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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 $50 for a typical purchase.'"
I take it a step further - ignore the game release dates altogether and buy them after they've been out for a month - the previously priced 50$ video game is now $10.
The anti-salmon
You mean people aren't holding their breath waiting for DNF to get released? The YEARS of delays have damaged the possibility of sales? Gasp! Say it isn't so!
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Need I say more?
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.
The real problem is companies that delay games... and the finished product is still buggy or just plain sucks. Some game companies have earned the right to delay a game to ensure quality, and game buyers/players expect that. If Blizzard says they need more time, then we're willing to give it to them.
fallout was usually just disappointment among fans
No way, the first Fallout was great! The second one was way too buggy, though, and I'm not just talking about the ants and the radscorpions.
Don't blame me, I voted for Durga.
This story has got Dukenukem Forever written all over it. One can learn all the things listed in the article just by reviewing its developemental history. Throw in an analysis of Daikatana ad you've mastered the issue.
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
They should just skip using the calendar all together and set a release date of "when it is done". It would save so much pain and agony.
>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.
Sounds to me like it wouldn't be a problem if the price weren't something they'd have to "take the time to squirrel away".
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
I really wonder if this will be true 20 years from now when gamers like me who grew up playing games and have pay checks to buy what we want become a larger portion of the people who buy video games then teens. Of course, teens have much more time to play video games then people with jobs do, so perhaps this will never be true. I do hate playing MMORPGs -- not because I don't enjoy them, but because I can't compete with a 15 year old who can play the game 8 hours a day!
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.
The games companies aren't ickle teenagers in their bedrooms any more... I've just had 'Baldurs Gate Dark Alliance 2' (fantastic game, btw) which has a splash screen saying that over 100,000 man-hours were spent on the game...
You have a release plan, you have a risk assessment, you have risk management. It's not a one-day's-brainstorming which ends up with 'ok, next Christmas then...'.
The larger games companies are starting to seriously challenge the film industry for revenue, sometimes you get the film of the game (Tombraider) but most of the time you get the game of the film (everything else) - that should indicate where the power distribution lies; but it is dynamic, and a lot of effort will be put into maximising return on the large investment. Just like films. Big expenditure brings big risks and big rewards. Just like films...
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
The poster alluded to this, but not enough. Announcing the product before it ships is very important for the people who are deciding between buying a product now and waiting for a better product in the near future. The announcement of the game is saying "Hey, look how cool this is going to be. It beats all other games on the market now, so save up your money and use it for this instead of the instant gratification that won't last as long"
The speculation and occasional leaks of information are vital towards feeding the anticipation of the game, and in many cases even surpass the actual quality of the game once it is released.
If a company decided to not advertise a game until its release, I guarantee it will not meet with the same success that an eagerly anticipated game will see.
I sent a response to the Author and the Editors of wired.com. Hopefully it'll show up in the rants tomorrow, but...
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"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.
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=Brian
There is nothing so good that someone, somewhere, will not hate it.
Delaying game releases seem to work well for Blizzard. Of course their games are always backwards in terms of technology but their story and gameplay are excellent. Maybe we should worry less about sophistication and technology and more about the non-visual aspects of the story? Then again, their FMVs are excellent, same with SquareSoft's. An interesting story with nice FMVs as reward for completing each stage seem to be the common theme here.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
Had Half-Life 2 been released about 6 months ago when it was planned for, I know lots of people who had intended to buy it... and these are even people who never buy anything, since downloading games is so easy.
HL2's graphics would have been so very advanced had it not been delayed repeatedly, but by now it won't really have much advantage over other games' graphics by the time it comes out this summer. I expect it'll still be a great game, with pretty exceptional graphics, but a lot more people were excited by it before.
I think it has a lot to do with the whole franchise aspect, they don't want to ruin a namebrand permanently by rushing it out with horrible flaws. If it's a one-shot game then a bunch of people will buy it and be pissed but as long as there's no follow up it won't hurt the company too bad.
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.
You know, if marketing would just STFU until there was a good solid date for a game, and not one that they pulled out of thin air, there wouldn't be nearly the number of problems there are.
Sure, there are engineering slips, but the majority of those are because marketing (or worse, engineering management) gave the CEO a date he WANTED to hear, not the date he NEEDED to hear.
Engineering slips because the date was unrealistic, marketing points the finger, and never gets the blame.
"Delays Hurt Video Game Business"
NEWS FLASH!!!
EXCESSIVE DELAYS HURT ANY INDUSTRY!!!
Please move along, nothing to news here.
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So 100,000 people could complete a game like Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance 2 in an hour! :)
Wow!
