Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

> Why ship the game, then? Oh, right, Q4.

This is how you get people to never buy your games again. Please whenever you plan to release a game, add an entire year to that date, but work as if its due in exactly 1 year prior, and internally re-adjust and figure out "if I were to release in a month, what's the MVP", once you have a stable game, use the rest of your 9 months or so (assuming it takes 3 more months) and polish and add in any nice to haves that make the game feel more complete. I feel like Starfield could have used with maybe 6 months of content-only additions. Cities don't feel like in Fallout or Elder Scrolls, too many useless NPCs running about. I liked being able to stalk people into their homes and know their routines, its a little harder in Starfield to figure out who even is a non-useless NPC.

I got sidetracked, my original point was going to be, anytime Bethesda releases a new Elder Scrolls, Fallout or now Starfield esque game, the first thing I hear about is all the bugs, despite being a day 1 player and rarely running into bugs that really mean anything crucial (like crashing). Once you leave a rotten taste in your customer bases' mouth some of them will refuse to buy your game even if its the GOTY.

If you are a PM at a major game studio, start making a shift in how games are poorly made. It is really embarassing. I used to justify not pirating games because I know a lot of hard work goes into them as a developer myself, but with how crappy some games come out, I'm not sure I can justify buying or pirating games anymore, they're just so awful. Also all the DRM that does nothing to pirates, and ruins gamers systems in various unexpected ways.

The only thing worse for a company than burning customers who might choose not buy their next product is if they fold before having the opportunity to release another product.

Early in my career I was a minor participant in discussions like this (albeit not in the video game space) and no one was in denial about the massive reputational cost of prematurely releasing buggy software, they were just balancing it against the increasing probability of bankruptcy.

Established companies with deep pockets and startups with shoestring development teams and patient investors might be able to weather a delay of six months or more, but most companies don't have that kind of runway and must constantly weigh the bottomless desire for more time to polish and the need for cashflow to make payroll.

(Thankfully the last couple companies I've worked for have had deep pockets and a strong desire to protect their reputations, but I appreciate that this is a privileged position.)

Very good point, which is why I think its crucial to also stop and plan on fixing bugs as #1 priority and descope some features, or hide them altogether until they are ready. I can appreciate how complicated these things are, everything is a tradeoff. Thank you for your insight, I've mostly worked for reasonably large companies so I have not yet been able to see things from the perspective of a much smaller company first-hand.

Yes, the company I work for now is medium-sized but it is stable and run by engineers so fixing bugs take precedence over shipping a feature by some artificial deadline. At the end of the day our customers and field folks understand that our feature roadmap is an estimate and not a promise. From what I can tell, many of our competitors operate similarly.

But this approach is extremely difficult in some domains. If companies in a particular domain routinely make what you consider to be obvious mistakes there are a couple possibilities. It could certainly be herd mentality and they just need someone to remind them to do more QA and to fix bugs before adding features. But it could also be incentives that resulted in the companies that cut corners outcompeting companies that did things "the right way".

This strikes me as a rather idealistic viewpoint.

Let's say we wanted to adopt this stance. The world doesn't stop turning. How do you fill the year of gap you've now introduced? What do the quarterly financials for the next year look like? Is your plan to just tell all shareholders, "Our company plans to make $0 in the next year because we want to implement this practice which might make you more money in the long run - but no guarantees on that except that we'll definitely take longer to build"?

Yes, exactly like that, but instead of using a sarcastic tone, use a matter of fact tone.

"You want A game or you want THE game?"

Maybe add a slide showing how much concentrated toward the very best game revenues are.

But the finance people don't want THE game. They want A game that is ready to release that fits into their quarterly financial statements. Predictable cash flow has a lot of value. It's not just about knocking every opportunity out of the park.

Companies absolutely DO NOT want TWO games ready to release at the same time because the marketing attempts will cannibalize each other. So, when one game takes longer to develop than expected, and a release slot opens up, another game must fill that slot, even at the cost of quality, because releasing multiple games at the same time is untenable.

Blood, Sweat, and Pixels covers this in great detail: https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Sweat-Pixels-Triumphant-Turbule...

But these deadlines are all arbitrary.

Game studios want to plan to release a game in X months; the commenter you're replying to wants them to plan to release a game in X + 12 months.

Why not plan on releasing the game in X-6 months? Is their plan to tell shareholders "Our company plans to make $0 in the next 6 months because we want to implement this practice... etc?"

A company can also stagger game releases; work on more than one game simultaneously, offset by 12 months or so. You still get a yearly - or whateverly - release cycle, but you avoid the burnout and the bad press of a rushed release.

A company works on multiple games at the same time, yes. Some of those games are exploratory and have a low likelihood of seeing the light of day. Some are rehashes of proven formulas with good confidence that they'll be profitable.

Something goes awry. The "known profitable" game is very much so behind schedule. An executive decision is made to give development another year.

There is now a gap in the release schedule. Leadership shops around and talks to the other teams. They say, "If you can promise me that you can ship at this time then I can promise you your game will ship. If not, then I can't make any promises because our primary game is taking the launch slot a year from now and the world might be entirely different in two years."

Those leading the less important game go back to their team with the news. They say, "Hey. We have a real opportunity here for this game to see the light of day, but we will need to make concessions to do so. Do you want to try for it?"

Most sane teams respond by saying "Yes, we will make that work" because no creative wants to work on a game that fails to see the light of day.

This results in a game being shipped in a state that is perceived as being rushed by consumers. The game was rushed, but there was never a guarantee that the game would release if not rushed.

Is this an idyllic scenario? No, but it is a pretty good scenario compared to what could've happened.

The answer is to have your cake and eat it, with Early Access.

You get a stream of cash whenever you launch an even somewhat finished game. You get a mountain of early feedback and real world testing, without the negative PR. And then, when the game is ready, you do the full launch + marketing with (from what I can tell) basically no PR/hype penalty from being in early access, as its a new game as far as the storefronts are concerned.

Maybe I am missing a big drawback, but it seems like such a no brainer. And it clearly works at any scale, see Rimworld (lone dev) and Baldurs Gate 3 (mega dev team), which coincidentally are among the most critically acclaimed games ever.

I agree, this is the sweet spot. It's a shame early access is full of worse games. It's funny because BG3 had a lot cut off from the early access for a while, which is what I would suggest, cut out all the incomplete things, feature flag what isn't working reasonably well, and enable it once its ready, much easier with Early Access.

Yeah, the most successful early access campaigns are started when the game is "finished and playable," but not necessarily complete

Rimworld was exactly like this too. It had a forum alpha, then a beta, then a polished early access release. The mod community was already raging before it even hit Steam. All this made the game that much more impactful when it hit EA and more features started rolling in.

imagine releasing a hollywood movie when there's only placeholder vfx because finishing the vfx will take another year

I'm not aware of how long this game had been in development, but with Starfield, Fallout etc, they're buggy at launch, but they at least have the content to justify release.

Sometimes the "release because it's Q4" approach is important simply because the game is such an irredeemable mess that delaying won't really help. I think simulation games are also likely to be more prone to this kind of thing because the content is more "centralized" (ie in Fallout you can have dozens of teams simultaneously working on unrelated side quests, but not really in a simulation game).

KSP2 being a glaring example of this kind of thing.

> This is how you get people to never buy your games again.

Every big studio/publisher does this, they still sell their games.

That’s how you run out of runway.

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