Shuhei Yoshida "'Hates' Annualized Franchises"

[walsufnir]

VXIII said:

walsufnir said:

It depends. If you have separate teams working on titles you actually release n-annually, with n being the number of teams working on it. Like COD n=2. Of course sports games are a different story, there you automatically re-use assets everytime by a certain degree.

How this hurts the industry in general I don't see, though. Devs always had tight release schedules, no matter if in gaming or in general.

If for further improvement to the experience this is always subjective. Did racing games change the last 30 years? For sure! For the better? Depends what you like. But this has nothing to do with annual releases but more with how much innovation there is in the industry in general, in my opinion.

I don't agree with the claim that developers always has tight release schedules, Is there any evidence for it? it is not how it works. The normal situation is the the company find the right balance, which allow the developer to have certain amount of freedom. And for the company plan the schedules of their financial year ahead. That is not the case with the usual annual franchises like Cod, AC and Battlefield. A game has to come out even if it is broken, like Unity and BattleField 4.

Having tight release dates is nothing new when it comes to software development in general. You can't say "x will release on $date" unless you are almost completely done. It is why devs have to take overtime hours before games have to go gold. There is always something unfinished, which needs more polishing but you have to ship it someday. Even if games get delayed they are "rushed" weeks before going gold, like software in general that has to be shipped in a given timeframe.

A nice story I found about Doom on 3do:

http://kotaku.com/heres-why-the-3do-port-of-doom-sucked-1671138312