MGSA can have yearly reports on the structure and growth of the industry. That's a completely different thing to maintaining corporate profiles, even if those existed, we'd still need to fill out a questionnaire once a year.

    You're welcome to set up a profile site for the community if you'd like.
  • How's the participation been here @LexAquillia? Are there any studios or individuals that you know of who haven't yet completed the form that maybe don't know about it but could be reached by the community? Not sure if it's Ok to post those names though as it could break anonymity...
  • We're currently sitting at 32 respondents. About 11 companies who responded last year have not responded this year. I'm reaching out to them to get them to fill it in.
  • Hey guys, tomorrow is the last day to fill out the survey. Currently sitting at 38 responses. We have 5 companies from last year who are yet to respond. If you've yet to fill in, please go ahead
  • edited
    Sorry if it's a hassle. I can't recall if Free Lives included a musician on staff... If not, I can hassle our musician to fill the survey in as a contractor (I believe he's on staff for tax purposes now, but our contract is a contractor's agreement... which is sort of the worst of both worlds, but that's his accountant's fault not ours).
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