Roundtable: Explaining the Trend Behind Unfinished, Unpolished Games
Question: Why are we continuing to see unfinished, unpolished games as we move into what seems to be the umpteenth year of this growing trend?
Ben: This is a frustrating trend that probably won’t end anytime soon. You can probably trace the problem all the way back to the invention of patches, but I’m not quite that cynical. I don’t think that the ability to patch games has been the result of more broken experiences upon release, I think the advent of complex software did. There is a lot of evidence (see the recent Rockstar fiasco) that games require more effort and resources to create than ever before. Furthermore, games with unique ideas are under immense pressure to put those ideas out into the world as quickly as they can.
With the success of something like Fortnite, how can anyone fault a developer for pushing out a shell of an idea and then morphing it around the latest trends as they go? It is sure to create unpolished experiences, but is seems more lucrative to be new and exciting than it does to be ripened and polished. Bethesda’s most recent misstep may be cause for larger developers, who want to assume less risk, to think twice before pushing games out too early. There are some rocky starts that you simply cannot recover from.
Blake: When thinking about this question, Fortnite didn’t even come to mind. I am so blinded by its success, that I don’t ever stop to think about the nature of how the game continues to evolve. But the idea that higher ups in game development companies are pitching their investors on the idea that their game will be released similarly to Fortnite, and thereby generate comparable levels of success, has immense explanatory power. If true, then I have been too optimistic about developer intentions.
As to Fallout 76, I think the industry has seen – as evidenced by the incessant onslaught of criticism videos on YouTube – a very clear example that boldly indicates how releasing an unfinished game can backfire. Since writing my article for Epilogue about the absolute catastrophe of a game, Bethesda has absolutely tarnished its reputation as a company, and has squandered the vast majority of the trust, goodwill and cultural capital that it has gained over the years. I was willing to give Fallout 76 another chance, but each week I am baffled to see that the game has somehow managed to cripple itself even further and enrage more players. Pardon my analogy, but Fallout 76 has become the Donald Trump of the chaotic games media. (Noted that much of this is an outrage train; it’s fun and trendy to hate on Bethesda.) The takeaway for me, as a person who plays games, is that I now know, after Bethesda’s fiasco, that I will never again preorder a game.
But I haven’t answered the question. A final thought before I turn it back over to y’all, developers have viable narratives as to redemption arcs with regards to model their release schedule after. Take No Man’s Sky, as the posterchild of an over-promised, over-sold game that tanked upon release, but has since regained much of fans’ respect. Or Destiny, with a similar narrative. Even Sea of Thieves is seeing an analagous parabola of disappointment and then growth. The justification for WHY we continue to see these unfinished, unpolished games seems to be explained by virtue of what is trending in places like Twitch. The bland rhetoric of “we’re working hard to give you the best possible experience and will continually update/upgrade our game with new features” constantly clashes with player expectations. As much as I hate the heavy reliance on “this game will get better” as a consumer, I don’t think the producers of games are keyed in well enough to notice. I hope that the market corrects itself, but I see no evidence of this happening.
Barry: While patches themselves are not inherently bad, I think a lot of companies use them as an excuse to put in less content at launch. One company at the forefront of this is actually Nintendo, surprisingly. Splatoon launched on the Wii U with a paltry 5 maps with only 2 available every 4 hours and only 1 multiplayer mode. today, we see a lot of variety in Splatoon (both it and its sequel) – but that shouldn’t excuse the launch state of the game. Kirby Star Allies, Mario Tennis Aces, and ARMS are all guilty of this. The latest in this trend never even got any updates – Super Mario Party. Developers continue to follow this because it sells. Constant updates also allows the developer to sell more copies in the future due to the constant coverage it gets. We’ve seen updates to Splatoon 2 in what seems like every Nintendo Direct for a long time now – I’m sure it’s given Nintendo at least a few more sales each time they do so.
Some games are launched in such a state that they will never recover (Fallout 76, for example), but those redemption arcs Blake mentioned show that many of these unfinished games can still be respectable if given enough time. On the other hand, a lot of these companies still also produce amazing standalone experiences. If you look at the top rated games of the past year, they were complete packages. God of War, Red Dead Redemption 2, Celeste… finished, polished experiences. Even if we’ll see some incomplete games, we’ll also see masterpieces as well.
Preston: Gamers have had a banner time raging against game publishers and developers for pushing out unfinished games. I don’t even need to name any since they’ve become household curse words.All the excitement around bashing developers and publishers for poor programming and implementation hides the business decisions that leads games to release in their state.