Companies should develop a solid storyline and some good gameplay characteristics before announcing a game. Id rather have a fun game that doesnt require the latest and greatest than one that has all full motion video but no real substance. Hell i still play Quake 1/2 and Duke3d. Those games have stories and they are fun to play!
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
If games are released on time, but buggy, then they get flamed and attacked. If they delay to perfect the bugs, then they get flamed and attacked. Either way there is a problem, and I know which way I'd prefer they go. I have no problem waiting for a good release over getting a buggy one and waiting for the patches to dribble out.
Having said that though, there are very few games I've waited for which have come out on time lately. So the companies should definitely learn. I for one have stopped paying attention to the calendar, if its not believable then its not worth having.
Abolish the release dates until closer to when you have a more finalised estimate available. Or be more conservative with the estimate, rather than hopeful. As a rule of thumb I add a quarter to the calendar when dates are announced, it would be a good idea if they insist on announcing dates early if they did this themselves. Failing to meet an over-optimistic release date, even if for good reasons which it typically is, makes the company look foolish and less reliable.
I don't think the game delays hurt sales. When Duke comes out, I'll buy it, no doubt. If it's a big name game, it will still sell.
On the other hand, the thing that pisses me off about the game release delays is the the developers are 'debugging'. I think that's bull.
How many games don't release a service pack/update/bugfix within a couple of months of the game release anyway?
--------------------------------------------- SignalGod ---------------------------------------------
an industry where many young buyers have to take the time to squirrel away $50 for a typical purchase.
Haven't we already seen tons of consumer data that shows that almost all money spent on games is by people over the age of 25? And aren't both Half-Life 2 and Duke Nukem Forever going to be rated M?
Still, everyone involved agrees on one thing -- slips in release dates ultimately matter less than shipping an awesome game.
dur, really? thanks for this insightful article
For example: Let's look at a case where the title released "on time" but sucked ass. The definitive example of this was Ultima 9. This was supposed to be Richard Garriot's 'swan song' for the Ultima series. The final chapter in a very successful and much loved 20 year old franchise. Immense pressure from the EA suits forced Garriot (against his pleas) to make sure U9 "shipped by Christmas". It met the delivery date expectation: at the expense of the consumer's expectations. The game was virtually unplayable. Bugs ranging from annoyances to full blown "quest killers" were rampant. Add that to the fact that you'd need a fully "state of the art" (+$2500) system to even load the thing. U9 entered the marked at $60 dollars. I never even saw it hit the $9.95 rack. It just disappeared.
Now for a company that consistantly delivers late, we need look no farther than Blizzard. Starcraft, Diablo (1 & 2), Warcraft 3 were all "vapor" for many moons. They also rank as the most successful titles in PC gaming history, with longevity and replay value that is unsurpassed. WC3 is nearly three years old, and it still sells for $40+. Diablo 2 debuted in 2000, and was on the top 10 seller list no later than 6 months ago.
As a consumer, I'm not going to spend my $50 on crap or a mediocre product. If I'm curious about a game, I'll wait till it hit's the $10 rack anyway (about 4-6 months after the release date - gotta love the irony). But if it's a hot title from a company with a record for Quality out of the box, not after "patch1.4", I'll drop the $50.
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
Love them or hate them, but id software probably has the best solution to the problem. They have always set their release dates as "when it's done" and it has always been for the best. I'm not referring to the (nearly) total lack of storyline but the fact that you don't go out, buy the game, and go home and download a fix for it. As far as I know, sales for id games don't suffer from delays. Perhaps the bigger problem is lack of quality products: you aren't nearly so ticked off when a game is delayed but it turns out to be fantastic.
Velox Versutus Vigilans
precious in an industry where many young buyers have to take the time to squirrel away $50 for a typical purchase.
See, this wouldn't be a problem if they were just taking the money out of their mother's purses like they're supposed to.
Dr. Obvious says: games that are in shops make more money than games that aren't.
this won't matter. Right now a big part of PC Sales are people like us ( geeks more or less) that check up on gaming websites , subscribe to gaming forums etc. Soon the game industry will be as big as the movie industry ( not in terms of money , in terms of popularity around the globe) , and the largest portion of sales will be normal people buying/renting a game they see on a shelf. It won't matter if it has been delayed 3 years, because they weren't waiting for it. Just like Kill Bill. This movie has been delayed for 2 years or so , for Uma Therman to have her baby. I am sure there were some movie fanatics that were all " OMG DELAYED bS" etc , but for 95% of the audience it didn't matter. The movie is out , it's good , so you watch it. It's just a matter of time before this is the case in games.
