Session Name: | Managing Growth: Mastering the Challenge of Scaling-Up |
Speaker(s): | Christopher Schmitz |
Company Name(s): | Ubisoft Blue Byte |
Track / Format: | Production |
Overview: | The games industry is undergoing a tremendous change within recent time. Projects of AAA developers and the need to ship in shorter time frames caused project teams to become bigger and bigger. Also the strong move to online gaming, and the move to free-2-play in particular, tended to cause intensive growth for the development forces of a lot of involved organizations. The complexity caused by most projects running through their usual development cycles requiring ever changing resources figures is already hard to master for producers and studio executives. This in combination with additional studio growth, ramping-up several project teams in parallel, is causing a though management challenge that can easily be screwed up. This talk will look at the challenges of managing growth based on the example of Ubisoft Blue Byte, a studio that has fully redefined itself within the last 5 years, evolving from a pure one project PC developer to becoming a premium developer and operator of F2P browser, Next-gen Console and AAA PC games. |