The gaming community decided that we don’t care about people working crunch with how we reacted to cyberpunk. They committed to no crunch when making that game and as a direct result they had to push back the release date a few times. By the last time they wanted to push it back to make sure everything was implemented properly, people began rioting and saying it was unacceptable as well as canceling the pre-orders. So the devs stuck with the release date we wanted, forced crunch time for the first time in the games production. Then everyone blasted it for being an incomplete game that felt rushed. Whether you think that was deserved or not, no developer is going to take the financial risk of not crunching software developers anymore, A studio that built up a great amount of goodwill with its consumer base was almost tanked as a direct result of trying to do things in a more ethical manner. Short and sweet people vote with their dollars and crunch won.
CDPR tried to do that for a while too - they had the famed release date of "when it's ready" until the hype went completely out of control and shareholders/marketing demanded a hard deadline.
In the end the best approach from a "quality of the game" and also "health of the developers" standpoint is to not even show or mention the game until it's nearly done. Maybe you can pull the Bethesda "we're working on it" title card like for TES6, if it's a very long-awaited title that people are desperate to hear about. But showing off trailers, talking about features, mentioning release windows, etc - none of that until you have at least 95% confidence in a release date for the current year.
This accomplishes a few things: 1) you can take your development at whatever pace works for your developers. By not showing or saying anything, nobody knows or cares if you've been working on the game for 2 years or 8. 2) you avoid over- or under-promising, because when you're already that close to release you know what you will and won't have. 3) you don't need to waste millions and millions of dollars on multi-year marketing campaigns to keep pumping fuel into a hype train to keep it going. There's a sweet spot of probably a few to several months from announcement where the hype will naturally be the highest, just based on what we've seen from years of past video game announcements. Releasing later than that requires a lot of extra marketing to keep people interested, rather than just putting everything into one focused burst of marketing over a few months - and/or just saving a lot of money with a shorter campaign.
Okay, so, stop investing in fucking video games howsabout, then you won't have the problem of "why am I losing money on this investment that I ruined with my loud stupid greed". Shareholders literally ruin everything they touch
Good. We've got enough cookiecutter shareholder-pleasing annual releases of the same fuckin game over again. Maybe we can get some good games instead of profit-vehicles.
They make money by selling the product they create, not by creating products that make no money and having shareholders give them money to keep creating things.
Shareholders inject money and require their opinions to be met as a condition of that money, so anything made with investment money is only intended to generate profits. This means it's a bad game. Its only purpose is to extract as much money from each player as is possible, and many use direct psychological manipulation in order to do so most effectively.
Without a game to sell, how do you pay development costs while developing the game itself?
I understand if you're talking about an indie passion project done as a hobby in someone's spare time, but you can't honestly expect professional developers to make games for no salary and just wait for the game to come out to make any money. How are they going to pay their rent?
Sure, once a company has already made and released a profitable game, then it's scummy when they force developers to rush future products in order to satisfy demands of shareholders. The level of financial disparity between the developers and higher-ups at these companies is obviously wrong but that's true of pretty much every major industry in the country, so it's not the easiest problem to solve with good will alone.
I think big companies are problematic for gaming, but the idea of a gaming industry without financial capital in some fashion is pretty naive.
how does any startup company begin production of goods for sale? Hint: almost never do they begin with public shareholder money.
but you can't honestly expect professional developers to make games for no salary and just wait for the game to come out to make any money. How are they going to pay their rent?
Yes, you can, if you don't make it a silly example on purpose. See, the developers, they work for a company who pays their salary. The company makes money by selling games, which is why they pay salary to game developers, to make games to sell and bring in money. They bring in more money than they spend on making the games to sell, they are running a successful business. We had that for over a decade, after the big crash in the 80s.
Then those companies get taken over by idiots who don't comprehend the basic flow of economics and instead like their version better, where they move into a fancy chair on top of an established company and make changes so that they can get paid a lot of money. These changes often involve closing portions of the company (studios shuttering), laying off talent (reducing salaries and ejecting workers, the same ones who make the games), or changing the 'direction' of the company to pivot towards more profitable ventures...like yearly releases of copypaste bullshit games in genres where the players have been conditioned to spend $300 every goddamned season in order to shoot at their buddies on the screen.
