Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacques_chester | Hacker News Reader

At least 43-years old, if the first edition of The Mythical Man-Month can be counted. Over 50 years if you consider the OS/360 project that book was inspired by. Centuries if you consider prototyping generally as an engineering practice.

It's pretty sound, in my view -- AAA budgets are gigantic. Spending a few million on a failed prototype is probably a wise investment compared to spending hundreds of millions on a failed product.

Edit: original title was "Why I'm using a 30 year old method", hence my reference to the age of the method.

View on HN

> spending hundreds of millions on a failed product

Where are all these failed products though? I can name Mass Effect: Andromeda and basically nothing else in recent years. Hollywood has far more big flops.

Big-budget games are almost guaranteed some degree of success. If you follow the proven formulas and don't mess up, the game sells.

I think you would find quite a few in the MMORPG space, other then that you're probably right - big budgets are usually reserved for "sure things" such as rehashing popular franchises like COD, Battlefield, etc.

Then again Star Citizen probably has its day of reckoning coming.

If big budget games would be a guaranteed success you wouldn't read about studio closures and layoffs every few months. Also you never hear about failed products, a game that you know about is more likely to succeed because obviously it was marketed well. Usually failed games sink without a trace and are forgotten within days or weeks.

Projects get killed in production pretty often. Also, if you go through releases on steam, there is a lot of stuff that is unlikely to earn enough money.

A lot of bad publicity and public fights is not only way to fail, often simply nobody cares.

Mass Effect Andromeda isn't even in the discussion when it comes to the largest commercial flops. It probably sold 2-3 million copies in the launch window. (But yes, bad enough that they thought it best to suspend the franchise and even kill the DLC).

From last year, Agents of Mayhem was really in a league of it's own for AAA games. It had Steam sales numbers of ~20k a month after launch, so <100k across all the platforms combined. From the year before that the most high profile flops would probably be Battleborn or Evolve.

1. The projects that fail are often cancelled rather than bad releases, because they go so far off the rails that they are not even functioning, saleable products. When a film production goes wrong, you still have footage, you can still use post-production and editing work to make some sense of it and fit it into a 120 minute package - a Hollywood film typically doesn't get released with e.g. cuts shown in an unintended order, actors speaking out of sync, or visual effects accidentally shown upside down. A game that goes wrong is more like broken software, and does not function even on that kind of technical level.

2. There are plenty of games that fly under the radar, and the press will give them one review to lament their failure and then a follow-up when the studio closes and there's a massive layoff. Stories about failing games don't get traffic like stories about popular, beloved games. This has only become more true with the onset of digital storefronts.

So if you don't look, you only see a stream of hit products.

I work in game development. In my experience for every big title that makes it to shelves, there are several more that never see the light of day.

Some of those were axed early on in development, but I have personally worked on a game that was cancelled after spending at least $10M.

Publishers know when to cut their losses.

if you google "AAA game flops 2017" you will get an endless series of listicles naming multi-million dollar flops from last year alone.

During the MMO rush due to WoW successes there were lots like Tabula Rasa, Star Wars Galaxies [1]. Curt Schilling was even part of one that entangled Rhode Island state funds at 38 studios for Copernicus. [2] Cheyenne Mountain, where I worked for a while on Unity games, unfortunately never released Stargate Worlds MMO and burned through 10s of millions, I think 60-70 million by the end. The main problem was warring design teams, new tech not ready for primetime and builds not happening early and often and really Unreal wasn't the best for large MMOs back then (UE3). A recent article "Confessions of an Unreal Engine 4 Engineering Firefighter" highlights not using continuous builds as being a big problem in failed games [3]

> Make Builds and Test Them: Imagine a game has a 2-year development deadline. Imagine the first playtest happening 1 year and 9 months into development. This happens. Make regular builds of your game and playtest them, even starting from week one. If you are a serious game development company, you probably should have an automated build pipeline of some sort. Pro-tip: Automation is cheaper and more effective than human labor.

Large games like this are generally smarter today taking it to market with smaller teams and getting funding and alpha/beta feedback all along the way. Fortnite for instance has been in development with available builds for Epic using Unreal Engine 4 almost since inception and became a better game for prototyping/early and often releases.

[1] https://www.pcgamer.com/the-biggest-mmo-failures-in-history/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/38_Studios

[3] https://allarsblog.com/2018/03/16/confessions-of-an-unreal-e...

I don't know the story behind it, but fortnight was adapted into a PUBG type free-for-all mode which seems to have helped its popularity. Being able to jump on a trend like that so quickly shows impressive flexibility. They didn't need to make a whole new game to cash in, the ROI is probably crazy.

Yeah I would say Fortnite was influenced by Overwatch and PUBG and maybe even Splattoon, but originally probably started out as Epic's Overwatch type game that Blizzard was successful on.

Star Wars Galaxies came before WoW, better examples would probably be Rift, Age of Conan, Warhammer Online or Aion

You are right though World of Warcraft and Starwars Galaxies came out around the same time (mid 2003, late-2004).

I should have said Everquest (1999) as that one really started the craze leading to WoW.

But the WoW success is what led the insane MMO bubble/hype as it broke all types of records and everyone wanted to be the next World of Warcraft.

When I worked at Cheyenne Mountain on Stargate Worlds, part of the job was understanding WoW and playing WoW to level 70, then 80 on Wrath of the Lich King, our CEO had done it twice, everyone there played WoW because everyone wanted to replicate it.

Turns out WoW was an outlier not the norm or the future, but every game company wanted subscription money not one and done purchases and it led to tons of investment and hype.

Sony even couldn't replicate Everquest with Everquest 2, Planetside nor Starwars Galaxies, though I loved Planetside.

Duke Nukem Forever

Every AAA studio closure takes down a AAA game in development, e.g. Visceral's unnamed SW game as of couple months ago.

A few recent released AAA flops: MoH:Warfighter, Sea of Thieves, Titanfall 1 (and 2?), Battleborn, For Honor, Prey, Lawbreakers, Paragon etc. etc.

Diablo 3 did pretty poorly because of an un-fun system. No Man's Sky was a flop, a horrible flop.

Both games have been heavily changed and built upon to make them fun and worth their price.

My guess is that the marketing budget is a big percentage of the costs so abandoning a failed project even several years after development is a viable strategy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com