So, there was a post on a game site, where people were complaining about a game (Too Human) that’s running late. A 2008 release date doesn’t seem out of the question at this point. Fanboys are up in arms, and the project lead came to the board, whined about how people are jerks, and all hell broke loose.
Now, whose side am I on? On one hand, I feel bad for Silicon Knights. Having a late game, honestly, seriously hurts a developer – much more so than it hurts the consumer. A late game costs a developer a tremendous amount of money. They’ve obviously gone over their originally projected budget, for one. For two, it damages their relationship with their publisher. Any advertisement money that was slated for a launch window is gone – not that it’s likely that at this stage they had any. But it also really, really hurts developer morale. When your game’s late, the end that you thought was coming isn’t, anymore. There was something so wrong with the game, and with the schedule, that things didn’t work out as planned, and as a result, they’ve taken on a huge amount of work to make things *right*.
So, morale sucks at that point. You’re losing money hand over fist. Your publisher’s pissed at you. Fans are pissed at you, because this thing that you’ve shown them has piqued their interest, and now you’re taking it away from them, never mind that you never promised them an actual release date. These things suck for the developer.
For the fan, they were shown something, and built up some expectation based on what they were shown. Maybe it influenced their decision to pick up a particular piece of hardware at a particular time. But for the most part, that’s it. That’s all the negative impact a late game has on the player. They’ll play something else in the meantime. Unless you were stupid enough to preorder something with no release date, you lost only the *potential* for something that might have been. You might as well get angry and pissed off every time you don’t win the lottery.
That said, one of the major problems is that when a company starts pitching their game to the public too far in advance, *they* create certain expectations in their audience. Every time Denis Dyack goes out, and gives a preview of the game, he’s essentially setting up an implicit agreement with the game-playing audience. Here’s this awesome thing, and here’s when you can get it. I’m building up enthusiasm in you – showing you this information now, so that when it’s released, you’ll be pumped up to play it. YOU will in turn generate hype, and help us get momentum behind this game.
The developer can say, well, that’s not REALLY what’s happening – we never really promised anything – but that’s bullshit. This is how the game industry works. If you play the game well, and make things clear, this can work in your favor. Build up the hype and fail to deliver, and you have created your own problems.
That’s not to say it’s Silicon Knights’ fault – maybe it’s their publisher. MS needed to show some first-party exclusive stuff, and SK was probably contractually required to deliver. So, they didn’t actually choose to make their problems – their problems come from a mix of what the publisher needs, and what the developer needs, and somewhere, communication broke down.
Game development isn’t entirely predictable, but it’s also not completely voodoo. A good developer has to continually assess where they are, in terms of their progress against their plan. No developer should “suddenly” be late – anyone who’s doing their job knows they’re running late within a week of starting to run over the schedule. That’s not to say it doesn’t happen. Some places are really that disorganized, or their communication has broken down that severely.
But so as a publisher, MS then has a responsibility to ensure their investment. You could say it’s MS’s fault that they released information too early. Whatever. The point, though, is that basically this is a problem in which all three major parties are at fault, but in the end, the only one who *really* gets screwed is the developer.
Five years after a game’s released, people will remember if it’s great, regardless of when it came out. If it’s not great, no one will remember it, period, regardless of how late it was.
I was with ya, up until the second to last paragraph.
Actually, the vast majority of gamers can’t tell one developer from another. Hell, the majority of gamers can’t tell one publisher from another, with *maybe* the exception of EA (and that’s only EA Sports, really).
Two things can happen when a game is late: publisher says “tough” and makes the dev eat the costs, or the publisher coughs up additional money. It sucks for the dev in the first case, but it sucks for the publisher in the second.
So, who ends up taking the most damage really depends on how the extension was handled, among a few other things. Let’s say that the publisher was counting on that game to be their big hit for the year. What if it slips out? You now have a big gaping hole in your business plan. And if an increase in dev budget had been negotiated with the developer, at least they’re still getting paid.
Also, what about relationships with retailers? Not only does a publisher potentially lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in ad money, if retailers had bought into the hype and had been expecting huge shipments, the publisher loses a lot of trust with the retailers.
So, the hurt goes both ways. In the end, *nobody* likes late games. It’s a part of the business, but it’s always a mad scramble to shuffle things around. It comes down to developers promising realistic goals and publishers keeping the BS detectors on full blast and sorting through any empty promises.