Deviant Anomalies

On your 2nd point I agree with you 100%. Thanks for the warning about My New Family I won't even bother with it.

But ya on that second point I know exactly what you are talking about from both first and second hand experience (different situations.)

I used to review videogames (didn't really go anywhere really due to my own fault) and you get to interview devs. I have also alpha and beta tested several games and have more than a few friends who work in and around the industry still. There are reasons things like Cyberpunk happened and we are certainly a contributing factor but most of it is being taken for granted. The simple fact of the matter is that for whatever reason.

The standard for a game to "go gold"  has absolutely plummeted. You used to need about 90% of your game ready to go out of the gate Excluding PC which due to constant updates have always had a similar problem but it has gotten more severe over time.

These are the contributing factors

1. Publishers forcing  developers to rush a game to completion during the home stretch as the game has been delayed too long (Sometimes this is more than justified. Other times they may see you have 24 months to finish a game then come back a few weeks later and say you have 18 months. Or they slash your budget in half. Or you might be 90% done with your game and they say "no we want to save it for the new console release) Alot of this happened with Xbox to Xbox 360, PS2 to PS3, Nintendo 64 to Gamecube and Gameboy Advance to Nintendo DS to 3DS  (in that case games often needed to be rebuit from the ground up to either take advantage of that godawful "3d Prism nonsense" and Dual screen support. Other times developers are told to start working on additional platforms as a game nears completion. In the case of the Wii version of an anticipated PS3 or Xbox 360 port this was always apparent (Though with large publishers agreed to in advance)

2. The videogame industry is the last entertainment industry that has no union. I absolutely love videogames but the way developers are treated is often terrible. Crunch is absolutely ridiculous in the industry. This has always been the case but with information being more widely accessible on the internet and with  more gamers in general there is more of an interest in the actual industry which leads to more coverage, leaks, understandably frustrated devs and just outright burnout to a criminal degree. Crunch  has always existed but as games have gotten bigger the crunch has gotten more severe what used to be 60 hour weeks for the last 2 months of a release has now become 80+ hours a week at the minimum for 6 months to a year before release!

3. Once upon a time the videogame industry was a niche. (As much as we love classic videogames maybe MAYBE 10% of the amount of people playing  videogames  now initially played them at release. Fast forward to about  the time of GTA IV and mobile games (GTA V was the evidence but it was happening long beforehand) and the videogame industry is the most profitable, expensive and time consuming entertainment industry. Yet developers are treated the same. Companies have gone from a handful of people on a team to a few hundred working across two or three different countries to now nearing a thousand across 5 or 6 or in the case of something like GTA V or Assassins Creed up to 10 countries. Who are all expected to coordinate, develop at the same time at the same quality. The videogame industry is now the most profitable entertainment industry in the world yet with that success has added pressure and expectations. From 10 different bosses instead of 2 (The TPS reports in Office Space are a great example of this.

4. With the size of the teams changing and larger publishers absorbing smaller companies (more often that not by design and destroying those smaller companies in order to poach top talent for first party titles (Midway, Akklaim, Atari, Sega, 3D0, are just a handful of victims of this practice) Development teams often change mid development (Uncharted 3 to The Last of Us is the most glaring and well known example of this as is Anthem where more than half of the developers had no experience making FPS and were taken from EA Sports and RPG teams to develop a Destiny Killer (itself a victim of the same practice when Activision bought Bungie Destiny 1 is average and generic fight me. When Jason Rubin and Andy Gavin (original founders of Naughty Dog each left the studio and the new guy came in (TLOU creator) Naughty Dog went from one of the most coveted developers to work for to one of the worst) The game quality was still great but the developers  were not treated the same and had several times higher expecations without more pay. The previously mentioned Uncharted to the Last of Us example  above involved the A team leaving Uncharted 3 Mid development (if even that far) to work on TLOU instead. You can actually see the  exact point this happens in Uncharted 3 (when you crawl through the cave crevice with the spiders when you come out the other side the story changes entirely more bugs are apparent and there is sometimes even a tip in quality of the graphics. You can actually tell which parts of the game are developed by which team. That isn't meant to imply that the B team sucks but they were probably less experienced and weren't as familiar with Uncharted as the previous  team (Naughty Dog tripled in size over the course of Uncharted's success.)

