Nowadays it's seems to be a common thing in gaming industry to set a release date for a game and than either release a half finished product or postpone the release date over and over again. What are you going to do to prevent anything similar and what can be the reason for that phenomenon?asked by MF140884
TL;DRThey say they do everything they can to avoid half-finished releases; unlike publisher-bound studios, they set dates internally and will push a deadline back if quality would suffer, though early transparency makes this harder.
So the answer to the first part of that question, what are we doing to prevent this, everything that we can. The reason you'll see this sometimes is because you'll see games, usually ones with bigger publishers, that have committed to retail stores, committed to marketing dates, a year, a year and a half in advance, that means those games have to come out those days, no matter how much polish they get, or maybe don't get to do. You'll often see those games release patches or something later on to help bring things up to where they were aiming to be. On the flip side, you'll see people push their dates back when they can, because they're seeing the trajectory, and the features they might have added or things that didn't turn out the way they might have wanted, and in order to keep quality high you have to push things back a little bit, or else you're one of those half-finished products that you guys are asking us questions about.So it's always kind of a give and take.
On top of that, if anybody's ever preordered a game before, you'll see, lets say Amazon, you'll see a release date a year ahead of time, before any kind of release date is actually published, and a lot of times those dates are actually set by the retailer in anticipation of what the game's release date is going to be. Now, interesting about what we do at Cloud Imperium, because we don't have a parent company, we're not beholden to marketing deadlines or publishing deadlines. We pretty much set those internally. And those dates are set collectively by the entire company, whether it's Chris Roberts or the Marketing team, the Development team, the Production team, we all kind of have a say on when those dates are.So, with the case for Gamescom, it was very obvious that our deadline was Gamescom. We had to have that finished for Gamescom, because we couldn't push Gamescom back, so you'll see a lot of scrambling to get that done. So it depends on what the deadline is, what is it for, and how badly do we need to meet it. If it's a deadline that can be moved and we feel that the quality is going to suffer if we release it right now, then clearly it's better to push that deadline back and make sure we reach those quality benchmarks.
A lot of games will also have sort of an internal range, and they have the luxury of not mentioning their game or announcing it until they've decided, okay, yeah, we can definitely make this date, which is something we don't really have the luxury of, since we started engaging our backers so early.
Yeah, our game is very transparent.
It's good but it's also challenging.
You can see every little thing that we...
Every second.