Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Look, delays hurt *all* kinds of businesses. This is why most companies who know what they are doing do not comment on future products, and some (like Apple) go to great lengths to keep folks from knowing about projects in the works. Other companies who are less capable try and build enthusiasm by pre-announcing products to say, "Hey, look how cool we are".
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
I think it helps the game industry. By creating so much undelivered hype and anticipation the frustrated gamer will lose patience and buy another game. The only undelivered games people tend to care about are ones that have a previous track record. Doom for example is anticipated because of the first Doom. By not delivering Doom on time, the young gamer will try something else and give 'new blood' a chance.
I sent a response to the Author and the Editors of wired.com. Hopefully it'll show up in the rants tomorrow, but...
------
"The process starts when a producer conceives of a project and then goes through an internal sales process that can include being wildly optimistic about budgets and schedules, [Gifford] Calenda said."
This is an interesting view, and yes, it certainly happens from time to time. However, as a former producer myself, I often find that I will present a reasonably budget, schedule, and feature list, only to see upper management tell me that the feature list is perfect, the budget is far too high, and the game needs to be done in half the time.
Producers usually don't want their games to fail. There's very rarely an incentive on the producer's side to cut the development time, unless the producer is bad at making schedules (not uncommon) or the game is tied to a particular release date. However, most games being released are not tied to a release date such as a movie or sporting event.
Upper management, or the publisher, if you're an independent developer, is significantly more likely to have a reason to cut the time and budget. Usually it's a) so the game doesn't cost as much; and b) so it gets out sooner, therefore generating sales revenue in a particular fiscal year. You can see why there will be pressure from management to either present a schedule that is unrealistic, or to cut a realistic schedule away from reality. Naturally, additional budget money is hard to get, and features could never be dropped, and those are really the only other ways of cutting the development time.
I will grant you that, to a point, reducing development time and slashing budgets is a perfectly acceptable way to behave. It would be poor management that simply accepted a producer's word at every turn, because then the producers might take advantage of the unwary eye of management. However, management needs to listen to the producers if they tell them that a particular project is 'unlikely' or 'impossible'. If the people in charge of making decisions tell the project team to go ahead with the hobbled schedule and budget, then the project will likely slip.
The worst part is when the development team has to take shortcuts to get the project out on time which result in more QA time at the end of the project. The ironic part is when the projects slips to meet the original schedule, but you had to do it the hard way, with lots of bug fixing and messy code.
I hope this is a trend that goes away sometime soon in game development. The three worst habits in the Game Industry are poor scheduling, mandatory overtime, and laying off the project team or studio when the game is finished, and usually those three go hand-in-hand. It's a shame when the producers are solely blamed for the process, when it is terribly unlikely that they are the primary cause.
------
=Brian
There is nothing so good that someone, somewhere, will not hate it.
While it's true that delays in shipping a title can hurt sales and alienate potential customers, I think what it really comes down to is a company keeping its promises, and the way it communicates with those customers. NeverwinterNights is the perfect example. Not only did they fail to deliver on time or as promised, they waited until the very last moment to give any explanation to customers, and even those explanations didn't make sense. They had to have known they weren't going to be able to produce way in advance.
You simply can't treat customers that way. Disney (despite it's current troubles) has made a mint on underpromising and over-delivering, and game companies need to start to take notice that they don't operate under a seperate rule system from the rest of their entertainment competition.
The culture of game development has a great deal wrong with it, and missing deadlines is really only the tip of the iceberg.
One problem is, missing the strike while the iron is hot. Duke Nukem was hot, now it's cool, now it's cold, and finally it's a dead fish on your doorstep and you wonder where it came from, now that you've moved on.
There was some game, back in the day, I waited for eagerly on the Amiga. It looked like the be-all, end-all RPG and I wanted it so bad I'd scream in frustration each time I heard it was futher delayed (for quality control, etc.) Well, eventually I gave up. I don't know if it ever came out. I was onto something else.. NetHack, IIRC
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Another thing that really irks me after spending $50 of my hard earned cash is the fact that a lot of these games seem to have really bad bugs when they are released. The most recent example was Tiger Woods 2003 for the mac (yea, I know, I should be playing on pc, but it happens there too). I bought the game and it wouldn't play with my ATI video card (unplayable with crappy graphics settings). I had to wait for the first bug fix for a playable game. UT2003 for PC is another example of a PC game I had alot of problems with. You would think with all the xtra time that companies are taking to release the games, they would try and release something halfway stable. And, no on my PC I'm not running really out-there hardware.
