Łukasz Hacura - Buffer is a Lie – How to Plan a Game Production Budget

[Music] hello welcome to buffer is a lie how to plan a game production budget uh my name is Lucas satsura I've been around for a bit most most worked on um premium PC and console games and for the last 12 years I'm running onire Studios and surprise surprise we're mostly doing uh premium PC and console games so first I want to start before I before I'm going to talk about how to solve a problem of budgeting a video game let's define the problem and maybe let's define the reasons why nobody can do it and I don't believe you can

um so first biggest problem from my perspective is the fact that nobody knows how to make games like let's just establish that and um the reason for that is that I strongly believe that if you're not creating a SQL or a clone with minimal changes using the same team uh you're basically you don't know what you're doing okay uh you're going to you're going to find out things about the game that you're creating that you didn't know first and all your assumptions are basically uh but hey don't take it for me I have only 18 years of experience so you can take it from Patrice de that said it at this year's reboot uh with 27 years of experience right to be fair he mentioned that you know he knows how to kind of budget his games right how to plan his games but like with a very specific genre and then if you don't take him from him let's go up 33 years of experience right it's like I know the actual scope and a budget of a video game when I'm more or less halfway done

right and that was Machi mik who's here with us today at Game Dev evening conference and if you don't believe him uh Brian Fargo at this very conference at digital dragons 41 year of experience um said that you cannot control video game development right it's chaos and you just need to roll with it and uh mitigate the changes and the risk associated with it uh another specific example this year there was a very good talk at um uh GDC shipping Diablo 4 now Diablo 4 uh estimated the team of Diablo 4 estimated the launch date more or less two years before launch and they were sure of it and they hit that date a year from launch now why it's important uh they the total development time of Diablo depending how you count Diablo 3 started like launched 12 years earlier right but the like

depending how you count it took them at least six years to develop Diablo 4 and they were absolutely ecstatic at the speech that they were able to predict precisely the launch date when they were 2ir in a project right and it's not a this at at blizzard in no way it's just to Showcase how difficult it is to actually budget and estimate timelines um in a production of a video game uh but hey at unire Studios I often hear that the problem with our budgets and with our budgeting is the fact that we every time we do a different game right we do and different technology we do like a match free game on XNA we use Unity for a hidden object game we then shifted to VR uh then we started doing remasters in a horror genre we did our own RPG uh a remake and now we're doing a co-op shooter out of all things right in first person so every project different obviously we don't know how to

make video games right because every video game we're doing are different but let's take Lan Studios right like they know what they're doing right it's like RPG RPG RPG RPG RPG RPG RPG right so they surely know how to budget a video game well clearly they don't because nobody does right uh Divinity original in 2 blew up the budget blew up and they were surprised by the amount of work but they took all that lessons to heart and Sven was talking about it at this morning's keynote they took all that lessons to heart and heel and behold they will still surprised by the amount of work on baldos gate free right and their budget again went to so uh I think that my case is if Lan Studios doesn't know how to make video games nobody does that's that's that's my takeaway um okay so that's problem number one now but let's dive a little deeper into the reasons of uh over budgeting and uh like going over budget Parkinson's law I mean that that law was developed um mostly for government

Administration but it works perfectly in game development so the Parkinson's law is that the demand upon a resource tends to expand too much Supply what does that mean it means that it theoretically a thing can be done by five programmers but you give them 10 suddenly in a couple of months 10 programmers become absolutely necessary to finish that thing right like the the resource T the demand upon a research tends to expand um but on the other hand we have the overconfidence bias like initially especially if we want to pitch it to publisher right initially when we budget a video game we're like super confident super optimistic it looks more or less like this uh the overconfidence bias obviously is overestimation of your knowledge and abilities uh which makes you deviate from reality and it looks like this right if I would estimate how long it take me to walk from our studio at Anar to this year Congress Center it should

