Are games developers different?

I used to be editor of a cross-platform software engineering magazine that every year ran a special games development issue - and we used to sell more copies of that issue than any other throughout the year. Strangely, games development specials sell better than an in-depth series of pieces on mainframes, storage or networking.

Funny that isn’t it?

I’m reminded of this as I was talking to Perforce today about some fairly standard Software Change Management issues. While I was chewing the fat with our spokesman du jour (European director of ops Dave Robertson) he mentioned that the editors of a certain game developer magazine (that shall remain nameless) had cheered up his mantelpiece with an award for best programming tool.

So, for those not in the games industry, rather than deride games developers for all the time they spend rendering nice graphic models and designing high-score sheets – let us instead recognise that both designers and developers in this space need the same kind of tools that the rest of the industry relies on. Change management is as good an issue as any to consider the fact that there is a need to manage the wide variety of game assets from large binary files and 3D models to sound effects, music and dialogue.

Having said all that – our games issue might have been the top seller, but our systems integration issue wasn’t far behind. So maybe there’s hope for us all.