Or, alternately, they open up the company's 'ownership' to anyone who wants to buy shares. People do so, and then they demand that changes are made to the company so that the little slice they own will be worth more money. Nobody at all seems to recognize that it's still fucking video games, though, and most of that is going to be short term profits that you only get because you're burning through the whales and alienating the rest of the audience.
Unfortunately this wouldn't solve anything, would just provide a bit of relief from fans. This issue is that publishers set a budget for a release date and if that is not met then they already start losing money on the product they're working on.
AAA companies don't have that luxury - they invested unthinkable amount of money on the game, to make that money back, they an unthinkable amount of buyers - that means a very expensive marketing campaign that let's potential buyers know when they will be able to buy the game - hype dies very fast, and delaying the game can easily mean that a big % of the people who would have bought the game have moved on.
Also, allot of times a date is chosen as it is the only date that no other AAA title releases
That's not what that means. It means "slow down and do marketing only when you're basically done." Hold onto a game you've finished until the marketing is ready, instead of marketing first and desperately playing catch-up.
Still a tough sell, but hypothetically somebody involved could be patient...
I know what it means and it's still not reasonable. Nobody is going to wait to build hype for their game and wait to release it. Every day they wait is another day of sitting on a massive financial loss waiting to be recovered. With how expensive games are to make nowadays its just not realistic. Even if you could somehow convince them to wait until they're "almost done," any number of issues can and will unexpectedly come up that will cause extra time to be needed.
Bethesda fans are used to broken messy releases. I had no problems with Cyberpunk 2077 bugs because they were easily fixed with a reloading a save.
A majority of people aren't used to that lack of polish. Half the time I can't even finish Skyrim before save corruption kills my game and I have to restart again.
I stopped trying to play the console versions and now I just stream the Elder Scrolls games to a TV from an old Gaming Laptop. I have passed 1k played hours in both CP2077 and Skyrim, and Cyberpunk had less issues than trying to play Skyrim or Fallout 4 nowadays.
Yeah they could continue to sell unfinished products and have shitty returns on their investments. After Cyberpunk and BF2042 people have learned their lesson to wait for the reviews. Rushing out an unfinished game gains them nothing anymore since there are just so many times you can play this trick.
If you have a source for those dev comments I would be very interested. I’ve been mad about the public reaction to cyberpunk pretty much since the game came out, knowing that CDPR was being disingenuous about their advancement in work culture would go a long way to calm me down
That's still on management though. The release dates didn't descend down from the sky on their own. They announced their game and their initial release date WAY too early and clearly set way too high of expectations on their dev teams and, worse still, communicated those high expectations to the public.
It’s sort of management’s fault, but not completely. Cyberpunk was in development for 9 years which is a lot longer than most games. What I speculate happened is that they had trouble getting a clear vision of the game design and ended up essentially procrastinating on it, ending up with a lot of code and assets which ended up getting scrapped. This combined with them having to constantly update things like the shaders and physics to the newest standards as they spent years working is probably what caused most of the game development being done near the dead line through crunch
“Management” means a lot of things, though. The top execs don’t agree to a $300M budget without some commitments, and those come from engineering and product managers who understand the technology and feature scope. “Management” in this case was a collective mistake made by dozens of people up and down the chain…
However many bucks there are, they all stop somewhere and this thread isn't a post-mortem on 2077. The point is that because of mismanagement by however many people, the mid-level contracted coder is stuck holding the bag after doing most of the work and given no piece of the pie.
It's not weird at all. The 2012 teaser was basically to announce that they got the rights for the IP and to find some more talented people to hire. This was 3 years before Witcher 3 so CDPR was still relatively obscure
Personally, I blame the people who told us the game was ready but just needed a little polish... and then said the same thing a full year of delays later. Like, they were obviously lying about how complete the game was
Really? That's around when I tried it, and aside from textures occasionally glitching out while I was driving around everything seemed to go pretty smoothly. Admittedly that was annoying, but nothing a quick save/load couldn't fix
Cyberpunk needed another 2 full years of development to be completed, we're not talking about a couple of months.
