This just in, TPCi admitted they miscounted:
“The details were included in error” is not the same as miscounting.
The wording there is very deliberate…
COVID didn't slow down the SWSH Expansion Pass, BDSP or Legends, so why would it have slowed down this?
Producing an anime is different than producing a video game. While it is possible to do both remotely, game development has different hardware and software needs that might make it easier to shift to remote work/work from home. I can more easily do game development through a virtual or Remote Desktop than animation. Wacom tablets aren’t the easiest thing to pass into a virtual desktop…it’s supported, but it doesn’t always provide the best experience.
(See here for using Wacom devices with VMware Horizon, which is a virtual desktop solution I work with:
http://developer-docs.wacom.com/faqs/docs/q-sig/howto-config-vmware)
Sorry, but this just strikes me the wrong way because of how far from the truth it is. Video game development is far from easy, it's much harder than working on an animated show (regardless of digital or hand drawn) can ever be. Experience =/= ease of operation.
No one is saying that game development is easy. It’s very hard. But my experience tells me that building a remote work/WFH solution for game developers would be easier than building one for animators. Peripheral support would be the biggest challenge for animators as they use some specific types of software and drawing tablets that might not be supported in remote work scenarios.
Even with WFH game developers have to endure severe crunch and the hassle of coordinating over the internet, along with maintaining our opsec. Besides, WFH is only applicable to back-end and asset creation to an extent, everything else still needs to be done in the studio. At times, there's also the potential threat of development hell stagnation that can end up with a product being outright cancelled by the publishers, and not even a sunk cost fallacy can save it.
Coordinating over the internet isn’t that big of a problem. Distributed development has been a thing for a long time, and there are tools and processes for making this work. Daily standup meetings over Zoom suck, but it’s possible…
Maintaining OpSec also isn’t a problem. It’s possible to build a development environment where the developers remotely access their workstations in a data center, cloud, or even their physical development workstations in the office. In the early days of the pandemic, I consulted with a few studios looking to provide their developers with remote access to their desktops to continue working on their gaming projects despite being at home.
The biggest thing to make this work in a data center is NVIDIA GRID cards. They’re expensive and hard to get right now due to supply chain issues, but they can deliver a virtual desktop capable of 3D gaming.
This means that the number is wrong.
No, it doesn’t. If the number was wrong, they would have said the number was wrong.