Dont understand why so many are defending spencer and blaming it on higher ups. He is the head of Xbox! It is his job to explain why canceling games and not investing in new IP´s is a bad decision to the higher-ups if that is what he actually believes.
Have you followed Star Citizen or its thread?
It's a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. Most video games are a nightmare to make. Most large scale software projects involving hundreds of people are a nightmare to make. Almost no games end up being like the creator envisions them. There is never enough time or money. You promise more than you can chew to make publishers bite.
You go to publishers, and you make a pitch. As a lead you promise things you cannot realistically deliver.
If they bite (Microsoft) you get millions and you begin working on the game. Then eventually, you've not hit your milestones and now you're behind schedule. You go to microsoft and the investors and tell them "we're out of money- Please give us more". The publishers become annoyed because the agreement was they'd finish by this date and with this amount of money. Developers explain to the publisher that things went wrong (it always goes wrong) - Systems needs to be remade, focus groups gave them insights into things that werent working, major problems with tech and engine forces them to seek other solutions.
As a publisher or investor you're in a pickle. If you pull the plug now, your money is lost. the game is dead, and you will never recoup your investment. Or. Or you can give the developers more money. Okay- 5 more million for you guys- six more months.
And then six months later, you come back and they're not done. Ahh, things where not working in the internal alpha. They could release it, but it would mean they expect much lower sales prejections and perhaps a meta critic score of 55-65.
What do you do? Now you got a sort of working game product you can release. Do you keep going at it? The developers show the latest builds, they show their new targets and how they plan to spend the remaining money. Okay, - You give the developers 5 more months and more money. You come back 5 months later, and it's still not done.
At this point this is where many publishers say "enough" and either force them release it (a half finished or finished buggy game) or shut it down.
Game development is a fight to hit milestones. When you operate a studio and you have a staff of 300-500 people working internally, with marketing, branding and all the various staff members, you're easily spending 100K a month just to keep the studio operational. That's not even in full development cycle. You're burning through massive amounts of money and you take major risks.
On the other line you have the gamers. Sick and tired of publishers always betting on the safe games. Another World War 2 shooter? uck. Another Military Shooter? Yuck. Another Hero shooter? Fuck.
It's not that publishers like EA or Microsoft or Ubisoft are out to fuck anybody over. It's that they are trying to make back their money.
I respect Spencer for betting on Phantom Dust. That was a bold and insightful game that deserved another chance. And going by this games development studio, and the fact it was transfered to another team makes me think that Spencer had a personal interest in seeing it realized. I don't think Scalebound was different. Or ReCore. How cool would it have been had ReCore been a modern Ico? It could have been. That game has so much promise, but that's another situation where the game just wouldn't finish. Microsoft had to say "enough" and force them to release it.
Why is this?
It's because games are not coming together until near the end. You cannot tell if it's a fun game you got until all the gameplay systems are in place. And because they need to be a part of a whole, you're designing and building in the blind for years. So you have to go deep into the rabbit hole and hope for the best.
Software development is beaucratic. You got so many people that the leads don't even have an idea what is really going on elsewhere. If you're a lead on programming, or animation or sound or illustration, you're just ahead of your team. You don't know how the other pieces of the puzzle is coming together. Sometimes you have a strong team and a strong game, but one team is fucked. Either by poor management or because it suffers on the burdens of other teams. Maybe the programming team is understaffed or the choice of engine was problematic in the beginning. Now because a early lead developer picked a terrible engine to work in, you're spending 50% of your staff on programmers because the engine choice was fucked. Now you don't got enough budget for other teams- Now what the fuck do you do?
Are you supposed to go to Microsoft and EA with that fucking story? Yeah, me as the lead dev and the lead programmer made a mistake, and now we need a lot more money for the next 3 years to finish this game.
Decisions like that in the beginning is why, many large famous developers move to indie games. It's less stressful, it's smaller manageable budgets, you can have your finger in every area of development, you can control it, lesser people means less risk and less timewaste by the sheer amount of people, meetings and builds that have to be moved. You cannot throw more staff and money after this and expect games to become good. It just doesn't work that way.
So what did Spencer do wrong here? I don't understand how he is at fault. It's a stroke of bad luck that these projects have folded. It has left wide gaps in the Xbox strategy for 2017. But it could not have been forseen.
Sony during the PS3 days is a good example of how they had a massive slate of games that ended up being terrible terrible. Games like Lair and Haze ended up being unfinished messes. They weren't coming together- But that was also not the fault of Sony. Choosing which projects to back is a 20/20 hindsight.