-- TRUST ME! I KNOW WHAT I'M DOING!
Gotta disagree with you there. Diablo 2 came out in summer 2000. It had no 3D accelleration, and couldn't display in resolution greater than 640x480. Dated graphics can be looked over simply by a game being "fun". Just look at the sales of the lates Tetris title. Even on modern consoles, it's not all that flashy, but people buy it anyway. Compare that to the masses of games that are flasy, gorgeous, visually impressive, but about as much fun as plucking your nose hairs.
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
I would rather wait for a good game.
Lets look at MegaMan X7, I love megaman, but this was rushed, and it sucked.
MegaMan Zero2, unrushed and wonderful.
Nintendo took their time on the Metriod games and they are wonderful to play.
Halo 2 keeps getting pushed back, but I rather wait a few months and love it then to have it early and be sorry I bought it.
Yeah delays suck, but I would rather have a delay then a crappy-ass game that was rushed to market.
After playing the demo, I am seriously doubting if I should be buying a game that could as well be made as a Mod for UT2003.
And yes, of course UT2003 had alot of revamped stuff out of UT, but in the end the whole new look of the engine gave it a totally new feel : Now I just don't know if it's gonna be worth my precious money once the big games are about to release (Doom3 and HL2)
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.
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
That was one of Atari's mistakes. The term 'Cartridge Glut' ring a bell? People begamn producing games faster than sewing machines with the only interest being to create carts to make money and screw leaps forward, no one could tell what games were good cause most of them sucked, and bam - no one could make money. The market was flooded with games and no one company could make enough money to make it. Imagic fell, Atari collapsed, Appollo imploded. By pushing the envelope and constantly inventing, companies distinguish themselves, stay ahead of the pack, and make money.
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
Yea delays hurt the industry, but look at what its doing to its customer base. Take the example of valve. They are creating a furvor around halflife 2. "It'll be out by sept. 30. And here take a look at these MOVIES" Sept 30: "JUST KIDDING! oh.. and btw a hacker stole the code too. Hope you didnt get your hopes up! Have another hit of screenshots/movies." Its creating an obsession/addiction...
the bastards.
Im still waiting on the edge of my seat for hl2. Some of my pals just know it will be out any day now.
Most people aren't thought about after they're gone. "I wonder where Rob got the plutonium" is better than most get.
I work for a games testing company in Europe, and it's true that game publishers always have to move their release dates, since games are ALWAYS buggy (if it's not compatibility issues it will probably be functional issues). Games for XBOX and PS2 also need to pass the certification at Microsoft and Sony, and they really flag you for the most minor reasons (since no company wants to meet their users in a courtroom etc)... I can really understand this.
Blizzard and ID are 2 different type of game companies that both say
:p
Blizz "hay were making a game"
Kid "OMFG when is it going to be out? Is it out yet?"
Blizz "STFU you'll get it when it's done"
ID "Hay were making a game"
Kid "OMFG when is it going to be out? Is it out yet?"
ID "STFU you'll get it when it's done"
Neither of those companies will hurt for sales...they have a loyal fanbase, just the same as SE does with it's FF series...the good companies own our souls and we can't not give in to them.
OH wait this is slashdot so maybe your talking about those open source games that are announced and then never come out or are released in varying alpha and beta stages over a 6 year period and never finished...yeah I guess that would hurt your company.
Ave Molech Setting
Theres once were some games called Duke Nukem,
With lots of Blood, Gore, Guts, and Pukem.
But the constant delays
For infinite days,
Made us all so damn mad we've rebuked em.
(And just for the sadism's sake, as it is near Valentines day, I'll go ahead and shoot myself in the foot and post this logged in)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order- Ed Howdershelt Via Tass
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
Must...resist...urge....to...make..Duke Nukem Forever post!
I don't know about the rest of you, but I had planed to buy HL2 and then upgrade my hardware to run it if I had to. So no HL2 no new hardware. I dont think I am the only one that does this, and it would hurt the hardware people as well.
The delays don't kill a game. A bad game, released early, will still not sell. A good game, released late, will still sell. While a good game can become bad if forced to release early (*cough* Temple of Elemental Evil *cough*), I'd rather have the delay and have a completed game.
The real problem is the hyping of games. They're hyping games that won't be out for over a year. I'm constantly surprised by games that just came out (I thought Chrome came out months ago, based on the hype back then). I suspect other people are, too.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
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.
Simple solution is for marketing to get their act together. Otherwise the only alternative it getting games like the latest in the Tomb Raider series, games that shouldn't have been released.
