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nanoUFO @sh.itjust.works

Gabe Newell on why game delays are okay: 'Late is just for a little while. Suck is forever.'

174 comments

  • I don't disagree that often an early release can really kill a game. I think that Fallout 76 would have done much better had it not gone out the door for a while, and I think that the poor quality at release really hurt reception; despite Bethesda putting a lot of post-release work into the game, a lot of people aren't going to go back and look at it. CDPR and Cyberpunk 2077 might have done better by spending more time or deciding to cut the scope earlier in development too. But, a few points:

    • First, game dev is not free. The QA folks, the programmers, all that -- they are getting paid. Someone has to come up with money to pay for that. When someone says "it needs more time", they're also saying "someone needs to put more money in".
    • Second, time is money. If I invest $1 and expect to get $2 back, when I get that $2 matters a lot. If it's in a year, that's a really good deal. If it's in 20 years (adjusting for inflation), that's a really bad deal -- you have a ton of lower-risk things than you could do in that time. Now, we generally aren't waiting 20 years, but it's true that each additional month until there is revenue does cut into the return. That's partly why game publishers like preorders -- it's not just because it transfers risk of the game sucking from them to the customers, but also because money sooner is worth more.
    • Third, I think that there are also legitimate times when a game's development is mismanaged, and even if it makes the publisher the bad guy, sometimes they have to be in a position of saying "this is where we draw the line". Some games have dev processes that just go badly. Take, say, Star Citizen. I realize that there are still some people who are still convinced that Star Citizen is gonna meet all their dreams, but for the sake of discussion, let's assume that it isn't, that development on the game has been significantly mismanaged. There is no publisher in charge of the cash flow, no one party to say "This has blown way past many deadlines. You need to focus on cutting what needs to be cut and getting something out the door. No more pushing back deadlines and taking more cash; if the game does well, you can do DLC or a sequel."

    EDIT: I think that in the case of Cities: Skylines 2, sure, you can probably improve things with dev time. But I also think that the developer probably could have legitimately looked at where things were and said "okay, we gotta start cutting/making tradeoffs" earlier in the process. Like, maybe it doesn't look as pretty to ship with reduced graphical defaults, but maybe that's just what should have been done. Speaking for myself, I don't care that much about ground-level views or simulated individuals in a city-builder game, and that's a lot of where they ran into problems -- they're spending a lot of resources and taking on a lot of risk for something that I just don't think is all that core to a city-builder game. I think that a lot of the development effort and problems could have been avoided had the developer decided earlier-on that they didn't need to have the flashiest city sim ever.

    Sometimes a portion of the game just isn't done and you might be better-off without it. Bungie has had developers comment that maybe they shouldn't have shipped with The Library level in Halo. My understanding is that some of the reason that different portions of the level look similar is that originally, the level was intended to be more open, and they couldn't make it perform acceptably that way and had to close off areas from each other. I didn't dislike as much as some other people, but maybe it would have been better not to ship it, or to significantly reduce the scope of the level.

    I mean, given an infinite amount of dev time and resources, and competent project management, you can fix just about everything. Some dev timelines are unrealistic, and sometimes a game can be greatly-improved with a relatively-small amount of time. My point is that sometimes the answer is that you gotta cut, gotta start cutting earlier, and then rely on a solid release and putting whatever else you wanted to do into DLC or maybe a sequel.

    I won't lie: That's the kind of talk that really makes me wish Valve would quit playing around with Steam and weird hardware experiments, and go back to making new games.

    I don't agree at all. There's one Valve and Steam. If it's not Valve, it's gonna be Microsoft or someone, and I'd much rather have Valve handling the PC game storefront than Microsoft. There are lots of game developers and publishers out there that could develop a game competently, but not many in Valve's position.

    • I think that pretty much every great game, especially those boxed and released before digital distribution, was made by a passionate and talented team.

      I’m just about certain that every team on those games would have at least one person pushing for more development time to make it just a little bit better.

      It’s a romantic idea to say devs should have all the time in the world, but somebody needs to be the voice saying, “No, it’s done. We are boxing it.”

      If enough of the development team can articulate why they need a delay, and if it looks like they are making actual progress, delays are good. If it’s just constant iteration and tweaks, that’s not enough justification.

  • I dont think any creative would disagree shareholders and useless management however

  • Fantastic advice, as a guideline in a vacuum.

    No game should be shipped broken, but sometimes concessions are a reality.

