In the era of coronavirus, the world lies in ‘quarantine and chill’ culture. People, have confined themselves to their homes and are finding various ways to kill time of which gaming is the one. Due to lockdown, people are spending more time indoors which has driven the growth of the gaming business. In addition to that when WHO-recommended recently to play games as a pass time since then the gaming industry has witnessed even more spike in the number of users, time spent by the users, choices of games and so on.
Utilising the time of lockdown, gaming industry folks have pulled the horse’s rein to keep the game development wheel running, even while working from home. Leaders from the gaming industry joined an online discussion hosted by IGDC on zoom call, to discuss various aspects of gaming under lockdown. One of the key highlights of the discussion was how they are coping up with work from home culture under lockdown. The session has been moderated by YesGnome director of business development Imtiaz Hussain with panellist Yozoo Games India CEO Anuj Tandon, BombayPlay co-founder and CEO Oliver Jones, Gametion founder Vikash Jaiswal, 99 games CEO Rohith Bhat, Next Wave Multimedia co-founder and CEO Rajendran PR and MPL co-founder and CEO Sai Srinivas. With the initiation of online session IGDC is aiming to bring the latest updates, and understand and discuss various ways to deal with changes in the challenging time.
It’s been a while now that everyone is working from home, identifying, understanding, learning and practicing new tactics in the work from home workspace leaders have shared how they have managed work smoothly while at home. This is what they have to say:
Next Wave Multimedia have started working remotely in advance and probably they have covered more than thirty days practicing work from home. Except for minor issues like- if somebody is working from a remote village where there is a power cut issue or something then there is a hindrance, other than that work has been pretty smooth and productive. Rajendran shares “Work from home has been a big eye-opener. We deal with a kind of mid-core games that required a lot of 3D development and high power PC which I never imagined that we would manage projects while working from home. However, people have adapted it very easily and it was an eye-opener for us that, we could manage the mid-core games in development collaboratively and remotely.”
All of their project managers have been working more efficiently utilising the travelling time to go to the office and a lot of things have been eye opening as everyone is forced to collaborate because of the challenging situation.”You are collaborating at a level which was never possible earlier and that is so wonderful. We use base camp for collaboration and I think it has helped to work more procedural, as you have to document every work and the use of tracking softwares has helped to be aware of the progress. Moving forward we are planning to have a window open for work from home as it helps in work and life balance and brings more productivity without compromising on trust deficit,” he added.
MPL did a little bit of adjustment with going totally online and work from home even though they had liberal work from home policy prior to challenging times. They believe that there are advantages of working from home and at the same time it is crucial to understand the processes. Srinivas shares, “Although we are purely digital company it took us few time to adjust. One key learning that we learnt while working from home is that- You need to have really good processes business management practices, product management practices, when do the daily reports coming, when do alerts coming, scum management practices and so on everything should be counted. If the process is right whether you work on site or off site it will not make much of a difference.” Being the young in the industry they also faced a chaotic situation in the initial one week of time during that period they have spent time to make the process right to keep the ball rolling. He believed that by working from home, processes will get stronger which will further help to monitor while working from office again.
For Yozoo there was already a process guideline setup as the pandemic hit the HQ first in January so they were aware of what to do while managing operations. Tandon shares“ Our Korean team gave us how to manage art in the remote working situations and I think the major working challenges for games is the artwork which is one of the most complicated thing in studio approach which required hand helding.”So they had one week work from home as trial before hand to understand the requirements.
Regarding motivation of team he shared “somehow the success of games has been the real motivating engine for people to give their 110 per cent, atleast we have seen that. Some of the games have taken off in terms of usage and downloads, the team members have responded very maturely by taking the ownerships and responsibilities. I have seen people working on Saturdays and Sundays because of their ownership of the product that they are taking.”
BombayPlay has realised that even if the employees are working work from home they are human first understanding that Jones highlighted on the human quotient. He said, “how the team can deal with work when there is a chaos situation already be it buying groceries or water which everyone is adjusting. If there is real life chaos how they will manage work? Initially we calm people down that everything will be alright.”Since messaging sometimes becomes inhuman therefore they were personally calling or video calling their employees to know the situation and understanding what help they require. He shared how they, “Call people up get to know your teams how they are dealing with their personal lives just being a life coach. By doing bit by bit, within the first week we got the team up and running and then we started group activity.” He explained that like everyone is deprived of social interaction so they did happy hours where they sit over a stash of beer that they stocked up before lockdown and, have a conversation on how they are doing in life which has helped them in continuing work for home smoothly.
For Bhat there is a bit of change he used to return from work at 9pm and now it is like returning from workstation to living room. Which is a bit of a challenge as his kid is around home and he is around home, therefore, his kid was thinking to interact with him but when his kid realised that he is busy like his office his kid understood.
Bhat also shared that, “Initially we thought how we will manage being in a creative field where everybody will interact be it with art, trailer or anything but everything was managed and we hardly felt any change.”
On managing kids and work part Jaiswal also added “Challenging part on work front is that it is difficult to hold on to kids. When we have a conference or video call I have to engage my kid in some creative work. Kids can’t go out and play and what they will do in their leisure? I believe it is not just us but it is a challenging time for the kids as well. So being parents we should spend more time with them.”