Incredible. So you think even a job as seemingly as minute as scheduling "doesnt amount to much?" Like dead lines dont matter??? LOL! You guys are ridiculous.
I can only speak for myself, but my experience in the game industry did not leave me with a particularly positive image of game producers. In fact, I don't think I've met anyone more incompetent and a bigger waste of space in my life, and I have Comcast.
The producer is as much of an orchestrator as a director on movie productions.
Please excuse me as I break character here for a moment... No jokes, no shitposting... This is not what a producer in the game industry is. It's basically a title which implies some authority, but there's not like an explicit set of duties that a producer does. Here's how it worked at my particular place of employment.
The game's idea and direction came down from on high. We were a development house wholly owned by one of the big publishers, and they wanted to continue their highly profitable line of games with yearly releases. We were tasked with making the sequel to another game. The publisher had a designer on their side which was basically in charge, and whom we would send weekly builds and milestone versions to for review and comment. His comments would be relayed to the producer, who would relay this information to our lead programmer, from which we took our scheduling and marching orders. We had our own designer who was hired because his brother worked there, and was just as big a waste of space as the producer. His design document was three pages long and looked like the book report of a middle schooler. For the majority of the time I was there, we had no direction that wasn't directly related to the immediate milestone, as decided by the publisher's guy.
As near as I could tell, our producer was in charge of hiring and firing, and largely operated as a middle man between the publisher and our team. He spent the majority of his time in the break room playing Xbox games, and when we needed something, we quickly learned that the associate producer was the one to talk to. Based on talking with other people in the industry at the time, my experience doesn't seem particularly uncommon. It's been almost two decades though, so who knows? Maybe things have changed? Do they still have crunch time?
After leaving the game industry, I did pick up some contract work writing for games - a much, much more pleasant experience - and I largely dealt with the game's director (this was an auteur game(s), so the director was the creative and technical lead). I also was in email contact with the game's producer, who basically handled my invoices and getting me paychecks. While I don't particularly have anything unpleasant to say about the producer as a person, he wasn't really a driving force on the project at all.
The game industry is really terrible about what titles mean (there's no union to enforce rules about these sort of things), so a producer can be anyone from the creative lead and game designer to a glorified middleman, relaying communication between the real game developers. I think that at larger companies, like EA, Activision, and Ubisoft, the producer's position likely trends towards the latter - but I can't say for sure. If Jade Raymond's title is "producer" then there's almost nothing you can assume about her actual duties on games. And that's why I think this award is silly. Nobody actually knows what she does. Just that she is a producer, which, to use a sports analogy, could be anything from towel boy to head coach. Although, in her particular case, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, I'm leaning more towards mascot.
Gavon West
says- Producers are extremelly important in videogames industry. I am personally working with 12 different producers and I couldn´t do my job if not were because of them.