5. The shitshow of the mobile app based game industry. Publishers can now successfully argue that the quality of a title and/or size of the team doesn't have to directly correlate to the sales potential of a title because look at how well all these average titles sell and how little they cost to make?) The mobile  gaming industry IS the most successful part of the gaming industry and the comparison isn't even close. I used to trash mobile games (and still do a little) but most of the games that I play are mobile now. I buy all the great AAA titles and they sit on my shelf unplayed while I play crappy mobile games. (I am NOT proud of this they are designed from the ground up to addict you they are modeled AFTER the way someone becomes a drug addict and how casino games work FROM THE GROUND UP) At least with an MMO you get consistently high quality content but this mobile nonsense... It is improving as spec potential of our cellphones and tablets increase but you still have 1 in 5000 apps worth playing as opposed to 1 in 50-100 traditional videogames worth playing TT.

No one single factor is to blame it is all of these factors combined that lead to the poor state of the industry as it stands and they all have to be fixed (but  won't be) in order to return to the golden years of the The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of time, Metal Gear Solid, Gran Turismo 3, Donkey Kong Country, Armored Core 2, Final Fantasy ( Playstation and PS2 Era) there is a reason why So many great indie games get started from Kickstarter and Indiegogo comprised of well known developers and it is more often than not how they were treated at their previous employers, empty promises, new regime changes within the developer itself. There is one factor however that we the consumer is almost entirely to blame for.

Videogames need to cost more money than they do period. There are a lot of people who would fight me on this and all of you are wrong. Development teams have expanded in size 10x The game costs 100x more to make than it used to yet the cost of a AAA title has remained the same for the last 25 years even though the US dollar is worth less than 5 dollars than it was 30 years ago. IF games cost more to make and there was a union in place to protect developers the  added cost of development would lead to a better overall work environment and quality of the game itself. Developers paid next to nothing with 10 producers who know nothing about how to develop a videogame breathing down their necks but working twice as many hours aren't really all that invested in delivering you a masterpiece. Except they are since instead of 1000 people who want to work in the videogame industry you have 100,000 who do. DLC's are often garbage money tie ins but they exist as an alternative for additional funds to make up the difference of our refusal to pay more for our videogames. Expansion passes are often genuinely worth it but DLC's are dog shit. Looking at you horse DLC from Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion. This is how we get shit like every fighter already on the disc of Street Fighter IV but locked away so they can force you to pay for the costumes and additional characters (One used to unlock characters through specific goals met in games now they have to "pay" for the privilage of playing them) The same with those dreaded Deluxe Editions (here are a few extra weapons and an hour of extra quests BY DESIGN 10 dollars less than the game costs at retail) Unfortunately since the DLC standard has long since sailed now they want us to pay more money for the game AND the DLC which is an unfortunate side effect of how long we have waited to address this. And the consumers revolted and forced Playstation and Xbox to backpedal on asking for the perfectly justified increase in game cost.

These factors combined together are why 90% of videogames are garbage now. It used to be like half the games now it is almost all of them. A game of the year quality title is now more often than not equivalent in quality to a title that would be rated an 8 or 8.5 in the days of Metal Gear Solid and Ocarina of Time. That is a substantial difference in quality. But this whole "The game can be half finished as long as a day one dlc is available and the companies who determine whether a game is ready to "go gold" those are the real P.O.S. to blame for allowing all of the above scenarios to take place. if they had more checks and balanced even  auditors making sure developers were being treated fairly and DID NOT GREENLIGHT THE GAME FOR release until it was ACTUALLY ready to play. If publishers didn't force a game to developed on 6 different systems at once. This crap would happen far less. We would go back to the time where the half the games released are worth playing. Indie games do as well as they do because their business model is run  the way the teams who created Super Mario Bros, Sonic The Hedgehog, and Crash Bandicoot were run. Small teams who treat their staff well and are focused on releasing the game complete instead of rushing a release to appease a publisher breathing down their necks to release on X day. They release the game when they want to and don't have to worry about their budgets being halved, they don't have to worry about all of their development team being poached to another division of the company thereby changing the entire feel of the game. Don't have to coordinate with development teams from 5 other countries. They focus on creating something new and interesting instead of the same grey titles all of the large development companies make based off of their oh so successful focus groups who show that a game must be 100 hours long (even though 10% of them finish it, feature an open world, must have violence but no sex, be easy to play, puzzles can't be too hard etc. Indie developers don't have to put up with that shit. They can make the game they want to make.

She was fired two days before her birthday. It's on the back of the photo... now if you haven't found the photo yet...

oh I found him once but didn’t end up going back