10 Lessons The Gaming Industry Must Learn From 2014
10. Broken Products Aren't Acceptable
Publishing games is a nasty business. The everyman's image of triple-A studio executivessnide madmen cackling away in Gothic spiresisn't as accurate as we may think, but there's still conflict to be had. Creative vision will always have to meet marketability halfway; you can't make the things you want if nobody buys the things you make. It's tough, but it's true, and it's been the case for every artistic industry from day one. Games are no exception. More often than not, deadlines reign supreme over artistic "freedom", and they always come down hard when things get tightespecially around the holidays, as we've been seeing. That's why we have satisfaction surveys showing games developers to be one of the worker groups most afflicted by "crunch time", a period of severe overwork brought on by fast-approaching deadlines. That's (primarily) why Assassin's Creed Unity can still be an unplayable mess, why Battlefield 4 was initially hosted on a single Game Boy Color, and why Driveclub: PS Plus Edition doesn't exist anymore. The studios behind these disasters don't want to release broken games. They want to meet deadlines. Unfortunately for gamers, the two are often joined at the hip, particularly in the triple-A scene. This doesn't have to be the case. The Witcher 3 developer CD Projekt Red, who recently delayed its forthcoming RPG for the explicit reason of ensuring complete bug eradication, is proof of that. If publishers set reasonable, flexible deadlines and valued consumer satisfaction a bit more, we wouldn't have to deal with faceless NPCs.
A freelance games writer, you say? Typically battling his current RPG addiction and ceaseless perfectionism? A fan of horror but too big a sissy to play for more than a couple of hours? Spends far too much time on JRPGs and gets way too angry with card games?
Well that doesn't sound anything like me.
