One thing I’ve always found a bit strange about the games industry is how games are sold immediately after they’re finished. A game is finished in August, you’ll see it on store shelves in September.
This method of working makes it harder to hit release dates, because being just a few days late pushes back the release date. It also makes it harder to promote your title, since you have to show an unfinished game to the press before the release. An obvious solution is to release games a few months after development has finished. That way being a few days late doesn’t have to impact the release date and you can show the finished game to the press months before the release.
Denis Dyack was burned with this problem last year at E3, when he showed the unfinished version of his game Too Human. Since then he’s been arguing for separating development schedule from release schedule — to finish development when it makes the most sense for development and to sell at the best time to maximize profits.
Next Generation had an interesting interview with him recently about this subject. He says:
“Showing previews and talking early about games is going the way of the dodo. How often do you see someone critiquing a movie before it’s finished? Never. Because the film people will never let you see it until it’s done. The previews that we have are endangering the credibility of the press and the credibility of the developers.”
About the advantages of this method:
“Once your game’s in the can it’s a guaranteed. You know that game’s going to ship. There’s no guessing, there’s no promising. You announce the date and then that’s the date. What about the CFO? Will they be happy? Reliable quarters? I think so. The retailers are happy. The consumers are happy.”
March 28th, 2007 at 10:52 am
“Showing previews and talking early about games is going the way of the dodo.”
Oh, really? From what I’ve seen, what’s happening is the exact opposite: more and more hype, earlier and earlier. And with good reason: since games sell most of their copies in their first month, that first month has better be well-announced everywhere. Hype, or the lack thereof, is probably getting to be one of the main factors in explaining game sales.
And how do you do that? With previews, screenshots and demos. The earlier, the better: hype takes time to fully develop.
To the risk of repeating what thousands of other developers have said before, games are not films. In particular, buying a game is more expensive than going to the cinema, and there’s much less “impulse” buys for games, so hype becomes much more important. A company trying to eliminate hype for its games will crash and burn.
And of course, films have this property where if you show too much of a film, it becomes a spoiler. Not so in games.
Oh, and about the separation of release dates and the end of development? That’s actually already happening sometimes, usually by a few months, but development schedules have this gaseous property of taking up all available space. If there’s a few “slack months”, you can bet development will try to use them
March 28th, 2007 at 1:41 pm
I don’t think he meant that hyping games is going away, what he meant was that hyping games before the game is finished is going away. If you finish your game 6 months before release, then you can hype it for 6 months using the finished game. There’s also some amount of marketing that can be done without a complete game without damage — anouncing it, screenshots, trailers, etc. You just shouldn’t show it to the press or release a demo before it’s done.
I don’t see why this way of working should be any different from the Hollywood approach. Movies get at least as much hype as games, often more. Games may live and die by their first month, movies live and die by their first week-end.
Of course, if a project finishes 6 months early, then those 6 months aren’t “slack” — the team just moves on to their next project just as if the game was released. I’m sure movie directors would love to tweak their movies up until the very end too, but studios (wisely) usually don’t let them.