Paul Bettner responds to Ian Fischers open letter via Joystiq
The debate continues between Paul Bettner and Ian Fischer as Joystiq have managed to press a response from Paul in regards to Ian’s recent open letter where he shed light on some flaws in Paul’s speech including falsifying his position as a manager who had some oversight into the way the studio was run and his title a “Creative Director” of which there was no position at Ensemble.
One important point to highlight in the response is that Paul does believe Ensemble was a high quality studio that it was focused on delivering excellent games, and the studio did with each game selling millions of copies:
In my opinion, Ensemble was one of the greatest game developers in the world. I loved Ensemble. I owe so much to the friends I was privileged to work with there for so many years. I am extremely proud of what we accomplished together and I said so in my talk. Our shipped titles and their legacy in millions of sales and numerous awards are an undeniable testament to Ensemble’s industry-leading focus on quality and fun.
Here is the full response:
“Ian and I did work together for over a decade. I value our relationship and I appreciate his letter. At Ensemble there were times where our individual philosophies on game development led us to different perspectives on how things should be run, as is evident in his response. When I read Ian’s open letter, it seemed to me that he was actually supporting many of the points I made in my talk (the usage of crunch, for example), even though we obviously disagree on how and why these factors contributed to Ensemble’s demise.
That said, there is a message that I tried to convey in my rant that has still not gotten enough coverage:
In my opinion, Ensemble was one of the greatest game developers in the world. I loved Ensemble. I owe so much to the friends I was privileged to work with there for so many years. I am extremely proud of what we accomplished together and I said so in my talk. Our shipped titles and their legacy in millions of sales and numerous awards are an undeniable testament to Ensemble’s industry-leading focus on quality and fun.
Ian points out:
‘The truth of the matter is, Ensemble Studios, while certainly fond of numerous inefficient development practices, was no costlier or less efficient than any other developer of our caliber during this period of operation… yes, sometimes after we had steered hard left into the weeds, we needed to work long hours to get the car back on the road.’
This is the fact that is striking to me: Even at one of the highest caliber game development studios in the world, we still utilized these ‘numerous inefficient development practices,’ including the use of regular, recurring unpaid overtime. Yes we were way better about this than some. We scheduled it in advance. We catered meals and had family nights when spouses and children would come to visit their busy loved ones. We viewed crunch as a management failure.
But we still did it. On a regular basis.
I hope that my rant shines a light on the quality of life issues that were present even at one of this industry’s greatest studios. I don’t think we should accept these practices as a necessary evil of game development. I think we can do better. I can do better. This is a call to action: our industry-wide reliance on mandatory unpaid overtime needs to stop.”
I hope that now as independent studios groups like Robot, Bonfire, Windstorm, NewToy and Fuzzycube can operate with much less crunching – or in NewToy’s case, where lead by Paul Better, no crunching at all.
Source: http://www.joystiq.com/2010/03/18/ex-ensemble-studios-lead-designer-responds-to-bettner-rant/
