A lot of people here and there are slamming the Themis Group for being dropped by another company (the Saga of Ryzom people). Having never worked with them, I really don’t know how good this group is. But my experience with being a contract designer when I was with Ninjaneering has given me some perspective that makes me want to give them the benefit of the doubt.

First off, let’s be honest, other than art, contractors tend to only be brought in when part of a project is seriously screwed up. If the project were merely slightly troubled, you’d replace some head count and move on. You only pick up the phone and call a contractor when something is REALLY wrong — and often, when something is so wrong that management acknowledges it, it’s too late. At Ninjaneering, I did contract work on 3 projects. On those three, only one shipped. For the other two, it was obvious that it wouldn’t ship the moment I got a glimpse under the hood.

Second, contract work, pretty much by definition, is meant to be temporary. Either you fix what needs to be fixed and get the game to the point where the company can forge on without you (as I believe was the case with Themis and Anarchy Online), or you can’t and the game slides into the side of a mountain. Contractors are fine band aids for short periods of time, but if you were going to maintain that contract permanently, it would almost certainly be cheaper and more efficient to hire permanent, internal heads for those positions.. Lastly, and the part that’s lost to most people,there’s a lot of politics around contractors, and those politics can drastically shape how effective a contractor is. There’s nothing that states that you have to use the contractor’s work and ideas. However, (and this may be more in the case of design than the type of services Themis provides) often the contractor only says something that was already being said by someone on the team anyway. They just help ratify that point of view.

When you have a team of 30+ people, and something is really screwed up, people tend to notice. They also tend to come up with solutions. But, for example, if the old broken way is being clung to by an overzealous Lead Designer or a defensive CTO, then sometimes the only way to get the logjam broken is for the Producer to bring in an outside ‘expert’ to show people the error of their ways. Typically, a contractor has a shelf life of about 6 months before the ‘expert’ shine starts to fade off him. Once people start to notice that your ‘expert’ is just another guy with opinions, it becomes harder for him to be effective.

When I worked on Highlander Online, Ninjaneering essentially reshaped the foundation of the entire game in a very brief period of time — before the honeymoon could fade. That design team was very receptive to our ideas – and the precarious state of their project was probably a factor in their acceptance of such a radical reshaping (The game ended up greenlit, but the company folded shortly afterwards). By contrast, when I worked on TSO, very few of my ideas made it in. There was a myriad of reasons why, but mostly it came down to timing – I was recommending adding some fairly significant systems, and TSO was just too close to their ship date with too many higher technical priorities. Given that there was limited tech time available for new features, clearly Will Wright’s pet features will be given priority over some crackpot contract designer.

All this being said, is hiring contractors worth it? Yes, assuming you hire someone who actually has the expertise you need. One of the important things that contractors bring to a project isperspective. Designers are myopic about their ideas, and teams become more and more attached to bad philosophy as time passes on. Almost any project could use, at some point, fresh eyes to come in and critique it. Contractors can do that without the fear of getting fired (they were short-termers anyway), and without getting too attached to any personal agenda (contractors tend to care more about getting their checks than about getting pet features in, for example). It would be interesting to see how much value a contract group would add to a project if they were actually brought in before the ‘terminally screwed up’ stage.