Because they are too lazy to do that just went you do crappy homework just to give the work.

You can't know the game is a piece of crap until it goes into testing probably, which is near the end process. It's hard to know your game is bad in the pre-production phase, because that's when hundreds of good ideas are thrown around. Once you've invested too much, you have to release a game. Just look at Tales of Symphonia. I'm sure Namco wanted to just throw it out after testing, but they had to recoup the loss of resources, so they decided to release it.

I know that both Resident Evil 2 and 4 were both scrapped completely a good portion of the way through and were forced to basically start over from scratch. There's still Elza Walker Resident Evil 1.5 videos on Youtube to show what could have been and thankfully never was. 

Blizzard has done this a couple of times, and both games were well away in their development cycle.

You better say hello to Team Fortress 2.

Wait. Does the OP mean just throwing out an entire game, instead of just starting over?

Well that does actually happen, but usually it's due to budget or downsizing or management, instead of the developers realizing the game is just bad.

It might help if you gave us some examples on this one.

LordTheNightKnight said: Wait. Does the OP mean just throwing out an entire game, instead of just starting over? Well that does actually happen, but usually it's due to budget or downsizing or management, instead of the developers realizing the game is just bad.

He didn't really specify, so it could mean either. I think sometimes it's difficult for a team to even realize their game is bad because they have to work past their pride in creating it to think objectively. I remember when Square almost wanted to throw out Kingdom Hearts because they realized people would rather see Looney Tunes than Disney characters in an RPG, but after that CG movie debacle they just had to release what they had.

 

Blizzard scrapped StarCraft: Ghost, and that WarCraft Adventures or whatever it was called.

Nintendo scrapped Star Fox 2 for the SNES, and I think a Star Fox for the Virtual Boy.

Soriku said: LordTheNightKnight said: Wait. Does the OP mean just throwing out an entire game, instead of just starting over? Well that does actually happen, but usually it's due to budget or downsizing or management, instead of the developers realizing the game is just bad. I'm saying scrapping an idea that is bad to begin with. COmpletely scrapping, yeah.

If the idea is truly bad, and the developer goes with it anyway (BMX XXX), you're not likely to see them realize it's bad in the middle of development.

The more common problem is the execution of a game, not its idea.

Well, let's say I'm a developer.

and 85% into the game development, and 1 million dollars in, my team and I realize the game is crap, the camera is garbage, control is boring and it really targets nobody... what will we do?

2 options.
1... gave up and take the 1 million lost?

2... put it on a console that would even sell crappy games and hope it sells by promoting it a lot.



I don't know... option 2 seems like it is favoured by A LOT of crappy developers right now.