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twesterm on 31 October 2011
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zarx said:
twesterm said:
The statement itself makes sense at first but then you realize 1) that developers don't generally try to make bad games on purpose and 2) not every developer has the money to iterate on a game until it's perfect.

I love Valve but that's a pretty closed minded naive statement.


So big publishers can't afford to but small indie devs with no financial backing can, right...

Mojang can sell 4 million preorders with a 75%+ piracy rate, and terreria that sold almost half a million copies in a month both with a 0 marketing budget. Just because some devs/publishers can't doesn't mean that it's not true that if they did they could sell well on PC. The Witcher 2 is selling better than the first and has already crossed 1 million copies sold and they are a small developer with little marketing. Then there is Crysis with 3 million+ sales on PC and Crysis 2 with it's much larger marketing budget and 3 platforms has only managed 2 million so far, Starcraft 2 is selling faster than 1 etc people can do it when they try unfotunatly it seems like only indies seem to try most of the time these days.


Indie games and AAA or just even console games are entirely different businesses.  It's not exactly easy to compare Minecraft and Mass Effect.

Game studios eat through a shit-ton of money a month, more than it costs to develop entire indie teams, because there are large teams to pay for and general overhead.  Because of that, independant studios simply can't afford to iterate until the game is perfect and publishers don't want to keep throwing money away. 

Again, studios don't set out to make bad games.  Nobody kicked off a project like Haze off and said alright guys, we're going to make a real stinker here and waste a lot of time doing it.  They're generally trying to make the best game possible but budget and time can stop that.  As much as every studio would love it, there's no magical fun button a studio can press to make a game fun.

I respect Gabe Newell a lot but the statement-- if you want to fight piracy, make better games-- is just a beyond ignorant and naive statement.  Unless you really do want games only like Minecraft and other indie games (and believe me, I came up with 20 shitty indie games for every good one you bring up), that statement doesn't work at all.  Valve is an excellent developer and they have the luxury of being able to take their time, but that's not something most studios are able to have.  Most of them want that luxury, but not everyone can be Valve.