I don’t disagree that often an early release can really kill a game. I think that Fallout 76 would have done much better had it not gone out the door for a while, and I think that the poor quality at release really hurt reception; despite Bethesda putting a lot of post-release work into the game, a lot of people aren’t going to go back and look at it. CDPR and Cyberpunk 2077 might have done better by spending more time or deciding to cut the scope earlier in development too. But, a few points:
First, game dev is not free. The QA folks, the programmers, all that – they are getting paid. Someone has to come up with money to pay for that. When someone says “it needs more time”, they’re also saying “someone needs to put more money in”.
Second, time is money. If I invest $1 and expect to get $2 back, when I get that $2 matters a lot. If it’s in a year, that’s a really good deal. If it’s in 20 years (adjusting for inflation), that’s a really bad deal – you have a ton of lower-risk things than you could do in that time. Now, we generally aren’t waiting 20 years, but it’s true that each additional month until there is revenue does cut into the return. That’s partly why game publishers like preorders – it’s not just because it transfers risk of the game sucking from them to the customers, but also because money sooner is worth more.
Third, I think that there are also legitimate times when a game’s development is mismanaged, and even if it makes the publisher the bad guy, sometimes they have to be in a position of saying “this is where we draw the line”. Some games have dev processes that just go badly. Take, say, Star Citizen. I realize that there are still some people who are still convinced that Star Citizen is gonna meet all their dreams, but for the sake of discussion, let’s assume that it isn’t, that development on the game has been significantly mismanaged. There is no publisher in charge of the cash flow, no one party to say “This has blown way past many deadlines. You need to focus on cutting what needs to be cut and getting something out the door. No more pushing back deadlines and taking more cash; if the game does well, you can do DLC or a sequel.”
EDIT: I think that in the case of Cities: Skylines 2, sure, you can probably improve things with dev time. But I also think that the developer probably could have legitimately looked at where things were and said “okay, we gotta start cutting/making tradeoffs” earlier in the process. Like, maybe it doesn’t look as pretty to ship with reduced graphical defaults, but maybe that’s just what should have been done. Speaking for myself, I don’t care that much about ground-level views or simulated individuals in a city-builder game, and that’s a lot of where they ran into problems – they’re spending a lot of resources and taking on a lot of risk for something that I just don’t think is all that core to a city-builder game. I think that a lot of the development effort and problems could have been avoided had the developer decided earlier-on that they didn’t need to have the flashiest city sim ever.
Sometimes a portion of the game just isn’t done and you might be better-off without it. Bungie has had developers comment that maybe they shouldn’t have shipped with The Library level in Halo. My understanding is that some of the reason that different portions of the level look similar is that originally, the level was intended to be more open, and they couldn’t make it perform acceptably that way and had to close off areas from each other. I didn’t dislike as much as some other people, but maybe it would have been better not to ship it, or to significantly reduce the scope of the level.
I mean, given an infinite amount of dev time and resources, and competent project management, you can fix just about everything. Some dev timelines are unrealistic, and sometimes a game can be greatly-improved with a relatively-small amount of time. My point is that sometimes the answer is that you gotta cut, gotta start cutting earlier, and then rely on a solid release and putting whatever else you wanted to do into DLC or maybe a sequel.
I won’t lie: That’s the kind of talk that really makes me wish Valve would quit playing around with Steam and weird hardware experiments, and go back to making new games.
I don’t agree at all. There’s one Valve and Steam. If it’s not Valve, it’s gonna be Microsoft or someone, and I’d much rather have Valve handling the PC game storefront than Microsoft. There are lots of game developers and publishers out there that could develop a game competently, but not many in Valve’s position.
I think that pretty much every great game, especially those boxed and released before digital distribution, was made by a passionate and talented team.
I’m just about certain that every team on those games would have at least one person pushing for more development time to make it just a little bit better.
It’s a romantic idea to say devs should have all the time in the world, but somebody needs to be the voice saying, “No, it’s done. We are boxing it.”
If enough of the development team can articulate why they need a delay, and if it looks like they are making actual progress, delays are good. If it’s just constant iteration and tweaks, that’s not enough justification.