How about waiting until the games in in post production? Either advertize games in production with unspecified dates or dates so far in the future that you can gaurantee it. Then only as development completes do you reverse the estimete in a conservitive mannor.
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...
Back off that flamebait, friend - I *AM* the engineer.
If you adopt a "We will ship this when it is done" then it never will be done, for a variety of reasons:
Sometimes having a firm deadline is a wonderfully focusing motivator - the engineer will say "This is a cool idea - I will save it for AFTER the release", the marketing guys will say "Well, the customers want this really cool feature, but the return on investment isn't enough to jepordize the ship date, so we'll put it in later", the Q/A guys say "We'd better check this NOW, so any problems can get fixed before release data", and you actually make progress.
Of course, when the deadlines are not set with the buy-in of the engineers, the marketing people, and upper management, but rather are set for some highly arbitrary date....
www.eFax.com are spammers
As I sit here, after just playing a bit of halo on my xbox, I'm thinking about how the release of halo 2 has been pushed back to fall of this year. It doesn't bother me so much, as long as the game itself is good. One could say that it would be better for bungie to release a half-cooked halo 2 now, in the hope of selling more units, but I think that if bungie wants to release one of those games that are pretty much immortal and that I'll remember for a long time (such as the first halo), then they should release it when it is properly finished.
Reminds of Diablo 2 being pushed back over a year from its initial release date. For that matter, most of blizzard's games get pushed back, but the proof is in the pudding, blizzard puts the finishing touches on the games, making them top notch, and hence they move huge volumes at the stores. Did any company ever make as huge a return by releasing a buggy, unfinished product?
What's the big rush anyways? There are so many games out at any given time, that are good and worthwhile to play, that it doesn't bug me for a second if a company decides to delay their game to make it a much more quality product. I'll pay for a quality product, I won't pay for something that was pushed out the door, simply because the game company needed to ship something.
As for duke nukem forever, I'll be interested to see what they will unleash on us after all that development time. I wouldn't be surprised if it's a much cooler game than we all imagine it will be. But, that's for time to tell.
If they release a game *late* that still requires patches, isn't that a double whammy? As an aside, what is the most important missing feature caused by not enough devel time? For me it would be in FF7 when they whad planned to be able to revive Aris(sp?) but canned that idea because of time constraints.
True genius is grasping a situation like a peice of fruit, and peircing it just right so that it drains dry.
There are some companies, in my book, who can pull such delays off. Valve Software, id Software, just to name a few. If they want to delay a game, then good, take the time you need to release a quality product. In my opinion, rushing to meet a release date is a bad idea. Haste makes waste has always been true. But, delaying so long that your product (that at the time was a ground-breaking, barrier-pushing product) becomes out-dated pre-release is also bad (Diaktana (SP?)). With the industry moving as fast as it is, it becomes real difficult to keep up and still release a high-quality game (as far as PC is concerned). I believe that thats a reason as to why more and more games that come out are very dissapointing. And price will also have a lot to do with the problem. Some people really can't afford to spend $50+ dollars on a single game. Another reason why a game may suck is because of a lack of balance between the two sides of games (single and multiplayer). In todays world, multiplayer is a must. One reason why I thought that id's Quake III arena was not any good, was because it was just a deathmatch for $50 dollars. (Another reason why I didn't care to much for Q3 is because it was written in C but, that's a different story) A game needs a good single player game and have multiplayer on the side with room for mods to be made. That's were Valve did right with Half-Life. A good, mostly challenging single-player game with a multi-player game with a really good SDK for mods.
Are you telling me that you don't see the connection between government and laughing at people? - Interviewer
I actually think that more games should be delayed. Having worked on that side of the industry for quite a few years now (I am speaking almost strictly on the console side). As the transition into fully 3D games especially in the console arena has become complete the number of quality titles, and the quality of the overall marketplace has weakened significantly.
There are a number of reasons for this, first and for most is developers insistance on 3D games. Back in the previous generation of games there was still a good number of 2D, 2.5D and polygonal but not fully 3D games out. Companies spend far too much time trying to make fully 3D engines that look good while paying now attention to how they play. This is mainly with regards to adventure games, platformers, and first person style games. There is a big emphasis on reusing the same already flawed 3D engines rather then improving upon them.
Very few companies have the resources to release a "great" game in say an 18 month development perioid. The result is that many companies try and rather then miss their holiday season deadline rush bad games to the market.
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... --
Nintendo had this figured out when it had the monopoly back in the 80s. Nintendo Power, the Nintendo controlled magazine, was the most read magazine by kids.
