This is Not a Software Industry - The Video Game Industry: Formation, Present State, and Future - page 11

always this big kind of loop or tug of war, when
you're coming up with ideas. The engineers are
in on this tug of war too, along with your design-
ers, but the designers are saying what they want
to do, and the publishers and the licensers are
saying what you're allowed to do, and the engi-
neers are saying what they think they can do. It's
a giant tug of war that can fester for a long time
sometimes. But you eventually wind up with an
agreement and no one is really happy, and then
you start making the game.
Video game development companies often fi nd themselves working
between numerous other corporations; console manufacturers, video game
publishers, intellectual property fi rms, movie production studios and pos-
sibly more. Each company becomes a participant in the production process
of game development and each brings with it a perspective on what the fi nal
product could, should or ought to be.
Whereas software can often be “marked” as oi cially developed for a
specifi c software platform, there is little vetting of software that paral-
lels that of the video game industry. This is in part due to the signifi cant
amount of content that is delivered by a video game. Again, the emphasis is
not the software, but the players experience and the content being delivered
via the game's underlying software systems.
Many software companies have developed a hybrid approach to soft-
ware development, which leverages OSS (or Free/Libre Open Source Soft-
ware [FLOSS]) in addition to proprietary software. Game companies, on
the other hand, because of the restrictive non-disclosure agreements and
software licensing agreements associated with game consoles, must often
develop software that is almost completely proprietary. When OSS/FLOSS
software components are used, they must adhere to a very specifi c sub-
set of OSS/FLOSS software agreements. These packages must then often
undergo modifi cation to work alongside the distributed software develop-
ment kits (SDKs) and development “kit” (“DevKit”) hardware distributed
to a licensed game developer. These changes then also become proprietary,
rather than contributed back to the broader ef orts of the OSS community,
as their interfaces with the SDKs of game consoles are covered by non-
disclosure agreements.
Thus, very little of the “production” side of the game industry resembles
that of the broader software development community. From the history
of game development to the working practices of modern developers to
the structure of the industry that supports it, game development is a very
dif erent animal from “just” being another form of software development.
In addition, even on the side of the player, the game industry looks to be
something quite dif erent from “just” software.