Favro for
Game Development
The games industry is a $138 billion market as of 2018 and expected to grow to $180 billion in 2021. By far the largest chunk of that revenue comes from the content. As seen in the below chart, game content revenue grew over 23% from 2017 to 2018 to $35.8 billion in the US alone.
With incredibly high expectations driven by always online, continuous content delivery games and the struggle to be noticed amongst an overwhelming crowd of titles — 9,050 games were released just on Steam in 2018 — there’s never been more pressure on game developers. The teams that create all this content are being pushed, often to unhealthy extremes, to produce more than ever. The industry has become a victim of its own success to the point where there’s a now a serious movement towards unionization.
A contributing factor to the problem is that the game industry’s agile mindset has never made it much past the team level. While individual teams are working in an agile way, the rest of the business still remains mostly command and control, with traditional project planning, capacity planning, and budgeting.
Without having to drastically change the nature of the game industry, the increasing content demand can be met with a combination of sustainable agile development practices and the right work management and collaboration tools. Favro and its many integrations can be the hub that drives your teams and even your entire studio to a better way of working, with minimized crunch and maximized value delivery to players. When the studio is aligned within a single tool, it makes it much easier to achieve organization-wide agility, with happier teams feeling more empowered to create better games and content faster.
It all begins with cards that represent a game feature or an art asset. Thanks to the flexible nature of Favro cards, they can also represent feature areas, game titles, or studio business initiatives. However you choose to use cards, they become a living, collaborative document and a single source of truth for the whole organization.
Backlogs are hierarchical containers for game features, art assets, levels… everything that is planned for a game, where they can be prioritized and estimated to determine scope before work begins and evolve based on producer and playtest feedback as development progresses.
Boards are where the creative process happens, with cards flowing through continuously fine-tuned pipelines, customized to each team. The new board toggles allow everyone to see the same cards on sheets and timeline roadmaps.
Collections bring specific backlogs and boards together and control exactly who can see what. They can be configured for all levels of the studio: team, game dashboard, and studio portfolio overview and alignment.
While agile best practices and tools can’t solve all of the industries problems, they can go a long way towards happier, aligned teams creating more content at a much more sustainable pace.
This video walks you through how to run your entire game studio in Favro.