take me 18 hours 27 minutes who wants to bet that that's not going to happen right it's like it's not going to take 18 hours but this is how we budget video games all the time another problem and I think that the most prant in in video game development is scope change right we're ending up doing a different video game than we set out to do uh and it's one of the most common factors and most project I worked on had drastic scope changes I've talked one of the good examples for this are there any bler team guys here no no ah there are a couple okay so uh on unreal Fest at 2023 I talk about Lessons Learned From layers of from the remake of layers of fear so um that's a slide from that presentation that was the initial scope of the project okay just remake layers of Fear One in new technology okay this is what we ended up doing okay like layers of feere one layers of fear 2 deontology two hours of

gameplay added simplified combat so yeah that was a totally different project at the end and uh sanken Coast feny is another problem so we are often reluctant to abandon projects that frankly should be abandoned and the thing is and it's with the overconfidence bias is a great um correlation here also is like we perfectly see other develop ERS that should cancel their projects it's just our projects that never should be cancelled because they're like valid projects right and again I'm not dissing The developers here right but we all know that there were a lot of projects and a lot of Productions that you know like frankly somebody should have pulled in plug much earlier right we know the horror stories of the development the pivots we actually have a couple examples also in Polish development but you know let's not talk about them uh so I hope nobody's from BioWare

Ubisoft this here so but uh but I talked to many people at Ubisoft just not working on this project and they were absolutely sure that this project should have been cancelled um okay buffer is a lie title of this talk uh how I like to like explain this problem is using the Heisenberg uncertainty principle basically like the game def uncertainty principle is that you cannot precisely measure both the budget and the scope at the same time because one affects the others and changes the context of the video game production so uh if you introduce the buffer you change the context and everybody knows about it right and you cannot have a secret buffer because what is a secret buffer uh is that free programmers stashed in some uh you know shelf but in during the night they're being you know uh updated on the progress of the

project so then you can easily plug them in as a buffer no you're going to put them on a project right at some point and Parkinson's law they're going to change the context and your buffer is gone and you're not going to use it for emergency you're going to use it to make a more complex better quality video game right so buffer is a lie um but it's not necessarily a bad thing I'm not I'm not saying don't buffer your F because money is freedom right and when you have more money to play with in general if you're aware of that um it's still good it's like you can still have some movement of it it's just usually you're not using that money for the things that you wanted to use uh and the last problem is projects don't um are not created in a vacuum right they're created in some kind of context so you can have talent availability problem time and again we have this problem on Studios that you budgeted a

video game having a certain talent in mind then the negotiations with the publisher uh took too long right and suddenly that team is not available anymore they're doing something else right and you're scrambling you're hiring you have additional costs and um and the external context with no fault of the budgeting on its own took a hit company might have Str Chang strategies right it's kind of associated with the scope change but it can come from your own company like suddenly the company says everything everything needs to be gas but but this game was never planned for lives well tough right figure out how to add lives up to it um industry situation welcome 20 2024 right everybody's loving having a good time yeah yeah yeah so nobody could predict what well nobody that's a different talk but uh but it's of no fault of yours at 2024 that you were supposed to um uh while budget a project right taking such an

events into account and there are events that are happening out there and I'm not even talking about Co not even talking about war but who could who could predict that in Poland in 2021 2022 in video game development at least at La Your Studios because in the world in Poland has an inflation of what like 16% something like that right but in video game development it was like 40 you know because it was postco bubble remote work opened up uh and suddenly the talent was FL the tent was going to work time zone saved us kind of but going to work for for the United States and suddenly at onire studios in 2022 with like 40% inflation what buffer can take on 40% of increase on salaries right like you cannot predict this um so let's try to solve it so first thing like if you were going to take from this talk only just one thing like take this one it's face based production so basically divide and

conquer okay you don't plan for the entire game don't don't even try it it's it's very hard what you do is basically you break down to uh phases some of those phases have been thrown thrown around uh very often right like oh we're in deep sheet because we didn't do proper pre-production like that's like you hear it all the time probably um but the thing is that the way you think about it is not only on the Milestones is like hey do we have like a proof of concept ver slice Alpha Beta everybody knows about it right but actually how you have different attitude to budget and to success on different stages so first stage is ideation it's not pre-production okay because ideation is all about making things shitty and making things fast and proving to yourself that your game idea is actually valid right that it makes sense to create this video game to commit a lot of resources to this video game so you want to do it cheaply you want to do it fast F and if it doesn't pen out you