I don’t disagree that often an early release can really kill a game. I think that Fallout 76 would have done much better had it not gone out the door for a while, and I think that the poor quality at release really hurt reception; despite Bethesda putting a lot of post-release work into the game, a lot of people aren’t going to go back and look at it. CDPR and Cyberpunk 2077 might have done better by spending more time or deciding to cut the scope earlier in development too. But, a few points:
First, game dev is not free. The QA folks, the programmers, all that – they are getting paid. Someone has to come up with money to pay for that. When someone says “it needs more time”, they’re also saying “someone needs to put more money in”.
Second, time is money. If I invest $1 and expect to get $2 back, when I get that $2 matters a lot. If it’s in a year, that’s a really good deal. If it’s in 20 years (adjusting for inflation), that’s a really bad deal – you have a ton of lower-risk things than you could do in that time. Now, we generally aren’t waiting 20 years, but it’s true that each additional month until there is revenue does cut into the return. That’s partly why game publishers like preorders – it’s not just because it transfers risk of the game sucking from them to the customers, but also because money sooner is worth more.
Third, I think that there are also legitimate times when a game’s development is mismanaged, and even if it makes the publisher the bad guy, sometimes they have to be in a position of saying “this is where we draw the line”. Some games have dev processes that just go badly. Take, say, Star Citizen. I realize that there are still some people who are still convinced that Star Citizen is gonna meet all their dreams, but for the sake of discussion, let’s assume that it isn’t, that development on the game has been significantly mismanaged. There is no publisher in charge of the cash flow, no one party to say “This has blown way past many deadlines. You need to focus on cutting what needs to be cut and getting something out the door. No more pushing back deadlines and taking more cash; if the game does well, you can do DLC or a sequel.”
EDIT: I think that in the case of Cities: Skylines 2, sure, you can probably improve things with dev time. But I also think that the developer probably could have legitimately looked at where things were and said “okay, we gotta start cutting/making tradeoffs” earlier in the process. Like, maybe it doesn’t look as pretty to ship with reduced graphical defaults, but maybe that’s just what should have been done. Speaking for myself, I don’t care that much about ground-level views or simulated individuals in a city-builder game, and that’s a lot of where they ran into problems – they’re spending a lot of resources and taking on a lot of risk for something that I just don’t think is all that core to a city-builder game. I think that a lot of the development effort and problems could have been avoided had the developer decided earlier-on that they didn’t need to have the flashiest city sim ever.
Sometimes a portion of the game just isn’t done and you might be better-off without it. Bungie has had developers comment that maybe they shouldn’t have shipped with The Library level in Halo. My understanding is that some of the reason that different portions of the level look similar is that originally, the level was intended to be more open, and they couldn’t make it perform acceptably that way and had to close off areas from each other. I didn’t dislike as much as some other people, but maybe it would have been better not to ship it, or to significantly reduce the scope of the level.
I mean, given an infinite amount of dev time and resources, and competent project management, you can fix just about everything. Some dev timelines are unrealistic, and sometimes a game can be greatly-improved with a relatively-small amount of time. My point is that sometimes the answer is that you gotta cut, gotta start cutting earlier, and then rely on a solid release and putting whatever else you wanted to do into DLC or maybe a sequel.
I don’t agree at all. There’s one Valve and Steam. If it’s not Valve, it’s gonna be Microsoft or someone, and I’d much rather have Valve handling the PC game storefront than Microsoft. There are lots of game developers and publishers out there that could develop a game competently, but not many in Valve’s position.
I think that pretty much every great game, especially those boxed and released before digital distribution, was made by a passionate and talented team.
I’m just about certain that every team on those games would have at least one person pushing for more development time to make it just a little bit better.
It’s a romantic idea to say devs should have all the time in the world, but somebody needs to be the voice saying, “No, it’s done. We are boxing it.”
If enough of the development team can articulate why they need a delay, and if it looks like they are making actual progress, delays are good. If it’s just constant iteration and tweaks, that’s not enough justification.