Maintaining morale in a creative development team is quite a difficult task. The head of the 22Cans studio, Peter Molyneux, as well as the heads of InnoGames, Christoph Schmidt and Fabio Lo Zito, discussed in an interview with Develop-online how to prevent developers from running away after the project is launched.
“Working on the support of a mobile project can turn a team of creatives into auxiliary workers in the blink of an eye, who only fix bugs and deliver new content to users,” Molinho said. “Taking a dozen smart, talented people, promising them an interesting new project and instead turning them into a support team is the same as forcing architects to lay out bricks.”
Molineux admitted that such a situation at a certain moment forced two of his people to put on his table a letter of resignation: “they did not want to be squirrels in the wheel.” He suggested that one way to keep the team in good shape is to let them work on a new project.
InnoGames, the developer of mobile and browser games, which employs 350 people in its Hamburg office and has just opened a new office in Dusseldorf, has its own secrets of motivation.
Fabio Lo Zito, director of the InnoGames PR department, noted that when they developed Forge of Empires, 20 people made the game, and about 50 people were engaged in its support.
He believes that adding content to existing games still allows developers to express themselves creatively, although there are other ways to motivate those who are tired of endless support for the game.
“We try not to leave a person in the same place for too long. We have a practice of constantly changing places of activity. When a person is just hired by us, we try to attract him to work on an existing game so that he finds his place in the company, finds out what’s what and studies the technical side of the issue. After a person has worked in the company for a couple of years, we involve him in working on a completely new project from scratch, and if he has the ability to do this, we allow him to take a leading position.”
InnoGames producer Christoph Schimdt, who is responsible for the development of the Rising Generals title, said that the game studio needs to be attentive to the needs of developers.
“The opinion of everyone who works for us is important to us. So when they want to work on something new, we try to meet them halfway – if possible.”
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