should cancel the project right not like try to revive it six times it's like kill the project then you enter into pre-production and pre-production is a vastly different mindset than idation right because suddenly you need to prepare for production you need to create your pipelines you need to create your tools you need to be able this is now what we are doing this is how we are doing phase of a video game development right and um so you're still not scaling up the team you're not rushing we love rushing into production because we think that that makes the game finish faster right because we have those Milestones already put in with the Publishers etc etc but it's actually doing us a disservice and then when you are nice and ready in an Ideal World I never seen it in real life but no in the ideal World production is the easiest part right because you already have the tools you already have the you already have

the design you know what kind of game you already proved that this game makes sense so now you're just throwing in money hoping that you're going to get the content and and uh content back right and most of the systems are already done so the variability also is U low and then you at post production and from my experience ideation and post production are the most difficult phases in at least in Polish video game development I don't know like why it's maybe inherently to Poland but we tend to do post- production and post launch right so that's the that's the issue and postproduction is where the magic happens this is where metac critics is made this is when you actually have a game you have your beta you have your systems you have your content and now you're polishing stuff and now you're actually making the game better um and and let it cook right and you should actually spend Budget on that and we usually treat it in video game develop and we treat it as a buffer

right for production post production and then we do Post production and post launch and then we do enhanced addition but but that's different different discussion okay now uh some of you may have worked been working in a developer that funds their own projects right through their own proceeds but a lot of us also work with Publishers right and there is this need to sign the entire game it's like hey because it's like give us a false sense of safety it's like hey I've signed a $10 million game right but no you signed that you're going to receive a $10 million you don't know if it's going to be A10 million game yet right uh and it's much me better you're in much better position to renegotiate when you only sign for example for a vertical slice or for a POC right because then you actually know what type of game you are doing and it doesn't give you any safety to sign an entire game because you're 100% you're going to have termination Clauses on the side of the publisher so they can cancel anytime they want it's just you need to

deliver on the original budget right so don't don't be afraid to not sign the entire game um on that side I recommend the book playful production process one of the best books on on production that is out there and still valid in in in 2024 22 years ago Mark cery did a dice Summit talk uh method um I had a pleasure to uh talking to to to Mark at um workshop at dice this year and I said to him yeah this is like the best talk like and he was like yeah but the sad part is that after 20s something years it's still so relevant right like the industry hasn't learned so go and uh watch that talk it's really good okay another part is controlling now controlling is basically deeply understanding what is your cost structure uh what is your men month cost with overheads because this is the most important part of your budget and reviewing it and doing projections

regularly right uh at anare we do it at every uh minor Milestone major Milestone is you know like vertical slice Alpha Beta minor Milestones are usually like every two months uh to show progress to the publisher uh at the think that we called an executive sync not to stress out the people when we called Executive review they were kind of stressed so we called executive sync um this is the dashboard with obviously fake data the I have access to uh that I can actually see the projections the actual burn rate right now I can see which project is in green which project is into red what is what are margins what is our buffers like everything right and the actual man month costs but I won't 12 uh it's about budgeting not controlling if you want to learn more about controlling uh our CFO made a talk about it last year um GAC go check it out let's focus on budgeting so from the budgeting perspective you start with uh

some type of context there's always a context like imagine that you need to do an action adventure game what does that mean right those are all action adventure games I hope that we agree that those are different budgets right so you always start with some type of context you for example know that this publisher is looking on a$ 30 to $60 million this and this genre ticket right you know the context so you start with that context and you start filling out your ideal team I think that in that context in that genre this is my team composition right and then you actually check it with somebody who actually does video games for a living not me right you check with somebody and that reshapes your context because it's like suddenly oh no no no no you're about this wrong if this is the USP then we need to focus more on that and that and suddenly changes your context and your budget is twice the budget that you thought initially is going to be right so you now need to reshape the context okay so maybe we actually remove that

