My thoughts on this (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Friday, March 31, 2017, 18:04 (2582 days ago) @ Harmanimus

My comments there were regarding budgeting, primarily.major budgets change all the time on many projects. Usually negotions are built into contracts so that both sides can attempt to better do business over the life of a project. The projects I have anecdotal experience with have had different end budgets than starting budgets as situations are fluid. So unless you have major insider knowledge about the budgeting conteacts between Activision and Bungie, your claims of spending v quality are purely anecdotal experience.

One way or another the sale is about the content. Because consumer backlash exists. If you don't ballpark your promises from advertising, you will destroy your return on investment. At this point in video games it is naive to assume that a publisher like Activision isn't playing the long game.

I know firsthand that ATVI only cares about next quarter's profits and will fully cut off their nose to spite their face in that regard. The number of wasteful and disgusting decisions that corporate handed down in my tenure there really soured me on the entire company. Sabotaging entire games just to fire a single producer, hiring excessive staff for the optics of doing a big hire, shortening development cycles in order to convince shareholders they had the same sort of "high buzz" product coming out as their competitors... it was all pretty poorly managed from the top level on down.

Also, consumer backlash is minor in a world where game retailers don't accept returns on open boxes (and you can't return most digital purchases whatsoever - steam being a limited exception) If full refunds for bad games was a thing, then I wouldn't care about pre-orders because, obviously, the money would only be made if the game was any good. But that's not the case here. Most of the time, once the company has sold you the pre-order, they have your money for keeps.