The Decline in Quality Game Development - TOG Feature

[Ned]

TOG Landshark gives his views on Quality with respect to Game Development.

The Decline in Quality Game Development Feature | TOG - The Older Gamers

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[Reoh]

I think there should've been more mention of the publishers that most developers team up with for cash, and the effect that has on content and quality control. In general though, yeah; the internet is a crutch leaned on all too frequently now.

[Binary-Ninja]

the publishers tend to rush the developers so they can get a jump on the competition in sales at the key times of year eg.. pre xmas make sure game is out on time ... if their is a bug they will fix it later seems to be the attitude

[Jigoku]

What about the fact that games are orders of magnitude more complex to code now than in your pre-internet era? Or that PC games have to run on a ridiculous combination of different hardware configurations, using an equally ridiculous combination of (and often out-dated) software?

No manner of testing can possibly prepare for a release in the wild.

[Reoh]

Thats true Jigoku, but some of them are... pretty blatant. :P

[Snott]

Hell, this even happens with cars now. You take it for a service and they reflash the ECU with the latest fixes, so you get better ecnomy, cold-start, fix stalling etc. Often you aren't even told its been updated.

[SonnyJim]

I always thought it was simply a case of games development being captured by big business. They operate just like the movies now - release schedules dictated by marketing knobs to maximize sales. Look at how many films get churned out today with much the same problem - they polish the coverart and and bribe the reviewers and we all buy their crap while we wait for the odd gem that pops up every 5 years, lol.

They say it's the price we pay for having so many games to choose from now and much better graphics. Yet it seems that the best games now really end up coming from the indie crowd, not the well known companies. And this was really the essence of the early game devs - a bunch of enthusiastic nerds who wanted to make a fun game.

[Reoh]

Not to mention the disturbing trend lately to cancel a whole bunch of games in development to focus on fewer titles that t hey know will sell sequels. Churn them out as fast as they can rehashing most of the work and charge ever increasing amounts for them.

[Mysterio3]

lol "sequels" are prolly the one thing i hate most about gaming nowadays.
in the past, sequels would actually be a proper sequel with new everything! most sequels/expansions now merely have a different cover art, a few more missions for SP, and maybe one or two weapons/units, yet they sell for atleast $50 even though the content is barely even 200mb!

EA is prolly the worst offender for this. they ruined the C&C series trying to rush the releases and churning out as many games from the titles as they can.

[Drac]

I wouldn't say developers are lazy, 90% of the time it's the publishers forcing the devs hand. But at the same time not every game made makes it's development costs back so at some point you either have to ship it and hope to reclaim what you can or suffer even more losses.

Also consider that in the old SNES days a game took a team of about 8 people to make and cost only a few hundred thousand over a 6 to 9 month development period. Nowadays you have that many people working on just the audio: voicing, sound effects, 5.1 surround musical score and so on - and the whole game costs millions with teams of up to 50+ people and development times of 2+ years.

Grand Theft Auto IV took over 1000 people and more than three and a half years to complete, with a total cost estimated at approximately $100 million.

No, developers aren't lazy, they're tired and stressed.