USB or maybe we add something else or maybe we'll cut the game in half or whatever else and rinse and repeat and you do it a couple times that's basically how you do a budget there's no super like there are some tricks to it which I will go deeply but there's it's not magic so this is an example spreadsheet of a of a budget it's super simple no magic in it like this is a zoom of it right so we just put it our guesstimate of hey we think that in this phase it would nice to be having a combat designer for example right and that phe would nice to have this and your budget is basically theand months right I Know video games is not only men months kind of is uh your overall budget is men months right and usually stuff like localization music voiceovers this stuff usually gets handled by a publisher either way right so and most of your budget is me months we have overheads we have overheads um okay one neat trick that we do in

that uh iteration of U you know redefining the context of the budget is in detail breakdown this is something that we uh borrowed the technique from or have been taught by saber interactive is that you do a mental exercise of actually breaking down uh a feature or a Content that you assume is going to kind of work this way this is obviously an assumption this is obviously an exercise but it's very helpful so for example hey we estimate that in this video game we need mechanical enemies let's say that eight of them what it actually means to create an mechanical enemy right so you try to break it down and suddenly you see okay we need 18 men months and this and this specialization we need concept artist animators character art Etc and then you check you check this in detail breakdown with your initial gut feeling of how big is your team and you just check yourself that is your thinking actually correct and then again Rin repeat that reshapes your context

and you do it all over again um for example we actually did um uh a budget for a big remake of a AAA game and but it was like I knew the context of it and the context of it it couldn't cost above a certain amount of money so I knew like hey we need to do it with 100 people more or less right and if we need to do it with 100 people in Peak this means that probably around 40 and 50 of them will be artists right and if around 40 and 50 of them will be artists I guesstimate that around five of them will need to be VFX right and I go back to the team and the team like explains to me how we need at least 15 VFX on this like what it's like that's the thir of an art team why like explain it to me why do we need 15 VFX so they started explaining to me like how the original game was made what it uh what it means for for the current and the we had a discussion that ended up with the fact okay we need to buy Houdini licenses we

need to change our pipelines we need to do this we need to do this we need to do that and then maybe we can do it with 10 right you need to have these discussions and we need to have this process and it's very tiresome it takes actually weeks to prepare it this way uh because you need to check with different various departments various specializations so we do it at a very late stage of pitching right such a in-depth budgeting um scope change I had to put something here right I I couldn't put like I have no idea how to handle it uh so I went with strong leadership team um you need to have an executive producer that can say to a publisher no right or or at least uh say to the CEO hey please tell them no uh because it's very hard sometimes to determine what is an iteration and and what is a scope change right and actually that also means that you need to have a very strong creative direction of the project because it's super easy to misread

iteration and polish from frer creep and pivoting right and actually you know adding adding stuff and changing stuff like what is an iteration of a feature and what is trying five different features to solve a particular problem right and the later it is in the development process especially in postproduction it's super important it's super easy to start changing drastically the foundations of your video game saying that hey we're polishing uh and that's actually a major scope change and hopefully are working with entities either your board or your publisher that understands how video game development works right and they understand that changes happen when the creative vision changes after ideation or inside the production where we know more if you don't work with such entities I don't like working civilians by the way right I don't like to work with entities that they don't are not from Game Dev don't understand Game Dev uh but if you do please have a good lawyer right and like make sure you have

proper uh proper agreement signed in about what is a change and what is not I have a lot of stories for different time maybe a beer today but few of them end well right like most of the most of the projects I worked on had drastic scope changes but remember scope Chang can go both ways and one of the greatest tools that a producer can have is an ax and uh you can always chop something out of the project especially on the content side and I strongly suggest using it often okay uh for the love of God console projects is like we have so there is a limited amount of games that we can create in our lives right let's focus on the ones that are worthy of actually finishing them of actually creating them um in ideation phase it's unexpected result it's like it's it should be a more probable result

actually it's like hey we gave it a shot it's not an amazing idea don't fool yourself into the fact that no no no we're going to solve it in production right I I've seen it time and I've done it time and again uh if you have doubts use external play testing for validation is your idea actually good and we we're also we're also um Sinners here right we also don't cancel projects often actually if we think about it we canceled one project like canceled canceled and how we cancelled it we're stuck in the adiation phase uh we're you know trying to find it one pro prototype second prototype third prototype fourth prototype and we were stuck in this Loop and I thought being inside that as executive producer I thought yeah we're we're looking like it's like that's that's the iterative process that's makes sense and then I went for for vacation and I got some rests and after a week it

