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[Fracas]

Yes, major pillars of the industry should definitely throw away money in seven year stretches.

 

[Hippolnareff]

Quoting a guy trolling users on twitter who just happens to be perma-banned for trolling users and mods on twitter...
...full circle.

Huh? I'm not actually familiar with the guy. Is he infamous amongst GAF?

 

[gypsygib]

So make the same game twice over?

How do you even design graphics for a game that you don't plan on releasing for 7 years.

 

[irfaanator]

By this I mean, aside from the annual dead line projects that take a few years to produce, why not invest in one major IP that is ran off a blank check, no dead line, AAA productions through the roof. You know, like how a 1st party exclusive is suppose to be. Their catalogue would be mobile, indie, annual sports/ block buster action, MMO, and major passion product. The game would be bug free, none gender or age target specific, have no dlc, no freemiums. No busines over art. Just a present for gamers and for the love of gaming.

.

 

[Wowfunhappy]

Hey Op have you tried Breath of the Wild.

Not quite a seven year dev period but close.

 

[astrogamer]

Huh? I'm not actually familiar with the guy. Is he infamous amongst GAF?

He was a SalesGaf guy that jokes around a lot. IMO, he wasn't that bad and I think the post he got banned on for was just badly reacting to fanboyism. Now, he's an actual sales analyst though he still jokes around (though mostly dad jokes now). That tweet could be interpreted poorly when instead he is saying it's an issue with the gaming community as a whole viewing Neogaf as a higher quality community and it still has ideas like the OPs and they aren't that rare.

 

[GraveRobberX]

More people don't make a project develop faster. It's not some exponential formula

Tell Bungie that for Destiny 2

"All hands on Deck" is that teams motto right now

 

[LockOfTheWeek]

A novel idea, can't help but think it might end up like this...

 

[SentryDown]

Do people have figures of fiscal year results of such companies ? Someone told me once that they would make more money spending their budgets in parking spaces and renting them, never bothered checking if this is true but sounds possible to me.

 

[ScatheZombie]

Tell Bungie that for Destiny 2

"All hands on Deck" is that teams motto right now

That's code for crunch.

Game companies have recently gotten a lot better at renaming crunch to a million different things so you don't hear the word 'crunch'. Now it's called bullshit like "Finalizing/Finishing Mode" and other such nonsense so that people (developers, media, gamers) don't attach what they are saying to the negative connotations of crunch.

That said, neither introducing more developers or enacting crunch time makes a game develop faster. It's a widespread belief that's demonstrably false. Additional developers introduce additional complications in everything from scheduling, communication, collaboration, directed vision, bugs, etc. And crunch time has had multiple papers on how anything over about 12 hours a day is actually a net loss in productivity. People actually tend to get more productive work done in 6 hours a day than they do in 16 hours a day.

Both of these don't work. But companies keep doing it because the misconception about their effectiveness is rampant and management teams need to seem like they are doing something to right the ship to investors, shareholders and COs. When the reality is that you end up with a better product if you let the same number of developers work their normal hours for another year than if you throw 100 new devs or double the daily man-hours to try to solve the problem.

But that doesn't tend to happen because crunch is cheaper (pretty much everyone in the gaming industry is overtime exempt and bonuses never make up the difference) and employees are seen as disposable resources.

 

[Iksenpets]

Seven year seven cycles would require budgets in the hundreds of millions. Like, assuming a relatively modest team size of 200, with a relatively modest average salary of $50K, you hit $70 million in salaries alone, not counting benefits, not counting taxes, not counting overhead, and not counting any of the additional expenses that would go into the game for voice work and motion capture and soundtrack and anything that has to be outsourced.

No responsible company is going to greenlight that unless it's tied to a franchise that can guarantee sales. GTA games can follow this model, and that's about it. Anything else runs the risk of sinking a company if it fails. Most of your EAs and Ubisofts and what have you are not sitting on the sort of cash reserves needed to weather a bomb of that magnitude.

Also, no piece of software can ever be bug free. No amount of time or money is going to fix that, and the scale and complexity that people would expect these games to work with would probably only increase the problem of bugginess.

 

[Interficium]

This thread needs to go in the forum archive, holy shit incredible.