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:Duke Nukem' Forever!

[Ralph Wiggam]

It's a real company, or at least used to be.
Me and my friends played a lot of Duke Nukem deathmatch back in about 1995. I always preferred Quake more, but Duke was the last good flat bitmap based game.

-B

Blizzard sucks beachball-sized camel nuts

[UberQwerty]

You may not realize this, but Blizzard sucks. Their games are the Backstreet Boys/Brit Spears of software.

They go out of their way to oversimplify their games so that they'll reach the lowest common denominator. For example, just before the release of Diablo 1, they cut out almost half the game. That's right; Diablo was almost twice as big as what you played, but they thought you were too dumb for it. They want to sell their games to stupid people, the same way Justin Timberlake's managers and songwriters design him to appeal to the young and dumb. Also, notice how every one of their strategy games requires heavy micromanagement and is really more about having a shorter attention span than your opponent; selling points if you aren't actually smart enough for strategy. Just log onto battle.net and you'll see how well they did their job. It's populated by angry, grammar-free, socially inept 14-year-olds with Napoleon complexes who think the ultimate insult is "noob". While you're there, you might also notice how buggy their network and internet code is.

Also, their ideas were never original, and they're showing no signs of changing. Warcraft was not original; it came early but it took its ideas from Dune II and Herzog Zwei. Diablo's idea came (obviously) from Rogue, and it's implementation was new-concept-free; the entities stand still and swing at each other exactly the same was as in warcraft. Since then, all their games have been mechanichally identical to one of the two, with new flashy graphics and reworked units/spells/monsters. This is the same mentality that has given us boy-band after boy-band, from The Monkeys to New Kids on the Block to N'Sync, in shameless attempts to copy the Beatles. Don't waste my time by telling me that these days they're making a generic role-playing game with warcraft backstory; roleplaying games are a dime a dozen (and so are MMORPGs). That's probably the least orignal thing they've ever done.

Price Supports and Lawsuit Protection for Games

[SimHacker]

Should the Government Treat Video Games like Alchohol and Tobacco?

[...]

It's not fair that the Tobacco Industry gets all the taxpayers' cash handouts, while the Video Game Industry, which also makes dangerous products, doesn't get diddly squat.

I think the root of the problem is that violent video games don't kill as many people each year as tobacco.

So I call on all video game developers to develop much more lethal, violent, addictive video games than ever before, because the game industry has a lot of catching up to do with the tobacco industry.

Only when Violent Video Games succeed in killing more than four million people per year worldwide, will the U.S. Government recognize that they deserve the same longstanding protection and support as Big Tobacco.

-Don