was so clear it needs to be cancelled this doesn't make any sense so I come back I canceled the project and you know what my head of Department said congratulations on a wise decision I'm like f why didn't you tell me earlier it's like again um people know where projects should be cancelled but somehow projects don't get cancelled and they should okay as I said before you need to buffer anyway right uh the buffer change con context but money is good right uh having more money having more opportunities to make mistakes with that money is always better ideally you would have around uh 30% of buffer apart from your overheads apart from your margin right so it suddenly becomes like a scary number because it's like hey I have 30% overheads 30% margin and 30% buffer that's basically over 100% uh 100 10 if I count correctly 110% uh of um

yeah because you multiply you don't add it uh over a over 100% um um of a buffer right and don't multiply the buffers if you ask if you know the lead asks the specialist it's like hey how much is going to take and he's like I'm going to add 30% of a buffer then the lead adds 30% of a buffer to it he goes to the executive producer the executive producer adds 30% of a buffer and suddenly yeah we'll make this Indie premium game for $10 million why oh we have a huge buffer and we would definitely deliver it funny enough it probably will cost $10 million but you will not sign it if you're going to say it and just saying so don't multiply the buffers um for the external context projects cannot handle external context on itself right um like a lot of companies fall because they're like a one project companies right and if something goes wrong in the project they basically go

bankrupt and and fall over so creating a company not a team gives you contingencies right uh you can have proper processes like we like for example in recent years we have a proc proper processes for team assembly and Personnel transfer we're tracking how to assemble teams for new upcoming projects right in theory this is a work in progress I'm sure is not there yet in theory when you're getting a senior programmer you know what you're getting right in theory you should like be able when you're assembling a team to have a enough structure from an HR and career development path perspective to actually know what you're getting yourselves into so if I have a five programmers in my budget I know what kind of programmers I'm going to get and I'm sure that I can deliver upon it right not that we on the fast we're hiring five Juniors that are transferring from Unity to Unreal and like hey you have five programmers why are you complaining um you have stuff like controlling which I already talked about you have legal which I already talked

about um for example onire Studios have their own play testing Studios and uxr research and many many more right the company gives you kind of a safety net and tools to handle external factors that the project cannot handle themselves right so thinking of video game development as purely a team I think it's also a false goal you need to have a company to actually take care of the team I won't delve much more into that I've done shitload of talks on it like uh last year at digital dragons uh I did growth pains at GC two years back I wrote an article on it you can go check it out we're moving forward um and finally there is no du there's only try okay so we are in a hit driven business there is absolutely no guarantee that your project is going to be aead right into

the only thing that you can control is how many times you actually try right so you need to maximize your chances of success um so you know saying to me oh no you need to have a successful mindset that this is going to be a billion dollar franchise right it's like I hate that talk right of course we want to make a billion- dollar franchise of course we want to strive for the stars of course that we are trying to do the best job ever but it's a false score to assume that you can predict that success so to be saying in game dep from my perspective you need to be definitely the journey type of a person right not the Destination type of a person um on that note I highly recommend the Black Swan and antifragile uh both books by Nasim Nicholas taleb that like delve deeper into this hit driven business um and by hit in that book it mentions black swans right like a hit is a Black Swan something that you cannot

predict but to uh finalize it sounds like I know what I'm doing although you kind of know that I don't because you know nobody knows how to make video games so I just wanted to give you an example that we are all constantly learning right so um a story from uh our recent budget we created a budget only for the POC so you know buy the book phb development right we created a budget for the POC and that budget was given to executive producer like hey build a team right there are all those tools that are now built in the company for you to fight for the team right because everybody fights to have the best team possible so we supplied the data and um we don't have like a full like from also from um like a gdpr perspective but whatever we don't have a um a policy where everybody body knows everybody's salary right I mean we have um salaries

per Department we have average salaries we like everybody like this data is transparent but the exit got the average men Monon per department and like hey build yourself a budget right inside the given budget be your build yourself a team but at the same time the heads uh implemented like we implemented the how we want to approach idation in our at our company and a lot of that went down into team building initial team building who's on your core team what type of Personality what type of skill set they need to be multip specialization super senior people uh that are open to take responsibility very good at communication basically you know unicorns right uh idation Team should be really ideal and turns out the ideal ideation team is far from average right so uh when the executive producer

