We hear the term Perforce a lot over the course of development. What is Perforce and why do we use it as opposed to other version control systems like Git?

So Perforce is a revision control system. It's a document repository in essence, where if you think of it like a library, you check out a file to edit and then you check that back in. And so it keeps track of all the revisions. So if you check out a file and update a paragraph and then you resubmit it, then that's version two of that. And if you decide, I really liked that previous version, you can check out revision one and make that the current active. So in development, of course, instead of documents and stories, it's all code and scripts and artwork and stuff like that. The main reason we use Perforce, well, it's a really robust system, but most of our senior developers... I've been in the industry for 25 years now, and back then, Perforce was by far the best revision control you could use in games. SourceSafe and CVS were some of the other ones that were problematic, let's say. And so I think that's one of the reasons why Perforce has remained one of the de facto standards in the game industry, at least, for revision control. Git is absolutely a very good system for that, but we're fully embedded in Perforce, and trying to convert to Git would be a very monumental task.

The developers being in the game industry and Perforce being the standard, it would be a big jump for them to make that transition as well.

Yeah, there's a knowledge level.

We do have specific small applications where we use other source control systems like Git. So it's like outside-the-game reasons, right? You may use it for controlling configurations on certain infrastructure and things. So we'll specialize that use case.

Yeah, we don't exclude anything. If Git is the best solution for what we're trying to do, we use Git. Perforce is the primary repository for source code, and everything we need to build the game goes in through Perforce.