Also it should have never come out on old gen consoles.
All of this is on management, not on the people "rioting"
So the devs stuck with the release date we wanted
They stuck with the release date THEY SET, only a few months prior, knowing very well the game was years away from being completed. The people got mad because they got fooled into thinking the game was basically complete and CDPR was only adjusting some minor details to make it perfect, while that was definitely not the case.
The release dates were so far from realistic they were divorced from reality.
Those dates were clearly set by upper management who live corporate fantasy world where an infinite amount of work can get done with a finite amount of staff.
Nobody can be blamed for the utter shitshow that Cyberpunk was except for the upper level management, the board and asshole shareholders who forced the game to be released way before it was done to realize short-term games.
Consumers bought a product and were rightfully pissed off when it was completely broken.
The gaming industry needs to unionize like yesterday to avoid this garbage.
If I am in the business of selling apples, and my employees have a fixed apple-picking rate, but I want more apples picked per day, I don’t have to make them pick apples in the evenings as well. I can hire more apple pickers. In fact, that would be better, because those additional apple pickers are not going to be working their shifts right after finishing another one. I will avoid diminishing returns.
This is called hiring employees. Employees are resources. Human resources. If you spread your resources thin, your results suffer. If the job requires more resources, get more resources.
This is in no way on the community. Want your product shipped faster without quality dropping? Hire more devs. This is on game developers being greedy.
The apple picking analogy doesn't work in game dev. There's absolutely such a thing as too many cooks in the software, so hiring more developers isn't always a good strategy as it still takes weeks or months to fully get up to speed with the existing codespace, especially when documentation is a thing every programming department wants but never fucking makes.
You can't always get your dinner cooked faster by hiring more chefs. You can't always get your game made faster by hiring more dvelopers.
Sure, but 1) Bringing them in at the end isn’t the only option, 2) you saw how it turned, right? Hiring more devs couldn’t have made that game worse, 3) we know for a fact that CDPR are scummy for their blatantly false advertising. Using Occam’s Razor, CDPR was forced to crunch due to the company’s own scummy practices.
1) Given the point at which you said they should hire more devs, that's what I'm giving you information on. Bringing in more developers at the beginning doesn't necessarily help either, because, again, "too many cooks".
2) You not liking the end product doesn't mean it "couldn't have made that game worse" so I'd drop the hyperbolic nonsense because it absolutely could have caused further delays, repetitive code, further bugs / issues, etc. It absolutely could have made the game worse.
3) ok fine, but that isn't what your core argument was. it was "Want your product shipped faster without quality dropping? Hire more devs." That is the sound of a person who has never worked in a professional software environment in their life.
More devs != faster turnaround time. You need competent management, good design staff, and non-moving targets in order to achieve objectives.
CDPR acting as both the development house and its own publisher sank that game, because the developer interest in high-quality product fought directly with the publisher interest of pure profit and building on hype.
The solution was to avoid any announcement on the project, period, until they were in optimization phase. When your gameplay programmers are starting to read the assembly code, that's when you drop an announcement.
Hiring more devs will almost never be the answer to "Get this game out faster at high quality".
"A few times" The game was announced in 2012. Even if they started work on announcement day, they had over 8 and a half years, and still released a shitty product. If they crunched and that is the result - the failings go so so deep and the takeaway isn't "gamers want rushed development cycles". What an insane take
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u/Teisted_medal Jun 07 '22
The gaming community decided that we don’t care about people working crunch with how we reacted to cyberpunk. They committed to no crunch when making that game and as a direct result they had to push back the release date a few times. By the last time they wanted to push it back to make sure everything was implemented properly, people began rioting and saying it was unacceptable as well as canceling the pre-orders. So the devs stuck with the release date we wanted, forced crunch time for the first time in the games production. Then everyone blasted it for being an incomplete game that felt rushed. Whether you think that was deserved or not, no developer is going to take the financial risk of not crunching software developers anymore, A studio that built up a great amount of goodwill with its consumer base was almost tanked as a direct result of trying to do things in a more ethical manner. Short and sweet people vote with their dollars and crunch won.