like hey okay this is my team this is what I need to do to deliver this uh he was by 15% off right after we signed the deal obviously right because we signed a deal on a budget and then we built the team around it so off the bat we're 50% below the the expectation and we didn't even do anything wrong it was a misunderstanding right um thankfully we C early on an executive sync that I mentioned previously and we only signed it on a POC right so now we have a super strong case when we negotiate when we renegotiate with the with the publisher our um our next phase if the project is going to be green lit uh that hey you know this is this is how much it takes you see great team great results give us more money uh so we're constantly learning right we're constantly iterating and we're constantly striving to be better at making video games but I would never say that this is a goal that you can attain right we were just

mitigating stuff and I was so afraid I'm going to end up like Sven uh and I'm going to go under over time that I got undertime so yeah thank you we have more time for [Applause] questions are any you can use microphone in M room hey hey uh thank you for amazing lecture per usual um I wanted to ask because you actually have two questions first one being you mentioned post production being the sacred ground of let's not get there and let's not use it as buffer I wonder what's your approach when you do have a realization that you are going to be forced to use it as a buffer or you're going to like step on the sacred

ground and you already chopped everything else do you go into time boxing to match the the you know estimates that you that came out of that initial exercise you're doing or do you handle it differently it's a tough question because it's all always like context based depending on a project right so I can mention like couple of projects that we had recent ly that we bumped into that right so for example uh project code Nam Mayhem at at our studio is right now in an awkward phase because officially officially it's like late Alpha early beta but unofficially we're actually in almost in post-production because the content is almost complete and we're already polishing a lot of stuff right uh and in there the biggest challenge for me is not

um what I mentioned earlier is you need to decrease the team that's the that's that's the actual sign you're not in postproduction where you're not decreasing the team because if you keep creating stuff then you're just fooling yourself right you're still in production uh but your question is more on the lines of okay but if I'm there what do I do right so uh the problem is that the easiest thing to cut is content but if it's a late in production you're almost done with content right so suddenly actually chopping stuff out creates more work right because hey we need to now redo the narrative or the Vos are already recorded or whatever so I would say that if you overrun in late production then you don't have much option actually other than renegotiate uh the post- production contracts right obviously you can do all the usual suspect you know like let's focus only on this or use the mosow or whatever or

cut whatever we can but it's like it's already too late right it's like you know you're going to overrun basically um so I would I would say that you end up in that situation why why do you end up in that situation you end up in that situation because somebody said that we're an alpha because that's what uh uh mil Stone sheet says not because you're actually are right that's the reason you end up in the first place so you kind of don't give me any room right anymore so I don't have a like a great answer to you other than usually I would just go and renegotiate the contract and this is what we do more often than I would like to do amazing thank you so I have a second one if you don't mind so the second one is when you do have those exercises and you come up with a budget the uh amendments you have a whole

structure and do you actually then collect the data from you know jira you have your exports you do you create the database of data that you can compare your original estimates to to just come up with like how accurate are your original budgeting and um how you do that I would so like to answer to that question oh of course we do I no so um this is something that we very much strive to and for example uh in our projects right now we do have a lot of uh jurat tracking the problem is that how are you going to compare a remake of layers of fear to a first person Co-op shooter right and there are some things that you can compare right um but actually even if I think about it no you can't because I what I wanted to say

well you can compare uh you know how we did the lightning for example right and how we used Lumen but Mayhem is on on real Engine 4 there's no Lumen so uh basically there's not a lot of things that you can compare in that regards if you would do uh because Sven talk on balers gate right uh the same thing he said on GDC they didn't accurately like the most thing that they were not ACC on was the new things so the Cinematic pipelines right the other stuff they kind of knew how to do so the hope is that if we were going to do another firstperson Co-op shooter we have all this data and we can actually compare it right um the but on that note I just wanted to say that one of the common mistakes I see is that we we we have data from the first iteration it's like hey we did this weapon and let's say know six months big weapon whatever we did it in

