Why Do Games and Game Studios Fail? 389
LukeG writes "This new article discusses the reason behind games and their developers failing, noting the distance of those selling the games, from those that buy them as one possible cause. Doomed games such as Bablylon 5 come under the spotlight, while the ubiquitous Duke Nukem Forever is also touched upon." For me, this article brought to mind the twin disasters of Fallout Tactics and the Farscape based game.
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It is a cold hard fact that the games business is just that, a business. When push comes to shove if you aren't making money then the game is over. There are times, however, when I begin to wonder if the people with the money actually know what's going on. I remember buying a DVD when the technology was just breaking in the UK and finding one of those stupid marketing research pamphlets on the inside. Glancing over the questions one has always stuck in my mind. The question was to tick what was the primary reason for buying a particular film over another and among the list was 'the studio'. I couldn't, and still can't, understand how someone would think "Oh, that film was made by Warner Bros, it must be good, I'll get it." What made it memorable was that some marketing monkey boy must have believed that to be case. To me it showed a complete lack of understanding between the people releasing the DVD's and the people buying them. It has taken years of marketing research by the studios to realise that the kinds of people who like to buy DVD's want extra features about the making of the films and interviews with cast and crew. If they had just asked me at the start, or any other film fan, I could have saved them time and a whole lot of money. I guess I've only myself to blame as I never did send back the pamphlet. In the same regard I often wonder about the people in charge of which games get made, and which do not.
Now, a lot of games companies don't succeed due to a number of reasons, but most fail because their games aren't particularly good. Corporate natural selection, as it were. There are two other types though, that make no sense to me. One kind that make or are potentially making great games, but still fade away. Then there is my favourite enigma, the kind of company that seem to be making a game that almost the entire gaming audience can see failing right out of the gate.
Let me talk about the first kind as a sort of epitaph to the death of a good friend. The most recent example of this was the tragic demise of Appeal, the Belgian developer that had made Outcast. Outcast was a tremendous game in so many ways. Graphically it was unique thanks to the voxel technology they used so well. It had extremely sophisticated effects for the time, including software bump mapping, depth of field blurring and even some screen anti-aliasing. It's soundtrack was an auditory masterpiece thanks to the Moscow Symphonic Orchestra. The gameplay a brilliant mix of adventure and action. Yet despite critical praise, and reasonably good commercial success, somebody somewhere decided that the sequel would not be.
In Appeal's case, one of the problems was the initial choice of using voxel technology. Whilst it gave the game a very organic landscape, the engine took a long time to develop. For the sequel they wanted to move to polygons and so it was a case of back to square one as they worked on a new engine. But from the screenshots that are still available on the website that sits like an eerie ghost town, it looked very advanced. By aiming for the Playstation 2 platform as well as PC it would have given them a more stable platform as well as a huge market. After all, more and more games are becoming more open and free form for the player. But what may have been a huge hit was cancelled so Cutter Slade, the saviour of Adelpha, is no more.
Another company that went under despite critical praise was Looking Glass studios who developed System Shock 2, and the Thief series of games. In their case Eidos Interactive's decision was very strange as many of the employees were rehired by Ion Storm to work on, Thief 3. So evidently someone inside Eidos believes in the title.
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The Wing Commander games were going from strength to strength, a home-grown property within the industry so no restrictive licensing was applicable. Each title met with critical and commercial success. Then Origin just stopped making them and the final serving of that brilliant universe was the spin-off movie that left a bitter taste. One can at least appreciate that the game series went out on a positive note.
A game license that broke my heart when it was cancelled was the planned Babylon 5 game. It was in production during the height of the show's popularity. It was to be a space shooter with the unique ship handling that characterised the Star Fury's of the show. When the Star Wars games had been so successful why cancel this promising project? It's interesting to note that the great TV series suffered similar problems from the mysterious people in charge. J Michael Stratsynski was messed around as to whether the fifth series would be green lit. Thus the fourth series had the narrative crammed into it leaving the fifth with little to do, only truly reaching its high in the final episode "Sleeping in Light". Why was this series messed around with? Well, the powers that be wanted a spin-off series, too blind to see they were destroying the very thing they wanted to prolong. The spin off was an abysmal failure.
There will of course be information that we are not privy to in each of these cases. Perhaps the games were vastly over-budget. The games cancelled mid-development may have been further from completion than I believed or were over ambitious in their scope and rather than scale back, cancelling was preferable. Or maybe it was simply personal or creative differences. For whatever reason I certainly would have loved to see the games come to fruition and I wonder what inner politics during development led to their downfall.
