Why Unfinished Games Keep Making Millions

am I your friend am I a phone wake up Samurai we have a city to burn why can't AAA Studios finish their games almost everything you see nowadays is buggy and unplayable yeah the depth of field off of things look much better what is that lacking entire game modes promised by developers PVE As We Knew It has been canceled or missing basic features like a scoreboard EA considers school boards and voice chat Legacy features it's like these AAA companies are competing to make the worst game doing whatever possible to piss off their players just was wondering is this uh an out of season April Fool's joke but believe it or not it's not the intention of the development teams to release unfinished games they want to make great experiences like Baldur's Gate 3 or tears of the Kingdom unfortunately developers themselves are often bigger victims than the players the cause of all these unfinished games is something deeper something rooted in the very nature of modern video games themselves and from what I've found every single garbage AAA game can be traced back to 2002 with the release of unreal Championship you guys remember this game because I didn't I remember playing Unreal Tournament but I had no idea there was an X Xbox version but this game is important because when it came out there are a few bugs you can leave the map the rifle had issues and the teams needed some balancing but the game was out there was no fixing to be done this was 2002 at the time bugs were just a part of the game experience like wave dashing in melee or the infinite staircase Collision Super Mario 64. the game was to be played as is bugs and all or so we thought for the first time in history a console game received an update epic games patched unreal Championship using the internet we're riding on the internet even though this update doesn't feel like a big deal it was the first domino in the path of thousands each year internet updates just got bigger and better console stores were introduced and you can now Buy fully digital games all of a sudden Hardware games were becoming a relic of the past treating more like a game key than an actual game with most having 80 gig updates the moment you popped it in your console goodness in the matter of 10 years we went from self-hosted games sold on cartridges and CDs is a deadly donut to purchasing a large majority of our games through a digital store and the rise of digital games is great for many reasons they cost nothing to manufacture shipping no longer exists and distribution is just click I mean without the digital world we wouldn't have indie games because there's no way 99 of Indie Studios could pay for manufacturing and distribution so developers and Gamers benefit hugely from digital stores like steam however the digital game also brought about the fall of companies like GameStop and introduce what I'm going to call software games now I can already hear one of you clicking in the comments saying something like hey damn all games are software which is true but hear me out when I say software games I'm not talking about how they are developed but how they are treated I've spent many years in the world of software from running my own software company to Consulting hundreds of others and when you start this type of company there's a tried and true process find a problem validate that problem and then build a solution and when you build that solution it needs to be Bare Bones keep it as simple as possible referred to as the MVP or minimum viable product but the moment that mvp is proven and successful then you can add more features and expand your Market think Facebook when Facebook released it was started out as a simple social media platform for Harvard functioning like an online directory Harvard students flock to it the Facebook team realized they had something so they expanded to other Ivy League schools like Yale Columbia and Stanford adding more features as they went along 2005 hits and thousands of schools are using Facebook now we're up to 575 or so schools expanding at about 65 schools a week for the rest of the school year so the platform added more features like Pokey grandma said she poked you and you haven't sent poke back dad I didn't even want to do Dan poke your grandma then in 2006 Facebook opened up to the public taking its first huge step towards becoming the Behemoth it is today with all the features imaginable on a social media platform this is the industry standard with book after book pushing this process get your software to Market as quickly as possible get feedback from customers to iterate and fix bugs then repeat but this model doesn't work with AAA games you can't push something out Half Baked and fix it as time goes on games aren't like these software platforms where you release a Jinky product and slowly get more customers as the product improves the game launch is riddled with bugs or doesn't have much content people move on he's like Halo infinite six years into the making half a billion dollars in development and upon release it felt like I was playing a Halo Tech demo the game had millions of players when it came out and now averages a fraction of that the game finally feels finished a year later but it's too late the amount of people it lost kills me I still play weekly and as a long time Halo fan I can't believe they botched the release this is a major problem at modern AAA Studios and one of the main reasons AAA no longer holds the going gold standard they treat their games like software with the idea of release now and finish later this is one of the reasons why developers release their games unfinished but at least games like Halo are free to play it's not like they launched infinite unfinished with a 60 price tag I mean that would be criminal to Market a game as completed and then sell it unfinished pushing out free and complete games is one thing but charging sixty seventy dollars for this they know the game isn't done they know they are Burning Bridges with their players what could you possibly gain by deceiving your community with a 70 unfinished game good old money the answer to everything except in this scenario it's not just money from game sales it's something else let me break down with Anthem this game began development in 2012 and released in 2019 seven years of development but relatively five and a half of those years are spent in pre-production which means the developers had a year and a half to develop the game not easy and as they dive into development