Skill Ratings in Games

In competitive games, rating player skill is a very hard to solve problem.  Not simply because player skill is a very broad concept, but because players have unrealistic views of their own skill level.

Skill in a game can best be approximated by a player's ability to influence the outcome of a game favorably.  This can take the form of anything from mechanical skill, to the ability to communicate.  Sometimes, you'll see players who are mechanically skilled but socially inept be unable to succeed in team based games.  Then they end up complaining about their teammates and blaming their teammates for their losses.

Players tend to overestimate their own skill level in a Dunning-Kruger fashion.  The majority of players think they are well above average in skill, which is a clear impossibility.  Part of this comes from players not wanting to accept responsibility for failure.  It's much easier to blame other players or circumstances when you lose.  Another part of this comes from most games being designed to make the player feel good about how well he does.  Games reward you for every little thing you do right.

I have seen countless posts on various gaming forums for countless games in which players complain about the skill rating system in the game because they feel that it does not work in some fashion.  There's actually quite a lot of math and statistics behind modern skill rating systems that show that they actually do work.

Nowadays, game developers have resorted to hybrid progression / skill rating systems, which allow players to have the convenient excuse that they simply don't "grind" progression as much as the other players who are at a higher level.  Players who play a lot and are truly competitive will reach their appropriate skill rating, whereas the players who play less can pretend that their lower skill rating is due to them playing less.  Of course there is some truth to this, since skill improves with practice.

If only the masses understood skill.

A Prime Example of Poor Game Industry Journalism

This terrible article claiming that "the problem with the gaming industry is that developers make too much" is a great example of poor journalism.  It recently made its rounds at work where my fellow developers were horrified and irritated by how wildly inaccurate it is.

Here's a brief rundown of glaring issues with the article:

1. The author did no actual research into the core of his issue, project budgets.  The largest parts of a game project's budget should be broken into three categories: employee compensation, marketing, and operating expenses.  Employee compensation is nowhere close to the amount that the author claims.  He cites an article showing how a single publisher employs 2000 developers, but he neglects to look closely enough to realize that all of those developers are not working on a single title.  It's a lot more accurate to estimate current gen team sizes as being around 200 for a "triple A" title.  This is typically only for the last year or so of a given project as they finalize content and get the game out the door.  Marketing can easily hit $10,000,000 for a "triple A" title if not much more for a highly successful title.  Operating expenses I can't really quote numbers for, but office space in a place like Los Angeles is pretty expensive.
2. The average developer compensation of $80,000 per year is heavily biased because most game studios are located in areas that have very high cost of living.  Renting a reasonable 2 bedroom apartment in Los Angeles can easily cost $2,000 per month.  Buying a 2 bedroom condo here can easily cost $400,000.  What kind of developer making $80,000 per year can practically afford a $70,000 car while making rent ($24000/year) and saving up to buy a house to hopefully retire in one day?
3. This leads into the point that he made a huge fuss over one developer who happened to get extremely lucky.  From the information in the article, I would venture the guess that the guy with the $70,000 car was able to afford the car because he was an early member at Riot Games, who were bought out by Tencent.  In that transaction, the employees there rightfully got nice compensation.  It's no different from any other industry where people form a new company and make a successful product and make some money when they get bought out.
4. This simple question shows how little thought the author actually put into the article: "Are we to believe there isn't an equally qualified person out there willing to do this guy's job for less pay?"  The simple answer is "yes."  Game development is a highly specialized field where the employees commonly work 70+ hour weeks performing roles that require a lot of training while trying to keep their personal lives from falling apart.  If it were so easy to succeed and make big bucks, then the author himself would do it, wouldn't he? He even lists himself as having "founded his own indie gaming developer called Penguin Run Games that creates play-by-post online roleplaying games."  He must be enjoying the highly lucrative, easy life too, right?

Maybe his degree in criminology didn't teach him enough about game development... or journalism for that matter.