Business as Usual
By PerryVandell 20 Comments
If there is one thing I hate about the game industry, it's the fact that it's a business. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that developers and publishers shouldn't be paid, or that games shouldn't be a significant part of today's media. What irritates me is when awesome creative decisions are overridden by the corporate side of a company if more money will be made because of it. Let me give you an example that happened quite recently. Before Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood came out, Jean Francois Boivin (An Associate Producer at Ubisoft) said how he didn't think there would be another Assassin's Creed game in 2011 since the series needed a "breather". When I first
Another example of a poor business idea that gets my blood boiling is when a game is released before it has been finished. As the years have gone by, it seems that games are released with more and more technical hiccups. You can take one glance at Fallout: New Vegas and tell that the game experience would have been significantly more enjoyable if the developers were given another month or two to fix the plethora of game-breaking bugs. However, I'm sure some financial analysts somewhere found that New Vegas would make more money if it were released in October and patched later rather than being released with zero bugs in late December/early January. Whenever a publisher releases a game before the bugs have been fixed, it becomes painfully obvious that the game's release date is more important than the quality of the actual game.
It sucks when you get the feeling that a publisher doesn't necessarily want a great game, just a profitable one. And that's not what game production should be about. Developers should try to make the highest quality games possible. Publishers should be able to make good "creative" decisions, not just business ones. And game companies should be influenced by what their customers want, not faceless stockholders who might not have even held a controller. However, I've realized that my little
As you can probably tell, I'm pretty divided on this issue of game production being run like a business. On one hand, a game's financial success shouldn't be more important than its critical success. But on the other hand, a game's financial success allows publishers to fund more games which could not exist without the revenue from the previous game's profits, making the financial side of game development something of a necessary evil. It's a complicated issue that doesn't seem to have much of a solution. Most of the games we know and love wouldn't exist without this business structure, and that really sucks.