Now we come to the second type of company and no matter how strange the first are, the second are even more curious. Their are a few examples that spring to mind in this category, from Eidos' impossible release schedule that destroyed the Tomb Raider series by not giving sufficient time for innovation, to the merciless march of the Army Men. Two prime examples stand out above all others, a lovely pair of double D's, Daikatana and Duke Nukem Forever.
I want to make it clear that I am not out to vilify the companies or individuals responsible, far from it. I have the utmost respect and admiration for anyone who has the energy, enthusiasm and courage to go out and create a game and release it to the unforgiving public. For those of you not familiar with the story of Daikatana it was the brainchild of an id Software employee called John Romero. He left id to form Ion Storm alongside Tom Hall with grandiose ideas about big epic games, large teams, fantastic designs, plush offices and all the cokes you can drink. Back in the optimistic technology boom he got it.
The game was being developed for the Quake engine, then when Quake 2 was released they decided to switch engines to keep Daikatana looking competitive. This was not an easy move. The team suffered personal and technical difficulties and was burning money rapidly. The game suffered lengthy delays and when released was a critical and commercial failure. Now Daikatana had some commendable design elements that just didn't quite work together.
Business decisions (Score:4, Informative)
I am told it is hugely impractical for a (regular?) game compnay to finance its own games. This is partly because of the crazy amounts of Hollywood-style glitz and polishing that the market pays for these days. The result is that game companies get "loans" from game publishers like Activision or Electronic Arts to complete the games.
At this point, the publisher is more-or-less in control. The publisher can cancel the game or change its budget. If the game is released, the game company has to pay back the publisher. Part of the deal assigns some portion of the game copmany's royalties to publisher. In the end, the game company can have a very successful product but barely break even (remind anyone of recorded music publication, or book publication?).
And that previous paragraph described a "good" situation. Imagine that the game company has crappy management and doesn't handle the narrow margins well; that the publisher decides to cancel the project; that the publisher goes bankrupt; that the publisher doesn't effectively market the game. I'm sure there are many more bad scenarios than good.
-Paul Komarek
Re:technology? (Score:2, Informative)
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The Playstation2 hardware is designed much differently then a PC game is. It has an ungodly amount of memory bandwidth, and very little VRAM. It cannot store much in the way of textures, or models. What it can do is draw huge amounts of polygons quickly. Its rendering hardware uses a Depth Buffer, and it can take huge amounts polygons and render them correclty to that depth buffer very quickly.
Voxels are essentially 3d pixels. While the PS2 can be made to render objects using that technique, it cannot take advantage of its specialized hardware when doing so. PC's tend to be more flexible, but since GeForce type cards are becomming the standard, if your using OpenGL or DirectX to do your rendering, then you cannot take advantage of your video card to draw yoru polygons.
END COMMUNICATION
Re:Games fail. - Movie releases (Score:2, Informative)
I think game developers - like any software - want to deliver all the cool features they can dream of. They want every module to be fully exploited... but more features, no matter how much you want them, mean more complexity. More testing, more bugs, more documentation, more confused customers, etc.
Another issue: Most games are released like movies - big introductions, everyone wanting to unpack them and know everything in the first day of play.
Anyone who does even basic business programming should recognize the crazy complexity of these games. The amount of data, the amount of input/output devices you have to deal with, etc.
Oh yha, kids who are high on soda are also not the best customers to provide error details and help track down code problems. And those release schedules - you sell 5 million copies in the first week, that means 5 million newbies all wanting support at one time. That is NUTS!
I don't work in the industry, but anyone who does software should be able to look at the mess these people deal with.
The good side
==============
The programmers are often given recognition, and they can often make big money.
Games are one of the few areas that a software developer, working like a "Movie director" could actually think of getting $1M or $5M for a project!
Re:Games and their Dying exposed (Score:5, Informative)
As a former game developer, I'll point out what should be obvious: the developers are rarely making the decisions. Ain't up to us to arrange to consult people, that's up to the people writing the checks. And they're the ones who tell us to stop coding so they can release the package, even when we really want to fix that last bug, or improve that section.
Re:Fallout Tactics? (Score:3, Informative)
1.....Turn based action. It detracts too much, it was okay in fallout 1 and 2 due to when they were developed.
2.....Creativity. Fallout Tactics simply wasn't as strong as Fallout in the story department, not was it as free flowing or as flatly enjoyable.
I didn't say that it was bad because it didn't find an audience on release. I thought it didn't find an audience because it was poorly executed, and since people -loved- fallout (myself included) it was doubly disappointing.
I'm with you on the movies though :-) The farscape game was total pants though, bad bad bad.
