"Going from concept to production in one jump" is why concepts fail, says Harrison

Whilst talking about Unity middleware platfrom in Copenhagen, Atari exec Phil Harrison has said that the reason many games fail is due to going from "concept to production in one jump."

"Here is my EUR 10 million gift to this room — all of the mistakes I have made in software development have been based around one problem and one problem alone, which is accelerating through this pipeline without successfully and properly satisfying the requirements of each of the stages - and typically it involves going from concept to production in one jump," said Harrison.

"That's pretty much the definition of why projects fail — because you don't know what you're building, you don't know how you're going to build it, you don't know who you're building it for, but you've got 60 people working on it and they've all running in different directions — that's how most games fail."

Thanks, Kotaku.