-- Is it a right to remain ignorant? -- Calvin
Probably not :)
People are waiting for Half Life 2 and Doom 3 to be released however. A good example of the 'late release == sucky game' can be seen in Daikatana. When it was released it was a very advanced game..... for two years ago (or whenever their original ship date was). Sadly they released it in the present, not the past, and therefor it sucked donkey balls.
Hopefully Doom3 and HL2 get put out RSN and aren't subjected to the same fate.
I should state up front that I'm not interested and have never been interested in any of the sports or first person shooter games. So right off the bat I'm in the minority, and my opinion is suspect.
My two big beefs with console video games are:
1) Not milking the platform for all its worth. I loved all the Mario and Zelda games. But I will never understand why Nintendo doesn't create new variations of those games, with new puzzles, but using the same world.
2) Console wars. These game manufacturers are in a race to create the next console. But why? I don't want to buy a new console. I want to buy more *GOOD* games for the consoles I already have. Games are not starved for technology. They are starved for creativity.
-Rick
URU online* was just killed (laggy, unscalable design), SWG is trying to pull back all those who tried it and quit (great engine, no content), and I bailed FFIX (great content, poor user interface).
/. :)
Getting it out the door in a non-playable state is worse than getting it out late. Players will put up with some level of problems when a new on-line game is released. However, it there is not drastic improvement in the first month, they are gone for good.
Harvest started out shaky, but there has been so many positive changes that many are still hanging on.
The real problem is lack of communication with the customer base. Talk to us and we are very forgiving. Lie to us and we'll tell the world. (Or as least
* This one was wierd - They released the game CD's while the on-line version was still in Beta! Only, they never called it a Beta, the called it a "Prelude"! 30 player limit per server, expanded to 35! Would that be called a MicroMulti-Player Online Game?
For every problem there is a solution that is simple, obvious and wrong.
What if Hollywood acted the way game companies act. We would still be waiting for LOTR TTT. Peter Jackson would make some comment like: "It will be released when it is ready." Some of the delay may be attributed to the immaturity of the game industry (in relation to Hollywood) but still...
It's a salient point, the cost of developing a game is insanely high, probably as much as the cost of developing a movie ten to twenty years ago, yet the games industry cannot rely on replica t-shirts, dolls, posters, cinema tickets for their income. Instead they purely rely on the sales of the DVD(to continue the anology, though admittedly at 3-4 times the price). It seems to me, either the gaming industry is missing a trick(i.e merchandising), or the games industry is not mature enough to be able to make the merchandising sell.
Which begs the question, is the industry not mature enough to manufacture these sales, or are the games themselves not mature enough?
Or, to quote Sid Meier:
Being a games developer myself, one thing that winds me up is hearing the poor quality of games being blamed on 'lazy developers'. Now, it's true that many games developers may not have the best engineering skills in the world, or be any good at planning/project management, but trust me, having seen so many people work late nights/weekends for long stretches of time, the problem is not that they are 'lazy', or that they don't care about the quality of the product. Lay that particular blame at the doors of other people, where it rightfully belongs.
As for dates - that usually comes down to publishers, rather than developers, as has been pointed out. The publishers push for a date related to their selling peaks (i.e. Thanksgiving), and usually refuse to consider any other date, even though they'll be going up against almost every other game that is released that year. Developers are pretty much powerless to prevent this - unless you're Valve or Bungie or Blizzard, then the publishers have all the money, and they dictate the terms. (Speaking personally, I loved the fact that when Valve demo'd Half-Life 2 at E3 and blew everyone away, they responded to questions about publishers with "We don't have a publisher yet." Unless you've worked in game development, you've probably no idea how good it felt to hear that.)
Publishers also need stuff to give their marketing guys to take around and show buyers to build interest in the game. This usually comes in the form of some shoddy demo/progress build that the developers are harrassed into producing. The same goes for game demos - ever wonder why most game demos don't actually seem to do a good job of demo'ing the game, and have lots of problems that 'will be fixed in the final game'? It's because the publishers demand a demo before the game is finished.
On a game I worked on previously, we tried to avoid building up lots of hype for the game when it wasn't ready, and focussed on quality, because that's what we thought people would be interested in. Hell, no, the publisher didn't seem to care about that. They wanted screenshots, and they wanted them now! Never mind that the game wasn't even a game yet. The most important thing to them seemed to be when the profits would show up on their books. For example, they wouldn't accept a 3 month delay because then the income would slip through to the next financial year. I mean, the profits would be the same (actually, they would probably be significantly larger); they would just be appearing 3 months later. Now, I don't know much about accountancy/finance, but it seems to me that something somewhere is broken if that's how things are run. The best part was, in the trade mags, all we ever heard from games publishers was how developers were useless at business and couldn't see the bigger picture.
If your focus is always on the next quarter's results, at the expense of everything else, I think that's a good way of not having a long term plan.