Is it?

In the documentary this quote is from he said that about thr development of HL1. To be fair the devs themselves said they voluntairily crunched quite a bit and had some time constraints at the end of the game.

The context for this was them deciding to take the time to finish the game properly even if they were no longer going to get paid to do it (the publisher would stop funding).

https://youtu.be/TbZ3HzvFEto?si=7g4Dylj_zaAeeos_?t=28m28s

Yes. If I can wait for the Dune movie in February, video game nerds can also wait.

It’s up to the companies to coast and ration their resources accordingly.

Valve was a completely new company then. They weren’t going indie, but Sierra didn’t pay them for the remake of Half-Life. In the documentary they talk about financing it by creating Half-Life: Day One.

Depends on the circumstances. Small self funded team, part time? Can probably delay indefinitely.

Generally they would fare better than AAA studios who are beholden to their publisher to release no matter what.

I think it becomes a mixture of too early and delaying.

Some games clearly need another year to finish but they delay it for half a year and wont allow more for themselves

Cyberpunk and NMS did exceptionally decent first day numbers…and then they didn’t do exceptionally decent numbers due to the well-deserved backlash. They would have sold even more copies over the last 5 years if they didn’t scare half of the gaming industry away initially. You have to work really damn hard to save your game from death. Case in point: Bethesda isn’t working to save Redfall and it shows.

I don’t have a problem when small studios do it for games like Terraria and No Man’s Sky. It keeps them solvent without having to attach themselves to a big publisher.

I do have a problem when a giant, established company does it, as is the case for Cyberpunk 2077.

Whenever I hear this quote I also think of the developers/publishers. They need to have a good reputation so people buy their games.

I think that’s why EA, Blizzard, Ubisoft, Activision, etc sales have gone down. I will not say that gamers react fairly when it comes to unfinished game releases, but it takes one bad game to ruin a developer. Especially when you consider how small the margins are or if they are publicly traded. Even developers with good games have recently been going out of business because it’s not sustainable.

I also think of their legacies. Especially in a post-steam world, a game with a good legacy will continue to sell for much longer. I don’t think a game like Watch Dogs ever got rid of the stink surrounding it, even though it isn’t a bad game to go back to nowadays.