How are ships prioritized? How do we determine which ship gets made first, next, this after this?

There is no singular criteria for organizing it. It's a combination of what staff we have free to work on things. Obviously, if we only had one person free to work on a ship, we're not going to put them on working on a capital ship for multiple years. About two months ago, so Q3 of every year, I sit down with the execs, so Chris, Erin, Tony, and some of the other directors like Todd, and anyone that has a vested interest in a vehicle coming out into the game. And we sit down and we look at the backlog of ships and go, right, what ships do we want to release, actually? What is going to add to the game? And we give our, like, these are our top five. And then we go and see whether there's any consistencies there. And that usually pulls out a few. And then I go away and work with production and go, right... and they go, you can only have one of these, because this is a big ship that's going to take all of next year. You can have this ship, but that's the only ship you're going to get next year. And I go, well, I don't want that. So then we go backwards and forwards. And we spend a few weeks going, we want this one, and we'll have these two, these will fit. We have this event at this date that needs this ship for it because of X reason, so that has to go in. And if we have any time left over, then it's sort of internal team choice. We have a free-form period. So are there any small little ships that we want to squeeze in there? Or do we want to look at doing a rework of a ship? And that's how it goes.

In a lot of ways, it's important to keep everybody busy, to keep everybody working, to keep everybody engaged. And I think there's this misconception that anybody can work on anything. There's this idea that everybody can work on everything, and even within ship artists, artists have different styles, artists have different aptitudes. There are people that you would put on Drake, like, okay, these are the people that should work on Drake, but you wouldn't put them on Origin because it's outside of their aptitudes.

Every member of the team is a capable artist, but definitely people have things that they feel more comfortable with. And sometimes people just click better with certain things. And then within the team, you always want someone that's a bit more technical and has a bit of a better understanding of the whys and hows, as opposed to necessarily the ones that can make stuff that's just super pretty. Otherwise, you end up with a ship that looks great, but everything's broken. And then comes the real frustration of having to go backwards and forwards with design and tech people to try and get that stuff working. I guess that goes with any walk of life. You always want to make sure that the right people are focusing on the right things. And that's something you do as a lead and a manager: trying to make sure you're playing to people's strengths. And when we get on to doing some of our more alien ships, and things that are a little bit less hard surface, that we may or may not tackle in the future, there'll certainly be a learning curve for a lot of members of the team with that stuff. And it might be that certain aspects of the ship may require more specialist skill sets. So you have to make sure those artists are free and ready to jump on it. And then, yeah, I think it is just about managing time. Sorry, I'm rambling.

The manufacturer point is a really good point. It was never intentional, but the different studios have ended up being the go-to teams for different manufacturers. The US guys are really good with RSI and Drake ships. So if we decided one year we want to only do RSI and Drake ships, those would primarily go to the US team, but there's only so many of them. And the UK guys would be able to do it, but it would take them that bit longer versus if it was an Origin or an Aegis ship. So then that's where you see things start moving around. Or we have an event where there is a request for one thing and it turned into two things, and that's a non-negotiable request, and we suddenly need to adjust course and go, well, actually, we're going to pause this ship for a bit, and then we'll do this, and then we'll come back to it. And then that's where, often, I do read the comments quite often where it said, John Crew said this team is going to be doing this ship and then they're going to move on to this ship. And that absolutely was the intention at the time. Just something happened in the middle that caused that to be paused, and then they'll get back to it.