The Missing R&D Department

tim-cain game-development production r-and-d management innovation

Abstract

Problem: Why does the game industry consistently produce either innovative-but-buggy games or polished-but-derivative ones?

Approach: Tim Cain draws on his decades of experience (including how Fallout was created) to argue that the game industry is missing a fundamental organizational structure that other industries solved long ago: a dedicated R&D department separate from production.

Findings: R&D and production require fundamentally different mindsets, personnel, timelines, and budgets. Combining them into one team forces trade-offs that result in one of two failure modes. The automotive and aerospace industries separated these functions decades ago — games haven't.

Key insight: R&D is a pure investment with no direct revenue — and that's exactly why publishers avoid funding it — but skipping it dooms games to either innovation without polish or polish without innovation.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsqCDLgBBSo

The Core Argument

The game industry is missing something that automotive and aerospace companies figured out long ago: a dedicated Research & Development department, separate from production. R&D is the "skunkworks" group where creativity, experimentation, and risk-taking happen. Production is where efficiency, scheduling, and execution happen. These are fundamentally different activities requiring different people and different budgets.

Tim uses the creation of Fallout as his primary example. The original Fallout team was essentially an impromptu, accidental skunkworks — a small group thrown together on their own time, outside normal channels. By the time production formally started, they already had a strong vision of what they wanted to make. He considers this the closest he's ever seen to a proper R&D-to-production handoff in games.

What R&D Looks Like

R&D values creativity, brainstorming, and teamwork in a small group. Communication overhead should be minimal. The people in R&D need to:

  • Come up with unconventional ideas and test them rapidly
  • Accept critique without ego — ideas will get shot down for good reasons
  • Work collaboratively and iterate quickly
  • Be doers, not just thinkers — you must prototype your ideas, not just propose them
  • Be cross-disciplinary or excellent at translating other disciplines' ideas into working prototypes

Certain mindsets are actively destructive in R&D. People who raise production concerns during R&D — "how will we localize this?" or "I need to optimize this now" — are not just unhelpful, they're disruptive. These are valid concerns, but they belong in production, not R&D.

What Production Looks Like

Production values efficiency, scheduling, and completion. This is a different group of people — or at minimum, the same people in a completely different mindset. Production people:

  • Want (or need) clear direction
  • Excel at optimization, bug fixing, localization, and coordination
  • Get the game over the finish line
  • May not seem important early on, but become essential at the end

Tim recalls working with someone who was so good at organizational and production work that he could hand her anything and know it would get done. These people are invaluable — but in production, not R&D.

Why Games Don't Have R&D Departments

The reason is simple: R&D is a pure money sink. It produces prototypes and knowledge, not shippable products. Publishers and investors hate funding something with no direct return. They often want developers to do R&D "on their own dime" and only fund production — asking "do you have something to show me?" is code for "do the risky part yourself."

Large game companies could fund internal R&D departments but generally don't — either because they don't see the value, or because they think they're being clever by letting others absorb the R&D cost.

The Two Failure Modes

When one team tries to handle both R&D and production with one budget and timeline, you get one of two outcomes:

The Innovative Mess

A game with genuinely cool, novel features — but they're disconnected, the play time is short, it's riddled with bugs, and the frame rate suffers. The R&D mindset dominated but production never got its due.

The Polished Clone

A slick, smooth game with constant frame rate, lots of content, and side quests for every build permutation — but zero innovation. Every feature has been seen dozens of times before. Production dominated but there was no real R&D phase.

Tim suggests these two archetypes describe the vast majority of the game industry. The rare exceptions are games that happened to have a genuine R&D phase — but that's the exception, not the norm.

The Prescription

R&D needs to be treated as what it is: an investment. It requires:

  • A different group of people (or at least a different mindset)
  • A different timeframe with different expectations
  • A different budget that management understands will never directly generate revenue
  • Different management expectations — you grow many ideas, and maybe one pays off when handed to production

Production then takes whatever succeeds from R&D and figures out the most efficient way to build and ship it. This is how cars and planes have been made for decades. Games should work the same way.

References