(4) GAME MANUFACTURING PARTS

WHAT IS A GAME MADE OF? >

Manufacturing Parts

a) Hardware Manufacturer Parts

MANUFACTURING PARTS

I am astonished at how quickly a PC game can reach the store shelves. Do you know how fast a publisher can take the final gold master from the hands of the QA lead and deliver a shrinkwrapped retail box in an Electronics Boutique shop in the local mall? Five days. That is right, in five days a 30-cent recordable CD from the local OfficeMax can be turned into $70 million of merchandise on store shelves in the form of Diablo II. This is perhaps the quickest a game can reach the store shelves and usually only occurs at a fiscal quarter end for the publisher—most especially Q4 for the holiday shopping season!

To accomplish this a publisher has an operations manager who keeps his eyes peeled looking for the strongest vendors for CD duplication, manual printing, box printing, and assembly. This is quite a job, and normally they would like to see about 20 to 30 days to get the job done, so as to not have to pay for express drop shipments between the vendors. But when the end of the quarter is rearing its ugly face, the operations manager saves the day. Toward the two-thirds mark of your schedule, meet with the operations manager to nail down the firm dates for when they need everything—final box, final manual, and final posters and other goodies in the box. This is definitely an area of the project where it repays you in spades to be proactive and find out the due dates for these deliverables ahead of time.

HARDWARE MANUFACTURER PARTS

CONSOLE MANUFACTURERS

The console manufacturers assign a producer to oversee the development of each of the titles for the platform. The console manufacturer retains broad editorial approval rights for the game, and it is very important to follow their feedback to receive your ultimate approval for the gold master.

HARDWARE REPRESENTATIVES

Some of the coolest people to work with in the industry are the hardware vendors like SoundBlaster and NVIDIA. These folks are motivated to be sure that not only does your game work on their hardware but also that your game takes advantage of all of the features of their latest cards. What that means to a PC developer is a bunch of free hardware such as sound cards, video cards, joysticks, and speakers for use of the development team to test the hardware. These folks are best approached at their booths at the Game Developers Conference (www.gdconf.com). Tell them your story, where you are working, and what game you are working on, and if they feel that you are for real, you can get test hardware. Please do not abuse this if you are not making a commercial game and will not be making a genuine test of the hardware, as it will only make those resources harder to come by for the rest of us.

............................................................