Scoobes said:
pokoko said:
The main reason this happens is the importance of hitting specific launch deadlines. In the case of blockbusters like CoD, Battlefield, and Assassin's Creed, they're going to release during the holiday period no matter what state the game is in. A delay into December would literally cost them millions; a delay into the year after would likely cost much, much more. It's a jumbled mess but it's clear why they do it. The holiday launch window is just that important for yearly franchises.
However, I think we should be a bit cautious about including games that suffer from online problems only in this. I think part of the problem there is that online technology is still sorting itself out and many of the problems don't manifest themselves until you have millions of people hitting the system at once. I'm hoping situations like Drive Club and MCC are more inline with new system teething pains and that developers learn from those problems. I don't believe either publisher believed things would be so bad when those games were released into the wild, which I can't say about some of the titles from EA, Activison, and Ubisoft.
Yearly franchises with absolute-must-hit deadlines are the real problem. |
Do you think publishers have methods to quantify the damage done to a franchise/brand by releasing a botched game? If the current iteration fails to meet standards, future games in the series could be affected with negative growth. That, in the long-term could cost them even more.
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That's true but it's also a lot harder to prove to investors in an earnings call. They'll want to know why a game threw away millions by releasing in January instead of November or why the budget ballooned with an additional two months of development costs but they might not be satisfied with, "it wasn't ready yet." Especially when games like Black Ops can release full of bugs and still earn billions the next year. Gamers, in general, have proven themselves lacking in long term memory.
Businessmen control the gaming world. They care about a concrete bottom-line more than the quality of the product. It's short-term thinking but then investors don't really care that much about building a slow-and-steady franchise that lasts decades. They want to hit as hard as they can while an IP is hot and make as much money as fast as possible.