the team realizes that most of the pre-production work isn't possible ideas are scrapped and the game has changed team leads at BioWare realize the game isn't ready and ask EA to push back the game release EA of course says no and it comes out February 2019. it isn't good the game is a mess and people are angry it looks like the programming is now so destroyed it is actually bricking a PlayStation 4. Slayer count drops off in a matter of weeks and the game is dying but it doesn't matter because the game goes on to make over a hundred million dollars EA got exactly what they wanted this is another reason why companies release unfinished games too much time was spent making Anthem so EA wanted to move resources to other projects and make back their money who cares about the game it's not like it's art just release the game and move on by aware no do it make your money EA determined that any additional time spent fixing Anthem just wasn't worth the cost so they cut development marketed the crap out of it and recouped their investment why spend more time and money on a game like Anthem that only makes a hundred million dollars when you could focus instead on developing FIFA Ultimate packs and make over a billion dollars and this isn't even the worst part EA and bioware's approach to Anthem didn't just hurt Gamers but hurt the developers too many employees working on Anthem reported having mental breakdowns from working long days and late nights subjugated to the almighty crunch by himself I was supposed to take the whole team four days it's amazing for those that don't know what crunch is it's when a company mandates its game be completed by a deadline no matter what so developer work weeks go from 40 hours to 80 hours weekends are treated like normal work days and families are just pushed to the side crunch exists in many Industries but because of heavy development cycles and specific release Windows lots of money can be lost in the video game industry if targets aren't hit infinite for example was pushed back but Microsoft still had to fulfill their marketing contracts so we ended up with all sorts of Halo promotions even though the game wouldn't release for another year some might say well it sucks but it's just the reality crunch is a necessary part of development but this is a lie you've been sold crunch is not only unnecessary but inefficient and unproductive and a GDC talk about crunch Ian Schreiber explains that those who are sleep deprived and overworked show the same symptoms and cognitive ability of those who are intoxicated causing a large decrease in output and if you can't trust an intoxicated person to in a straight line Tim all right all right well you got a pretty good balance thank you you definitely can't trust them to solve a multifaceted complex problem who would have thought that lack of sleep increased anxiety and no breaks would lead to poor outcomes where performing the same tasks in a calm methodical way would lead to positive outcomes duh so obviously crunch is unproductive and it's been a problem at EA in other game studios for many years but if science common intuition and incomplete games all show crunch doesn't work then why does it keep happening leadership it's no surprise that bad leaders equal bad outcomes what was interesting is when you have leaders who are trying to be good but still release a game buggy and incomplete this for me stems from teams being too big to succeed look at this graphic as you add more team members you drastically increase communication channels causing more time spent in meetings instead of working or this graphic which shows the more participants on a project less effort is delivered so even though you have a team of eight people you're really only getting the output of maybe four people or this graphic which shows an individual's performance drastically falling off once you pass six seven people larger teams just don't work even Amazon probably one of the biggest companies in terms of employees is known for its two Pizza rule with Jeff Bezos famously stating try to uh create teams that are no larger than can be fed with two pizzas OverWatch is a perfect example of this the first game had roughly 50 to 100 developers working on the game before release each person working within five disciplines audio art engineering production and design this makes sense each discipline would have two to four departments Bart would have concept art 3D models VFX and animations audio would have music and sound design and then engineering production and design would follow a similar pattern with each having two to three departments themselves overall the OverWatch development team would have an estimated 14 separate teams as 75 developers and with 14 teams each team would have an average of five to six members with team leads being in their own additional teams of two to four this is a great two Pizza structure and is a prominent reason why the first OverWatch was actually done and Polished on release teams could communicate effectively and understand their job intrinsically now look at OverWatch 2's development team as of November 22 22 there are over 300 developers on the team and according to the OverWatch Wiki the team size expanded in order to cover the development of free to play so three times the developers on OverWatch 2 and this is what we got this is more like OverWatch 1.1 oh and don't forget they canceled the PVE because of needing to move resources there are too many reasons why modern Games come out unfinished and I hope these companies can learn from all these mistakes but this lack of finished AAA games are opening the door for Indie Games to shine and in my next video I'm going to show exactly how an indie game with only three developers was able to succeed because of the failure of An Unfinished game so subscribe if you want to see that video or check out our video on how bad games trick you into buying them alright everyone we have our indie game Spotlight to finish up this week our Discord server chose astroneer a stunning space game with all sorts of biomes and planets to visit like to show their buddies while Explorer solar system love crafting or collecting resources this is the game for you go snag yourself a copy and join our Discord to choose what game we should feature next [Music]

Channel: Going Indie

Views: 408,393

Keywords: going indie, video game business, video game marketing, game devlogs

Id: EBaiGRXT5rk

Length: 12min 42sec (762 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 24 2023