Delays Hurt Video Game Business

George Bailey writes "Wired.com has an article (No Room for Slacking in Game Biz) dicussing the damage game developers cause themselves via delays in releasing games to market. To quote from the article: 'As the games become more complex and sophisticated, less of them seem to meet release dates that companies initially tout. A few years ago, the fallout was usually just disappointment among fans. But as the video-game industry matures and surpasses Hollywood in size, more is at stake -- like marketing campaigns delayed and intricate positioning against competitors disrupted. What's more, missing a promised release date can bleed buzz, precious in an industry where many young buyers have to take the time to squirrel away $50 for a typical purchase.'"

Comments

Re:What they should do...

[Analysis Paralysis]

This can backfire seriously if the game ends up being released without proper testing. Take Temple of Elemental Evil as a recent example - still buggy after the first patch (one of the bugs fixed was gems in a treasure chamber turning player characters into chairs...) and now a second patch is in testing (written by the head developer in his spare time). Pools of Radiance (Ruins of Myth Drannor) required four patches - one to fix a serious installer problem that could result in system files being deleted.

The biggest example I can remember though was Frontier: First Encounters. Random hangs and crashes to the point of unplayability. Gametek had to run a second advertising campaign to tell everyone that they had fixed it!

Another example of a rushed video game

[rock_climbing_guy]

Does anyone on Slashdot frequent video arcades? I think the height of rushing unfinished games out the door was when they released the Mortal Kombat 4 ARCADE game. For those of you who are not familiar, Mortal Kombat 4 shipped without all the fighters in the game. They actually patched the game by sending out new circuit boards.

Imagine that! Not only do we have to download patches from the internet. They actually had the balls to tell operators to install new circuitboards so they could rush something out the door.

True in some regard

[funky_vernacular]

having worked, and still working, in the the gaming industry for several years, a lot of the missed shipping dates arise from the marketing and biz people wanting to hit thier 'projected' sales peak timeframe (whatever that ambiguous time may be, however holiday release understandably being the only one which i feel has any credibility) -- anyhoo, biz/marketing people push for an unrealistic time frame, dev says it will be tough, though never saying 'Hell no we cant do it!' (even though this is what will happen) -- Dev checks off on the date, biz is happy for a while, slowly dev misses milestones, demos arent ready for mags, LOT checks and QA from the SONY/MS/NOA come back with a shit load of bugs causing further delay etc. etc. slippery slope created...some hooing and hollering, and boom -- youve missed unrealistic ship date -- I blame both parties however the dev will most likely get the short end of the deal if they say they cant do it...publisher will simply go find some other dev team which will give the publisher a hollow and fraile promise... i could go on writing further, but i will spare myself... --