Chrisd
Re:here's why (Score:5, Informative)
"Only people of the press say my game isn't good, their opinion isn't important anyway"
This is actually true. There are two edges to this; First, take the original Grand Theft Auto. It didn't really do too well critically(The magazine I was subscribing to at the time gave it a "c", and it was fairly liberal with the marks), but it ended up selling over 90 thousand copies and spawned three sequels. On the other side, System Shock 2(which I own, incidently), recieved critical acclaim from just about everybody, and sold relatively poorly(which is a damn shame, since it is an incredible game, IMHO).
The gaming press seems to me rather detached from the buying habits of gamers.
Also, Programmers don't make games. They make game engines. Game designers make games. Artists make art. Musicians make music. Programmers, artists and Musicians who thing they are Game designers make ass.
Re:This is a very complicated issue: (Score:3, Informative)
Will Wright started the Sim line, primarily focused on SimCity and "The Sims"
Sid Meyer created the "True" Civilization line (Civ I, II, and III, Call To Power I&II were created by others before Sid could get the copyright back) During the copyright battle, he also created Alpha Centauri.
Re:slashdotting (Score:3, Informative)
Close.
Warner Bros. sent strong hints about cancelling B5 after its fourth season, so JMS basically packed much of the 5th-season storyline into the final half of the 4th season. WB did, in fact, drop the series, but TNT picked it up, and even ponied up money for some TV movies that ranged from good to wastes of film.
Your statement is, however, accurate in relation to the Crusade spinoff. TNT demanded more sex and violence along with new opening episodes, ordered a costume change, after five episodes were already in the can, JMS resisted, and eventually Turner cancelled the series after seriously screwing with the continuity.
Everything up to "Racing the Night" was TNT-demanded, then the next five were the original episodes. There's a definite difference in the CGI quality, as well. The CGI in the TNT-ordered episodes have a very rushed look, and the jumpgate graphics in the original five are the same as the jumpgate in "A Call to Arms"; the TNT episodes have the old jumpgate effect.
AI and stuff. (Score:4, Informative)
I really don't think this is the case for most games (obviously, it is for a few).
The problems you cite are mostly with the AI. The AI coder has to wait until most of the rest of the game is in place. He has to frequently be modifying the AI in parallel with people who are tweaking the game to provide play balance. He has the tightest schedule of any of the programmers, usually has a rather small amount of CPU time alotted him (at the AI point, profiling and optimization on other parts of the game are probably underway, or will be soon, so everyone just wants to get the graphics engine running at a steady clip).
Another problem is that AI is very open ended. You can make incredible AI systems, and throw as much CPU time as you want at them. So you get programmers with grandiose ideas of what they're going to make. Then their time-to-work shrinks smaller and smaller, and they have to keep cutting their plan until they can just manage to squeak out their AI.
I agree that game developers in the PC world put out their games too early. This is, however, partly fueled by the lemming-like behavior of users to the latest and greatest. Everyone always wants "new releases". I never understood that. By buying right away, they experience the full brunt of the bleeding edge -- bugginess, patches to worry about, having to pay ridiculous amounts of money for top-of-the-line hardware to run the game at a decent clip...I don't buy any game that's less than a year old. I get better prices, better stability, and don't have to throw insane amounts of money at my hardware.
Just remember-- just because some developer puts a game out on the shelves and their publisher's marketing department is pimping it all over -- you don't have to buy it.
I agree with you on the abusive and frusterating harassment Viviendi did of bnetd. That's just as frusterating as the DVD Consortium going after Linux DVD players and MS trying to stop the NTFS and CIFS support in Linux.
Re:This is a very complicated issue: (Score:2, Informative)
I don't know how The Sims eventually got made (I had long since left the company), but I rather suspect that someone from EA found it sitting on a server and said, "there's potential here -- why don't we flesh this out?"
Re:It should be Customers not Games that come firs (Score:2, Informative)
Oh please... this is a joke. 99.9% of Blizzard's customers have never even heard of bnetd. Furthermore, Blizzard is one of the best companies as far customer response. Back in the day when games could only be played over IPX networks, the biggest IPX over TCP program was kalled Kali. Blizzard went out of their way to make a binary that optimized for this game service (war2kali.exe). I can't think of any other company doing something similar. To this day, WCII and SC users can still use such programs (Kahn, Kali, etc) to play multiplayer net games that completely bypass battlenet. I don't see how anyone has been "fucked" as you put it. Finally bnetd became a haven for people playing illegal betas for WCIII. Notice that they let the whole thing slide *until* that happened. A few people (probably a lot more) playing pirated games ruined it for everyone. Blame the people playing the WCIII betas, not Blizzard.