Did they hype up coming products ever? They published tips, level guides, cheat codes, etc. They wrote articles about games you could buy and encouraged people to go buy games.
They also didn't have enough of that game in stock so you hopefully would buy another and come back later to get the one you wanted, but, hey, that's a monopoly.
Instead of talking about games you can't buy for a long time the focus needs to be more on games you can buy right now. Before a game comes out you read months of previews. Then one month of reviews and that's it, it's on to hyping another game.
The game industry is often compared to the movie industry. Sure, you can read a bit about a movie coming out with xxx staring in it once in a while, but 95% of people who go see a movie don't see hype about it a year before it comes out. They pretty much don't even learn about it until a couple weeks or one month before it comes out. In the game industry most people know about games long before they are close to coming out.
Some games have plot (and in exceptional cases about as good as your average fantasy book). Why shouldn't they be able to delay? Some (though not all) of the books we still read as great literature were edited and rescripted for 20 years. Screw cash flow and give me quality!
Around sometime last year, I downloaded a copy of The Thing soon after it came out (I try before I buy) so anyhow- I play through the game, get to the end, kill the end boss monster thing of DOOM, and right as it dies.....*POW* the game crashes. I'm glad that I can download games and try them before paying, if I had paid $50 for The Thing, and it had crashed on me just as I was beating the game, I would have been VERY upset. (Note that this was a very common bug that was soon patched.)
Patch or no, failing to catch bugs like that is simply unacceptable. I pay for games that are worth my money.
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.
For my money, wired is a fun interesting source for gadgets and stuff, but it's too sensationalist technology. It feels to me like it treats tech still as some miracle or black-box that is to be possessed but not truly known. It is just like wired to treat this like some groundbreaking news when video games and technology are, at heart, just like any other industry.
Here is a little history of Wired. Back in the 60's there was a really cool magazine called Whole Earth Catalog. It was a large inch-thick newsprint magazine with sources for thousands of interesting environmental and alternate life-style gadgets. Unfortunately the magazine's success went to its two creators' heads and they started thinking of themselves as the source of cool, the definers of cool, and everyone else as uncool. When they had the planet-sized ego to actually re-name the Earth in one of their magazines I stopped reading it. Evidently so did a whole lot of others because they went out of business soon after we no longer lived on planet Earth. Maybe the Post Office couldn't figure out how to deliver to another planet.
The creators of Wired are the same people who created Whole Earth Catalog and they still have the same Gaia-sized egos. They've come a long way from compost spreaders to iPOD replacements, but they still see themselves as the definers of cool and everyone else as hopelessly uncool or backwards.
A few years ago I read my one and only Wired Magazine and thought "What egomaniacs write this thing!". I didn't find out until later that it was the same old WEC crowd. In Wired's favor at least it didn't try to re-name the Earth, but who could read green and pink type on a red background anyway?
You might also worry about completely losing the respect of the gamer market by pushing something out too early.
I for one don't like to buy a game on release day and then have to wait for days until they've patched it up to stable and playable.
After I paid $50 for the bug filled, completely unfinished, over-marketed piece of crap game that was 'Enter the Matrix', I'll be very leary of ever purchasing something from Shiny again.
Due to their deadline, they are now in the unfortunate position of having to re-earn my respect. Aka, no impulse or first day release buys of Shiny software. I'm sure the shareholders are happy about that.
Replay value. Often, I'll play through the game on 'easy' then work my way up through the levels of difficulty (good way to find easter eggs/etc), its also a good way to catch stuff you miss the first time around.
I've heard this argument again and again that 'if it's really good I'll buy a copy just to put on the shelf to reward the developers.'. It's bullshit.
Actually, it's far from bullshit. Recently I downloaded Call of Duty, played it through, and liked it to much I went out and bought a copy, because it was worth the money. The same thing I did with Battlefield 1942, UT2003, UT, Quake 3 Arena, C&C Generals, and Half-Life (and hopefully Half-Life 2 sometime soon!) All of these games impressed me enough that I decided that they were worth the $40-$50, and went out and actually paid for a legit copy.
The reason I usually download, play, then buy is because I once made the mistake of falling for the hype behind Black & White. I read the glowing reviews, interviews, etc; and ran off to the store to shell out $50 of my hard-earned money ($50 is a lot when you're a highschool student with a fast-food job). I installed the game, played it for a bit, and realized that it completely failed to deliver. $50 down the drain. Never again, I vowed. So now I download first, and the software developers can prove to me that their game is worth my money. Yes, when I download a game that have no intention of paying for, it is stealing. I don't deny that. But more often than not, if its good, I'll buy a legit copy.