I got into an argument once with another producer. My position: if we don't understand what we are trying to do, it doesn't matter how efficient we are. I was worried because everyone seemed to be drifing towards celebrating internal efficiency wins instead of external player outcomes.
The other producer was having none of it. They held that, even if it was someone's job to worry about those player outcomes, our job as producers was to create efficiency wherever we could.
Over a decade later, I have only become more convinced of how badly efficiency can trick you into thinking you're winning when you're actually losing.
The Efficiency Trap
Efficiency means you are creating more with less, or the same with less, or more with the same. In some material (and usually very measurable way) you're doing better than you were before.
And that's a good thing! I'm not against efficiency!
However, there are two things people tend to forget when talking about efficiency:
- There are a TON of things to change that can lead to "improved efficiency."
- Efficiency TENDS TO BE viewed as a local metric, not a global one.
Let's look at them one at a time.
Efficiency Is Not A Single Metric
Efficiency can be measured many different ways. You can use less money, less time, you can have less meetings or more quality. Maybe fewer people or teams were involved. Perhaps you made more money with fewer things to purchase. There's efficiency in process, efficiency in code, efficiency in marketing...
And all of it's valid. It all MAY mean something got meaningfully better.
But it may also mean things changed, and even though everyone is spending 28% less time in meetings, nothing that matters improved.
To go even further, in an industry that changes as much as game dev does with all the variables and volatility present, over some length of time even if you did NOTHING deliberate, you could probably point to "efficiency improvements" just based on the team and environment shifting.
If you're a leader, and you want to justify your existence via efficiency, you almost certainly can. You just have to cherry pick your stats.
This means that when someone tells me things are more efficient, I tend to ask things like, "Why does that matter?" and if they can't tell me, I end up doubting if the efficiency gains mattered at all.
But the cherry picked metrics sure look good on resumes and quarterly reports.
Sub-Optimizing With Efficiency
The second issue I often see is people holding up numbers like, "we created 20% more assets" or "we got everything done two weeks ahead of schedule" (jk this is game dev, "We got everything done on time almost") and act is if that is all you need to know to understand just how amazing the team or leader has been doing.
This fails to view the system in total. Because if you manage to create animations faster, but animation is not the bottleneck of your content pipeline, it may not matter at all that you have more animations, since that is only one part of the system.
In fact, sometimes we make things "more efficient" while dramatically decreasing our odds of success. An absurd example (though perhaps not, in today's industry): you wanted to become more efficient with your monthly burn rate, so you fired everyone. Congrats! Massive efficiency gains! Unfortunately, you are not going to finish the game now.
That may seem ridiculous but tons of these examples exist. Engineers who obsess about being insanely efficient with lines of code or memory usage where neither is ever going to be a concern or problem. Producers who trim down the plan over and over to create maximum output efficiency only to fail to create something anyone cares about. Rules and agendas that create efficienct meetings but accidentally stop all the conversations that might have helped us talk about the real problems, thus preventing their solution.
This gets even worse when the leaders and producers only know about and feel responsible for their small piece of whatever work is being done. The Design Producer making sure no one interrupts their designers and tracking their output by how much time they spend at their keyboard. The concept art producer getting the concept team producing way more concepts than the studio can use while preventing their concept artists from doing any art crit for fear it will slow them down.
This is a serious problem. When you pick too local of a goal, or a goal that doesn't have anything to do with the impact you want to have on players or your audience, you end up with people exceeding your expectations while dooming your game.
Where To Focus Instead: Effectiveness
If you recognize any of this, one of the objections might be, "But Ben, what else am I supposed to do?"
The answer is, "Increase effectiveness towards meaningful goals."
Effectiveness means you are meeting or exceeding your objectives. Effective organizations accomplish what they set out to do.
But you have to pick meaningful goals, and this is the biggest gap I see out there. Otherwise, you'll pick goals like, "Create as many concepts as we possibly can" and you're back where you started.
You have to move outside of the process and outside of the output - the stuff - that teams use and create.
You have to think about effectiveness through the lens of your audience and the impact you're trying to have.
I often say the goal of any game is to create an engaging experience for a player. That can be broken down and more specifically defined for each game, and the process of doing that is highly worthwhile.
Most studios don't do it well.
As a result, many leaders settle for focusing on efficiency because that's all they can see and know to do.
And if you're in that spot, I urge you: go find the actual goal. Go find the subjective, audience impacting value you're hoping to create. Figure out how it breaks down, and how whatever your team is doing relates to it. It won't be easy. It will be worthwhile.
Because as a leader in game dev, while it may help to make more stuff in less time, it only matters if that ends up creating a more engaging experience for your players.
Don't get lost in the local system, don't go seeking out the metrics that make it seem like you've been successful.
Evaluate all your work through the lens of: did this help our game have the effect on players we wanted it to have? Did this help us bring in revenue so we can keep having that effect on players?
If you don't know or know it didn't, no matter how much stuff you built for however little money, it doesn't matter.
Efficiency serves effectiveness, or it's not useful.
Don't place the cart before the horse.
I did an episode diving deeper into this topic last week framing out the difference between efficiency and effectiveness and providing some examples of what good and bad look like. This is a serious problem in our industry, so if you want to learn more, check it out here: https://youtu.be/fDlcMZ-VS9U
If you want to really level up your leadership, I run a Game Dev Leadership Accelerator. It will help you see and solve the real problems facing your game and team, and accelerate your career in the process. For me info, sign up here: https://www.buildingbettergames.gg/gdla
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