How Do Game Companies Manage Hundreds of Game Projects Simultaneously?

Original

Facing the increasingly massive scale of the gaming market, the quality of game project management directly affects the success of products and the competitiveness of enterprises. Many heads of game companies are worried about project management. According to the ZenTao customer interview questionnaire, after the team used ZenTao software, the project delivery speed and data reporting efficiency have been greatly improved. For the gaming industry, I would like to discuss what solutions ZenTao actually provides.

I. The "Three Mountains" of Project Management in the Gaming Industry

1. The first mountain: Numerous positions make communication extremely difficult.

A medium-sized game project has more than a dozen R&D positions alone. Planning is subdivided into system planning, combat planning, level planning, etc.; art is subdivided into modeling, animation, special effects, etc.; development is further distinguished between client and server sides. A game PMO once planned a new gameplay feature, but the requirement document was sent three days prior with no response from the art team. When the modeling was finally completed, it was found to be entirely inconsistent with the gameplay logic, causing a two-week delay in the project timeline.

2. The second mountain: Long project cycles make risks difficult to control.

Nowadays, any mobile game project takes more than a year to develop, not to mention PC and console games. The early technical research alone takes a lot of time. When entering the formal development stage, resource management alone is a time-consuming part. With hundreds of team members working simultaneously, art assets, code versions, and test cases accumulate rapidly. Sometimes, to check the modeling modification records of a certain character, it is necessary to flip through more than a dozen documents and dozens of chat records, which is not only inefficient but also particularly error-prone.

3. The third mountain: Rapid market changes make responses unable to keep up.

Players may praise the game's delicate plot today, but be attracted by the new gameplay of competitors tomorrow. What's more troublesome is the linkage between marketing and R&D. The operation team proposes to cooperate with festivals for activities, and the planning team temporarily raises requirements; the development team says the schedule is full, and the testing team says there is no time for regression. Finally, they can only force the launch, resulting in frequent bugs after the activity goes live and a lot of player complaints.

II. How to Manage the "Chaos" in Game Project Management?

During customer follow-up visits, some clients mentioned that they had tried numerous project management tools before, but found them either cumbersome to operate or too rigid in functionality, leading to "tool fatigue". Later, they learned about ZenTao and decided to try it, only to find that it precisely addressed the pain points of game project management. So, let's explore how ZenTao software supports project management in the gaming industry.

1. Full Life-cycle Management Enabling Multi-Role Online Collaboration

The product roadmap in ZenTao software clearly presents all released versions and active plans of game projects via a timeline. Whether it's the first test, public beta, or promotional CG updates, they can be intuitively displayed in the road map to achieve information synchronization across multiple departments such as production, R&D, operations, and marketing. In defining key milestones, ZenTao supports flexible labeling of milestones in the Product - Release module, marking core nodes (e.g., closed beta launch, official release, major version updates) with flags that clearly distinguish them from regular iterative versions. This function enables the team to quickly identify strategic priorities and allocate resources efficiently to ensure delivery quality.

The release management function of ZenTao can also divide a single project into different modules, such as defining the character system, combat system, etc. As independent applications for separate version management, which greatly shortens the iteration cycle. When version issues occur, the team can quickly locate specific applications to accelerate problem troubleshooting and repair. Meanwhile, application integration can combine multiple applications into a complete release unit, enabling flexible customization and delivery for seasonal updates, festival events, etc. Through visual road maps, flexible labeling, release management, and other functions, ZenTao software effectively addresses pain points in the gaming industry (e.g., low collaboration efficiency, difficult traceability), helping teams precisely control key objectives and improve project delivery efficiency and quality.

2. Breaking Down Large Projects for Controllable Progress and Risks

Large-scale game projects have long cycles and high complexity. The built-in infinite hierarchical task splitting function of ZenTao presents the project's task architecture in a clear and intuitive manner, helping you break down large projects into smaller tasks.

Take a mobile game project as an example: during WBS decomposition, you can directly import multi-level tasks into ZenTao through its provided templates, significantly reducing the workload of manual task creation and improving efficiency in project initiation. Usually, decomposed tasks have dependency relationships and sequences. At this point, the requirement tracking matrix of ZenTao allows you to visually see the connections between tasks, facilitating rational work scheduling, resource coordination, and ensuring smooth project progress.

3. Flexibly Responding to Requirement Changes and Quickly Adapting to the Market

Requirement changes are the norm in the gaming industry. Game companies can adopt the ZenTao Scrum project management model, using short-to-medium-term iterative development for project planning and execution to respond to evolving customer needs: small iterations every two weeks to handle urgent bugs and experience optimizations from player feedback; large iterations every two months to launch new features or versions.

For example, when players of a certain project reported crashes of the friend system, the repair requirement was included in the current iteration on the same day. Development took 3 days for repair, testing took 2 days for verification, and it was launched within a week, quickly restoring the user experience.

In gaming industry project management, requirements such as festival events or competitive bench marking functions are common challenges, which can be prioritized through the urgent track in the Kanban management model.

In addition, ZenTao provides rich reporting and statistical functions for real-time tracking and evaluation of project progress, resource allocation, and issue resolution. Through ZenTao's burn-down charts and statistical reports, project teams can quickly understand project status and progress to make timely adjustments and decisions.

III. The Essence of Competition in the Gaming Industry Is Efficiency Competition

Who doesn't want to create a product that wins both critical acclaim and commercial success? However, the reality is that even the best ideas need reliable execution to succeed. Good project management may not be a panacea, but it can help establish clear processes, smooth communication, and controllable risk management, allowing teams to focus more on polishing products. The value of management tools lies not in their appealing concepts, but in their practical effectiveness. ZenTao has fully adapted to the business processes of the gaming industry.