Half Life 3 is super late
Is it?
tbf that’s a lot easier to say when you’re the president of one of the richest companies in the industry. I don’t disagree, but not everybody has the resources to just keep developing forever, and that’s easy to forget too.
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).
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No Man’s Sky is a great redemption arc, but it would have been better if the game hadn’t sucked at launch
Yeah, if a product is sold, I expect it to work for the most part. Now, mistakes happen, and not much to do about very obscure things and it’s great if thing can be added afterwards.
But what I want, and this is apparently wild, is a finished 1.0 product that works as expected.
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I was gonna write. I agree with him but No Man’s Sky kinda defeats his point.
Yeah, if their publisher hadn’t forced them to release in its unfinished state, it would’ve been a lot better.
It’s not a redemption arc, it’s a people forgetting it exists except for those who want mediocre resource accumulation simulators.
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It’s because that’s how capitalism works. If you keep buying stuff from the same source without due diligence, you can’t be surprised when you get stuck with another sucky game.
The only incentive to spend resources on fixing a game is to preserve reputation for future games.
The real question is… Can indie games publishers afford the delay of a game?
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.
Joke on him, often game gets delayed under this exact pretext and it suck anyway.
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
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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.
Makes me think of old school Blizzard. Rest in peace.
I always thought that Miyamoto quote was real too!
