The ideas I find most difficult to find “buy in” for, are those that address scalability and flexibility of our productivity tools. Based on experience of decades in the game industry, my rule of thumb is that every next triple-A title has about 10x the number of assets and world complexity. Like Moore’s Law, this trend seems unlikely to continue, even impossible. But like Moore’s Law, the trend has yet to be broken.

The tools technology that we are working on today is meant to last us for at least another two or three triple-A titles after this one. So it seems obvious to me that our technology needs to be designed to eventually allow us to create 10x, 100x or even 1000x asset load and complexity, three to five years down the line. To me, it seems obvious that this is not a matter of optimizing code and buying larger hard drives, but a matter of planning and preparing for a new way of creating content and collaborating.

Why do I find it so hard to sell this? Why is it that no one else seems concerned with this problem?

It turns out that it’s not just me. Seth Godin wrote a recent (short) blog post titled “It’s almost impossible to sell the future” that describes exactly the kind of problem I’m running into.

If you're trying to persuade someone to make an investment, buy some insurance or support a new plan, please consider that human beings are terrible at buying these things.

What we're good at is 'now.'

Read the whole post here: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2017/02/its-almost-impossible-to-sell-the-future.html

Seth ends his piece with this advice:

If you want people to be smarter or more active or more generous about their future, you'll need to figure out how to make the transaction about how it feels right now.

This suggests that dazzling the audience with the long term benefits is unlikely to be effective. I will need to find and sell the short term improvements, slipping in the long range plan under the radar. Doing this in a way that is not patronizing is going to be hard.

-- Ron Pieket (Senior Engine Programmer)