Industry Survey 2015 - Studios
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
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
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)
@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).
@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.
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.
@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.
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Is that better feedback for you?
and this: Also, your tone above is extremely patronising. 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: Without my editing, everyone would have had to fill in 26 pages.
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.
@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
You're welcome to set up a profile site for the community if you'd like.