Bud the imaginary VP of marketing has been quietly shouting into the telephone for the past ten minutes, and he's looking the worse for it.
"That fucking producer," he says, shaking his head angrily. "He knows fuck about scheduling. He tells you six weeks, it means nine. He tells you four weeks, it means two. He tells you two weeks, it means he has no fucking clue." The dreaded f-word has come out three times in ten seconds. Bud is righteously pissed.
"When I say I need a title to go out on November 16, that means it needs to be in jewel cases, ready to FedEx. QA tells me there are 31 A bugs, several of which crash the game in under five minutes. It's unplayable at this point."
What kind of bugs? "The audio drops out after a while. There are several points that you can walk through walls and off the edge of the world. And the game just blows up at several points." Blows up? "Yeah, it blows up. You're walking along in the first level, and you go to the inventory screen, and it just blows up on you."
"You know how much money we spent to get endcaps at EB? Or to get demo kiosks into every Toys-R-Us on the West Coast? Wal-Mart has a full-color circular going out next weekend, with our game front and center. I flew to Arkansas twice to get that. Now I'm going to have to get them to pull their ad. That's eighty-five thousand dollars of co-marketing down the drain, sweetheart. Not to mention that the biggest game retailer in the US now thinks I'm a liar. I swore on my mother they'd have ten thousand units by Thursday. We had a three-page pullout in EGM last month; damned expensive for vaporware."
"I've been holding the producer's feet to the fire. He says the development team is going to work over Thanksgiving. That idiot is swearing up and down he'll have gold master on Tuesday. Yeah, right. I knew he was couldn't handle the job in June, but I didn't say anything.
Is the game any fun? Bud looks at us like idiotic children. "Get this straight: it doesn't matter! We are losing a shitload of money by shipping nothing right now. Every week we delay it costs us between sixty and eighty thousand dollars, and that's only from our retailer agreements. Every day we delay is another day before the Christmas shopping season. I wanted this game on the shelves in September. At this point, we can get it on the shelves on December 3, if the development team works twenty-four seven.
"I don't see what's so hard to understand about it: Christmas comes every year. Eighty percent of our business happens between Thanksgiving and Christmas. You have to get your titles on the shelves by November 1. And every year, the development teams can't finish their products on time."
How much time has the development team had? "Nine solid months. And before you tell me that nine months is not enough time, it's not like we asked for Tony Hawk, for God's sake. We had our license, we had exclusivity, the movie came out less than a year ago. So all we needed was a halfway decent game, on time."
"I know - and I mean, for an absolute fact - I know those development teams lie to us about their schedule up front to get the development deals. They give us the dates we want to hear. Then, they slip their milestones. Not by months ... they slip them just enough so that they get the extra time without actually pissing us off. A week here, three days there. Check this out." Bud pulls up an Excel spreadsheet and points at several columns. Does Bud really know Excel? "Shut up. This is the dates we were promised the milestones. This is the dates we actually received them. You do a scatterplot, and you regress to the line of nearest fit. Check it out: there is a thirty percent slip for the title. And it's a really consistent slip! All you have to do is to add thirty percent to whatever date that dumb-ass producer tells you, and you get a really good estimate of when the milestone actually came in.
"The producer says Tuesday, so I'm thinking the title will really go gold on Friday. Do not, under any circumstances, tell the producer I told you that, or the title will slip out another week. I'm going to call Wal-Mart and beg them to push the circular out to the weekend of December 8."
Bud closes the spreadsheet. "This has gone on for too many years. I'm going to start demanding titles four months before I need them. Next year, I am going to demand that my Christmas games be ready to ship by August 1. And I want that written into any development contracts we do. That way, they at least have a small chance of shipping by Thanksgiving."