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While I agree with a lot about what he mentioned. The thing that always irks me when people talk about this is the cost. I understand that there are a lot of factors going into this that make it more expensive to make games. Like inflation, new technology, employee wages, and more actual work. All of these have gotten more expensive and that makes sense. But at the same time I’d say 60% of AAA games that have come out within the last 4 years have been anywhere from mediocre to hot garbage. You dump millions upon millions of dollars into games that nobody wants to play (with a few exceptions, of course) and act all surprised when you don’t make $300 million back. You can’t tell me you didn’t know, at any point in development, that Halo Infinite wasn’t going to sell like hot cakes. Nobody could be that oblivious. There was a good game somewhere in there. The “higher ups” decided to fuck everything up. And those “higher ups” include you, sir.
Also, spending money doesn’t equal to spending money well. It seems like so many triple (“quadruple”) A games spend the first half of their development throwing money into a furnace. I don’t know if it’s normal to start development from scratch multiple times, but it sure seems like it’s becoming the norm now
If Halo Infinite had come out in a games production culture like what existed in 2005, then we would today be getting hyped up about the next chapter in the Master Chief’s story. Instead, Halo Infinite is a 6 year project with a bad name that somewhere deserved another year or two in the oven before release.
I’m not a fan of the massive amounts of crunch that appeared in Halo 2 and I’m not a fan of its story being truncated and the mess that made of Halo 3. But damn, at least we had something! Throw another year or two into the development of Halo 2, let the workers go home to their families once in a while, and you’d have had something amazing. Halo Infinite got another two years of development and came out passable.
I want the other two chapters of the Reclaimer saga we were promised. I want three games fighting the Didact, and an exploration of the ethical themes of the UEG following in the footsteps of the fascist-ass forerunners and what that means about humanity. And it should not have taken until 2021 to get that.
Throw another year or two into the development of Halo 2, let the workers go home to their families once in a while, and you’d have had something amazing
So, that’s gonna have some financial impact.
It sounds like Halo 2 was done in 10 months, which is pretty short. So, okay, say you add another 24 months. Gotta pay your operating costs of about 340% what you originally were going to pay.
That also means that it takes longer until the game can start being sold – you’re basically “paying interest” on any capital tied up until sales start. Say the cost of capital is 5% per year. Your first month is gonna cost another 15% finance overhead instead of under 5% because of the time value of money.
Now, I’m not saying that this is a bad thing to do. I think that it’s generally the case that if you throw more dev time and money at a game, it gets better. But…that isn’t free. I see people complaining about game prices, and what I’m asking is that if a game costs a couple times as much to make, are consumers willing to pay a couple times as much?
Bruh, the release of Halo 2 was a phenomenon. That series was shitting gold two decades ago. A few years later, Microsoft was selling 360s at a loss to make their money back on Halo and other games.
The restructuring of the engine meant that there was no playable build of Halo 2 for nearly a year, and assets and environments produced by art and design teams could not be prototyped, bottlenecking development.[16] Griesemer recalled that development was “moving backwards”, and after E3 the team realized that much of what the team had worked on for the past two years would have to be scrapped.
So, Halo 2 actually spent 3 years in development, it’s just that only 10 months of that was useful work. They could afford another year of development.
It’s because most game devs are owned by publicly traded companies; shareholders searching for constantly improved earnings man’s that games are rushed out the door, incomplete and packed to the gills with monetisation.
Balder’s Gate 3 is a perfect counter-point to this mindset; games can only launch once - so launch it properly.
As an aside; I do wish that there was a millennial billionaire who grew up playing some Konami classic titles, and were in a position to take over the company, take it private and focus on restoring it to its former glory. But there is no such thing as a benevolent billionaire, so it’s just a pipe dream.
Developers finally waking up to realize that games on more devices == more possible sales.
Yet it took Valve and Apple bending over backward to make playing games on Linux and macOS practical. And yet we still get very little testing until day 1 launch.
What’s even more appalling is delayed PC releases in general, even for non-exclusives. It should be the other way around since it’s more work to optimize for console.
So they’re learning, I guess, but in a really odd way.
I like Phil more than Don Mattrick, but the real honest truth of why this is happening is a combination of factors that has made things terrible finally coming to a head.
The biggest long-term one is the fact that the game industry has leaned for too long on the fact that they would always have a new steady reliable crop of disposable eager young developers and has made being a game developer of any kind a completely untenable long-term career.
We have no “grizzled ancient” masters. At least not in the US or any Western dev house.
It is a completely horrible career. I dreamed as a kid of making games when I grew up. I went to grad-school for it and worked in it for only 5 years before being at a studio that closed only 2 years after we were making $8 million / day at our peak daily revenue.
After that, I found a job that paid 2x with zero crunch at a regular software company that I remained at until literally January this year.
Why would I go back to the far more unstable field of game dev when I have a family to take care of, and a mortgage I need to be able to pay reliably?
At this point, we have only maybe a handful of game dev studio heads that have been involved in designing games for more than a few years.
We have Ken Levine - who has changed studios multiple times. We have Joseph Staten - who did his best to push for the good parts of Halo Infinite. We have Cory Barlog - who made modern God of War and is still working for Sony Santa Monica for now. We have some good long-term indie devs, we have Insomniac and to a lesser extent Respawn (as Apex Legends seems to have become their only focus anymore) as game companies that are doing things pretty well practice-wise… and that’s about it.
Cliff Blezinski quit and got into investing. Neil Druckmann is focused more these days on the Last of Us TV show.
Everything else is either Valve - who doesn’t actually make games anymore - or a garbage company that is absolute shit. Our studios are mostly run by trend-chasing bean-counting executives like Bobby Kotick who never touched game dev from any place except a quarterly earnings perspective and looking at whatever type of game is making the most money that they can try to force their devs to poorly emulate and pivot whatever their current multi-year project is… more toward - regardless of what the game’s original design was.
This means nothing is being spear-headed by anyone who has learned to figure out what they’re doing.
Meanwhile, people like Shigeru Miyamoto has been making games at Nintendo for 4 decades at this point. The top guys at all the major Japanese studios (especially Nintendo) have become the masters when it comes to game design because they’ve literally done it all their lives.
As such, they know how to make fun games, and are a part of games studios now generally run by older people who have been making them for a long part of their lives.
TL;DR - the games industry in the West didn’t give a shit about retaining talent long-term - and as such is run only by bean counting trend-chasing MBAs and staffed by 20-somethings who are learning as they go, burning out, and then pivoting to general software when they decide to start a family.