    Even Half-Life had to make concessions. Xen is infamously less polished and fine tuned than the rest of the game. Valve didn’t have infinite resources and time to keep tinkering. Would the game have been better? Maybe. But time is money, and Half-Life already ended up selling huge. Would taking time to fine tune Xen have boosted sales? Were people in the 90s avoiding the game because of Xen? I don’t think so.

    The profits from Half Life allowed Valve to make more games and be successful. Is it worth trading off a more fine tuned Xen in order to have Valve exist as we know it today?

  • Why don't they just not bother with a release date and release it when the game is 100% ready

    • A lot of the time in the industry, developers are using money loaned by publishers. Things like getting more development time, which means asking for more money is a negotiation that the devs aren’t guaranteed to win.

      Valve is one of the successful developer & publisher companies that managed to survive. The 90s were a much smaller time for video games, and a small startup like Valve could compete with the big names out there. They had more freedom in a sense, but they also were taking quite a gamble. Other companies tried the same and didn’t survive.

      It’s easy to simply say “only release a game when it’s 100% done” but it’s a lot harder when you’re watching money that keeps your company afloat dwindle with each delay. Also, “100% done” is a very flexible concept. Games almost always have to cut content or make concessions in some way, so figuring out what a done version looks like while working on it can be difficult.

      The modern version of a small Valve style startup would be something like a Kickstarter funded development. Again, unless you are (for some reason) a Star Citizen dev, people are going to stop giving you money and you have limited funds and thus limited development time.

      And just because you delay to try and release a superior game doesn’t mean it will be a smash hit.

    • baldur's gate did that and other companies were complaining about the high standard it set

    • Art is never finished, only abandoned.

      Also it's fucking expensive to market things so people are aware you just released it. Or at least it used to be, before wish lists, early access, and so on.

  • Okay, so there's game delays that actually have helped some games. Then there's games that sit on Early Access for what seems like forever, wondering what the fuck are they doing, like 7 Days to Die.

    I like and respect games that, take their time because they want a certain vision of a game to work itself out as intended. I don't like and respect games that need to rush for the holidays or need to rush for company appeasement.

    • Some of my favorite Early Access games, I'd actually rather just finish development and then start on a new release.

      Take Nova Drift and Caves of Qud. Both games, I think, are in a state where I have gotten my money's worth out of them many times over. But they're still Early Access.

      But, hey, as a player, who is going to complain about more stuff being provided for free?

      At this point, my preference would be to say "Okay, you did a good job with the resources you had. Now, I would like to give you more money and you can hire more people and produce content at a higher rate, because I really like the stuff you make."

      Or at least DLC or something. Like, I don't have a problem with blocky pixel art as a way of reducing dev costs. I think that many traditional roguelikes have benefited from just using text -- means that gameplay revisions are easier, and that one doesn't need an art team. I think that it's an effective tactic. But having seen how much art has added to, say, Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, I'd like to be able to purchase high-resolution art for Caves of Qud. I pay for tons of art in many, many games that I enjoy much less than Caves of Qud. Ditto for a number of other pixel-art indie releases that I like.

      I'd like to see more content coming out at a higher rate, and that is gonna require funds.

      Paradox does this. They have a deal where they make a game and if I like it, I can send them more money and they will make more game at a pretty good clip. Now, maybe not everyone wants to spend what some Paradox games run if you take into account all DLC -- okay -- but I'm not left in a situation where I want more of Game X but I'm unable to buy it.

  • Is that why they still have yet to make hl3 TF3 or update TF2 give portal 2 additional support

  • When you can literally change the entire game over time with updates to be something entirely different from what it was: Suck isn't forever. But neither is good.

    Even the perceptions don't necessarily stay forever. Look at NMS.

  • 🙄

    Can't stand this Miyamoto quote. Not only it's contentious at best (think of all the terrible games the kept getting delayed), it's factually untrue since the mid to late 2000s when online patching for games became common practice across the industry.

    • I think there's a kernel of truth to it. A poor first impression followed by a subsequent recovery tells us that a game could have been good at launch, but was rushed out for various reasons. This practice of forcing the public to pay to be beta testers for a half finished product should be punished.

      And nothing's going to erase a garbage launch. It will always have been garbage and the shit launch will always be a part of the conversation about the game. Hence why we still talk about it even in games that have recovered.

      You can't patch history.

      • I agree with the first impression aspect and I believe it's important to get the release right because of it, but the phrase deliberately implies a bad game will always be bad which just isn't true. "Bad impressions are forever" would be more accurate.

174 comments