| JEMC said: By the way, what's your opinion on this? Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 Dev Says Big Budget Games Are Failing in Part Because Teams Are Over-Scoping Their Projects Throughout it all, massive hits come out of nowhere. One of those is Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, developed by World War Z and SnowRunner studio Saber Interactive and published by Focus Entertainment. Of course, Space Marine 2 benefited from the strength of the Warhammer 40,000 brand, which is carefully managed by Games Workshop and about as big as it’s ever been. But still, Space Marine 2’s breakout success came as a surprise even to its developer, as Saber Chief Creative Officer Tim Willits told IGN in a recent interview. (...) Willits has his own theory on what’s happening. Speaking to IGN, Willits said that the problem isn’t necessarily that triple-A games take too long to develop and thus launch into already abandoned genres. Rather, Willits believes, triple-A developers are tending to “over-scope†their games, which in turn means they fail to do any one thing brilliantly. I have to agree with him. There's only a small handful of studios capable of successfully making that kind of games, and even some of them have had mishaps. |
If you try to please everyone you ultimately please no one. I think it's combination of what he said and publishers insisting that developers "dumb things down" as well. Instead budgeting for a focused project that will top out at 3 or 4 million in sales. They try to appeal to the lowest common denominator and budget for 20 million in sales. They when the game "only" sells 8 million units, it doesn't meet expectations.
