3d ago

When making lots of small games is more sustainable than making one big one

www.polygon.com

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Always has been.
There was a podcast that Irrational did before putting out BioShock Infinite that would interview game developers and other creatives, and they had one that interviewed the BioWare doctors. BioWare was always set up to be a multi project studio, and Irrational was a single project studio. At that time in the industry, lots of companies were pivoting from the former to the latter, due to how many more hands on deck a 7th gen console AAA game took to make. BioWare was set up the way it was so that one underperforming game could easily be carried by another reasonably successful one. By the end of that interview, I thought you'd have to be nuts to employ that many people and only work on one game at a time. Sure enough, Irrational buckled under that weight right after shipping BioShock Infinite's DLC, and modern, single-project BioWare is looking worse for wear.
- I also remember when people would constantly say that games were too short. I didn't play them at the time, but there was a period when everyone was complaining about waiting for a long time for games - paying a lot for a game, and then finishing it in 5-7 hours and never playing it again.
  
  That led into the used market, I suppose (a boogeyman for the games industry that birthed lots of the worst monetization today). I never really had that problem, outside of outliers like Pokemon Snap that were unusually short. In the 00s, it was pretty common to get 8-15 hours for an action game that you paid $50-$60 for, often times with multiplayer modes alongside the single player modes, and that felt like great value to me at the time.
  
  I've never had that problem myself either. I took a break there for quite some time with my gaming but I did grow up with it, and I have returned to it. I can't think of a time when I have played a game - even a story based one, and liked it and haven't returned to it at least once more. I think I've noticed though, I am kind of a gaming minority. I think the funniest thing I can say about games is that back when I played with a big rowdy group of guys a game would last however long it lasted because the guys would fight and swap for whoever was controlling the character and we'd play that shit into the ground regardless of how long a game was. The last system I had was a PS2, so idk but I knew a lot of complaints started coming out PS3 era. Snap even was a game that we played like crazy. I had a friend who had a N64, and Pokemon was so hot! And we'd all just sit there and see if we could do "perfect" runs even though it was pretty much the same game over and over again.
  Speaking of trends, I mean I guess these things have always existed but I think the PS3 began the genre my girlfriend lovingly describes as "penis games" which have hyper-masculine protagonist smashing the shit out of everything with dynamic lighting. I don't mean to offend anyone with this, but the trend is still here (I am just guessing it's Unreal graphics). I know it existed before the PS3, but it really took off then and was part of what actually turned me off of gaming as a whole.

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