“You were oblivious to the magical bits beneath the hood” (Destiny)

by kapowaz, Monday, August 04, 2014, 09:19 (3561 days ago) @ TTL Demag0gue

I think part of what you're bumping into here is a difference in expectations. How many game studios do you know that have the kind of open communication with their communities that we get from Bungie?

I really don't want this to drag on, but the answer is many.

Blizzard, Uber Entertainment, Bare Mettle, 22cans, Runic Games, Obsidian Entertainment, Frontier Developments; studios from the very large to the moderately small, but all have one thing in common: they're open about how they make their games to a much greater degree that Bungie. What used to be a fairly secretive process has become greatly more open: in part due to the challenges of how to finance an industry in upheaval, but also (I suspect) just because as their audience matures, they've come to expect a little more. Nobody expected to see behind the scenes documentaries of films in the 1950s, but they're more or less par for the course when you buy a film on DVD or Blu-Ray now.

So yes, I think my expectations have been set higher as a result of how other games companies have started to interact with their fans, and Bungie (in spite of a very good track record on the games they deliver) aren't living up to that expectation. Yours and others’ expectations are clearly a bit lower than mine. Is that entitlement on my part? Perhaps. But I'd prefer to think of it as a desire to see games developers continually strive to raise the bar.