Product Cycle timing (Gaming)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Thursday, October 19, 2017, 13:38 (2593 days ago) @ Durandal

I think lots of this is driven by decreasing product cycle time. It used to be you got a product out and then it sat for two/three years while you worked on the next product. Sequels started coming out based on larger hit games, and developers started pushing those into a series of games like COD or Madden where a new one comes out every other year to keep interest.

Now every big game pads out the 2 year cycle with DLC to keep people interested and keep hype up.

However that drives more development costs as you have to retain groups to develop DLC and patches to keep players interested in the game. Quality patches especially are a cost sink because they seldom result in more sales, and DLC tends to be limited in cost so there isn't that much profit in it.

Halo 4 tried that innovative weekly story system, but it was also quickly abandoned as the studio wanted to push those resources elsewhere. I think that is the key part.

Now you have the finance guys in every department who are on studio's backs to cancel less then profitable games and DLC support in order to cut costs and free up resources for the next game.

Andromeda had a troubled development and isn't the greatest game, even if it is competent. The suits wanted something to draw players like Destiny does, and when that didn't materialize they decided to fast track Anthem (which is basically a Destiny clone).

Good points.

This kind of tension exists in any industry, I’m sure. And it can be so frustrating to witness. It’s not allbad, either. I think Ubisoft is a fascinating case study when in comes to modern day game development. On the one hand, how often do we hear about mass layoffs or studio closures within the company? It’s mitaculously rare compared to other large game publishers. Working conditions are largely better as well. Crunch is still a thing, but Ubisoft does not run on a culture of grinding their developers into the ground the way Activision, EA, or Rockstar (!!!) are known to do. And despite their size, Ubisoft has a pretty good track record for releasing smaller, artistically driven games like Child of Light or Valiant Hearts.

Of course, there is a cost to all this. In order to keep all those developers in studios all over the world working at all times, and to find the smaller indie-style UbiArt games, Ubisoft needs a steady stream of AAA blockbusters. It’s easy to understand why those calling the financial shots would play things super safe. Notice how every AAA Ubisoft game released since AC2 have slowly been merging into the same game? I mean mechanically speaking. Every time a Ubisoft game resonates with audiences, the studio heads make an effort to nail down what worked, and encorporate it into future titles. Not just conceptually, but technically. That’s why Watch Dogs has the cover system from Splinter Cell Blacklist, Splinter Cell Blacklist uses the shooting system from Ghost Recon, etc. Teams no longer need to program and balance gameplay mechanic systems from scratch. The downside is that every major Ubisoft game starts to look and feel and play the same. It’s tiresom as a gamer, and yet from a sales point of view, it works.

When Splinter Cell Blacklist was in early development, it was going to be an open world game, because Ubisoft was following market trends and making everything they released an open world game. It took a serious and long-standing pushback from the dev team to get Ubisoft higher-ups to let them make a more tradition SC game. The project was overhauled, and a couple years later Blacklist was released. It was a critical hit, generally beloved by the SC community, featured a great campaign, fantastic co-op modes, and some of the best competitive multiplayer ever... and it was a commercial flop. I mean, it sold modestly well, but selling modestly well is not enough to sustain Ubisoft. So we haven’t seen another SC game since, and likely won’t any time soon.

So it’s a shame that publishers think gamers only want super safe bets, but they also happen to be right more often than not.