six months and then we're like yeah yeah but it's the first weapon next is going to take two weeks it's not going to take two weeks right it's going to take five months at best right so maybe four so we uh we tend to over rely on the fact that now we know more and hence we're going to do things faster right which is true but we always overestimate how much faster it's going to be amazing thank youash so my question to you is how do you approach scoping Outsource and how you protect yourself from wishful thinking that you're going to Outsource this to someone and it's going to get rid of all your problems you're having oh thank you for a super easy question we don't Outsource uh it's like we have 170 people on board and we are like a full stop shop so we try to do

everything in-house the only thing we Outsource is localization basically and uh vo recordings um and music and music also so the three things that I mentioned on the um on the sheet that are apart from our MMS um and to be honest we tried that we were awful at it we were absolutely awful at it we didn't have the pipelines I know that there are companies out there that are like built on the foundation that it's codf that we we just have a core team inside and we Outsource a lot of stuff so we do use Freelancers as a but you use it in the same way as we use we would be using overtime for example it's like hey we're a little bit behind here let's add an animator but not let's not hire an animator let's just you know I have a friend and he's going to prel Lance for us for 6 months but it's not like that we approach an animation company in UK or China or whatever and we like have a contract for a big part of that right we

don't have those pipelines I don't have that knowhow and it sounds scary so that's oh hey how can I help you [Music] sir yes the one one thing that I haven't heard you mentioning often during your talk as the importance of proper people proper team proper competence being there in your project and I wonder what's your take on uh what's your take on people their expertise their attitude their um dependency on being uh micromanaged uh um how do you calculate that into this whole budget being so uncertain thing so yeah uh well for example last time we not calculated it by 15% so I

say that we do take that into account but no uh that I don't see it as a I know that there is a direct correlation budget and your team right but building like from my perspective building a team uh making sure that you have the right people on the right you know positions Etc it's like a whole other production like this big pile of production thing uh problems that we had regarding that is that I mentioned Talent availability everybody's at unire Studios the I I really envy people that have one project in that regard I mean it's a high risk but then you know what people you're going to have right you're going to have everybody once we have we have six active projects at unire Studios right now and you know that every company has those couple of people right like I don't know like um uh 10 I mean at our company it's probably like 16 or 20 people that everybody wants

them exactly them right and everybody wants to work with them because they know that they're expert at teart or at this or at that and one of the big things that we're right now calculating into our budgeting which uh we'll see if it pans out is what if you don't have that person because we know that hey we have one of them or two of them right that they can handle that and we need four so uh I've been assuming in the past that hey if we're going to have money we're just going to hire them it doesn't work that way it's a it never panned out right uh I mean it usually didn't pan out right sometimes we we get lucky so um but from the perspective of team building uh I think that the ideation what I what I said at first uh that theme that core is super important to assemble that you need to have both the skill set and the communication side and the idea is and that's a big problem on

our side is that the core team starts the project and finishes the project right and in the middle you have what we call like you have heads and hands right in the middle you have a lot of muscle that actually makes the game happen they're super important to delivering the game because without them they would have like bunch of cool systems but no content and but the thing is that when you finish the project you want to start a new project and suddenly you need the same team that you we we've run that time and again you suddenly need the same team that is finishing the project you need to start another project not to mention you know they're burned out they would need a break like a long a h day maybe a sabatical whatever right so we haven't solved that in short it's like a it's like my go-to answer is like I don't know I haven't sold that I'm an expert the way the way I understand is that what you're saying is that if you

in theory were able to assemble the team of those dream people and have them and rely on them during the whole production cycle that there is a hope there is a chance for Budget being much more predictable than what you described what you're saying is that having this team on you which you can rely and not having to reassign them to other projects is outside of the realm of possibility uh I wouldn't even say that it would happen with that dream team I I can say that you can predict this well for a given phase but because the phases uh change the context of future phases I I strongly believe that you cannot predict the budget of the video game even if you have the Dream Team right it's because after ideation you're going to know much more after pre-production you're going to know more so in I in an ideal world after pre-production you can like perfectly predict the

budget in the ideal world right that that's what I would say thank you uh you have like three minutes or something I don't know it's so any other questions NOP okay thank you very much then [Applause]