| zarx said: Sunk cost usually, you don't set out to make a bad game but making games is hard and usually only become good in the last few months after you have already spent a lot of money. As they say the first 90% is the easy part, it's the last 90% that is the hard part. Things like licensed games are a different beast, most of the resources goes into the license usually which leaves very little for actually making a game but the do it because they believe that the license will sell it by it's self. And a lot of the time that actually works, or at least it did, that market has largely dried up which is why THQ isn't around anymore. Atari had a lot of success before they invested into E.T. it's just a shame that they only bothered to pay 1 guy to actually make the game in 6 months after they had spent tens of millions on the license and manufacturing millions of carts. |
For licensed games, it's not just the resources, even if it's a large part of the problem. You get the license relatively late, for a relatively short time, and the license popularity peak can be very short (for example, a month from movie release). So there is a very difficult challenge in term of schedule... to meet with a lesser budget. My previous company released a total crap based on license because the license was to expire, it was too late to do anything about it. One point to understand is that most of crappy games dont hurt the brand so much : the failure is short, does not become news, and it doesn't leave so many client to remember it. Only 1 crap out of 100 become legendary like ET or Superman 64.
The schedule problem is anyway not so specific to licenses. Duke Nukem, and a lot of games faced this problem. If you are becoming late, the technology you base your game on end to be outdated, the competitors release, etc. The cost involve to redevelop can make the studio put it on market before it's too late.
