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Gabe Newell on why game delays are okay: 'Late is just for a little while. Suck is forever.'
(www.pcgamer.com)
this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2023
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Unless you're No Man's Sky? Or Cyberpunk? Like games have been getting patches and updates for a long time, sometimes they get better, sometimes they get worse. Maybe he means your reputation as a developer and as a publisher is forever tarnished no matter how well you patch up the game post-launch.
In the days of Half Life 1? Yeah, it wasn't really feasible to patch games after they got printed on discs and left the warehouse.
Yeah reptuational is part of the issue but there is also a big financial issue too. Delaying a game is financially difficult as it affects financial projects for each year with shareholders (who only care about share price growth). If you release a game in a poor state you get to hit some of the financial targets which benefits the publisher particularly, but for the developer it means longer terms sales are much lower as reviews and feedback come in that the game is crap. You then have to patch and repair the game.
Patching has allowed publishers and developers to get away with this releasing of games in bad states, but it doesn't change that fundamental issue which disproportionately affects the developer. Dev studios often only have 1 game being worked on at a time. An unready early release which is poorly recieved can be an existential crisis. For publishers, a poorly recieved game is a disappointment but generally have other many other games also on release so they can move on and not care as much.
No Man's Sky and Cyberpunk are high profile exceptions. The gaming world is littered with abandoned flops, often due to not being ready for release.
Agreed. And many of counterexamples belong to the Live Service model. Halo Infinite, Anthem, Evolve (I'm digging deep on that one), etc.