Business in America has shifted the already lacking concern for consumer benefit to revenue and shareholder benefit. The shifting business ethics occur do to companies prioritizing poorly, rather than focusing on who is going to play a game the company focuses on what can be gotten from a game. The amount a company can get from a game has had the consequence of morphing games into a renewable monetary resource. I’m sure everyone remembers the quotes about “gaming’s untapped potential.” That potential doesn’t simply relate to what can happen on the screen, but also what can happen financially. This is visible in the burgeoning fight between online game stores and game aggregators. Market space for online game stores is artificially saturated due to the clout Steam has. But this artificiality is being tested currently with the Epic. As an example, on my computer I currently have 7 different game stores and aggregators, yet none compare to Steam financially.
Due to the financial head room in the gaming industry this has started an arms race businesswise. Businesses have begun to test different avenues for commercializing their products. So far the most successful and controversial has been paid content packages, or in-game purchases. These subsequent purchases a gamer makes after purchasing the main game go to add revenue to the original game’s price. Let’s say a company sells in-game content for $20 then with the games base rate of $60, they’ve made $80. This seems reasonable for a company to do. Add-ons help the player extend play time, just as it helps the company to create more content. Yet, businesses have abused these methods by monetizing spurious content and sometimes even withholding important features that would help to fill out a game until they are purchased. Paradox Entertainment comes to mind with their Crusader Kings 2 game having over 60 DLC. This modularization of games is a rising trend and so it is easy to write this off as a business practice to explore options for creating revenue. Though, this would be naive, since some of the DLC Paradox has released for CK2 have been small adjustments to how the base game works. These content packages, rather than being game extending are game fixing or game changing. Take for example how realistic CK2 attempts to be. The game has leaders die from assassinations, sickness, and other miserable life events. The game also boasts similar things for countries and armies, who collapse due to cold, surprise attacks, famine, etc. Yet you can buy DLC that changes how these game events work, adding new ways for leaders, armies, and countries to succumb. Compare this to game expanding DLC CK2 also has, such as the Rajas of India, which expands the game world and adds new kingdoms. The issue with offering to expand an already existing system with further traits comments on the monetary modularization the gaming industry has shifted into. If a system is already existing in a game, why not update it with a free patch and leave the DLC to truly expanding the world.
This modularization of the gaming industry paves the way for business to create gaming into revenue streams, a cornucopia of renewable resources. And this is where the shareholders enter. The poster child for shareholder, and subsequently, business leaders failure is Mass Effect Andromeda. Here I reference an inside piece written by Kotaku, which explored the happenings behind the curtain at EA expose that business leaders had much to do with Andromeda’s failure. When Andromeda first came out the fanfare was huge, a fourth Mass Effect game which broadened the cultural horizons for the series. But what happened on screen and in social media was something entirely different. Screen tearing, character clipping, character face meshes being removed exposing a character’s ugly floating eyeballs and mouth, narrative faux pas and plot holes were all rampant. Players were severely disappointed, to say the least. Why had this happened, though, remained a mystery. The question of a future fix coming was also just as aloof. Finally EA released a statement smeared with patronizing marketing slogans, similar to what Blake commented on, to attempt to alleviate the issue. This blistered players worse. About a year later, details began to leak from undisclosed sources that commented on the “unreasonable two year develop and release date,” the “shifting timeframe for when to release the game” that swung back and forth from one to five years and “superiors moving lead developers, project managers, and team members in and out of the project.” On top of this, the team that wrote the Andromeda story was replaced with a different team midway through the project which changed the development specifications and programming required to create the visual aspect of the game.
This messiness is nothing new in business. People have competing values, ethics, and beliefs. The gaming industry is no different. I just don’t want to trust in only the developers and publishers. The business practices behind these entities tend to gob up game development and release.
Andy: Ben mentions software, but along with that comes hardware upgrades. With expanded tech, we can push the envelope on graphics, UI, effects, programming; it can be easy to become too ambitious. Ambition alone doesn’t finish nor improve game quality though.
Developer intentions are a serious contender for being the root of the problem, though Preston appropriately identified the business aspects being a root cause as well. And here, at the crossroads of business and developer intent, is where I think the real issue lies. Video Games have become Big Business and as such have adopted a similar narrative: what can we get, financially, out of gaming? As if consumers aren’t already milked enough. I can’t see any silver lining.
With all we’ve said so far, I find a need to identify the responsibilities within this relationship trifecta between consumers, business practices, and developers. Consumers have the responsibility of delivering quality feedback to developers and outright boycotting malicious business practices (don’t preorder from untrustworthy sources, or don’t buy-in to “patches will fix/complete the game”). Developers have the responsibility of resisting big business approaches to game development and should prioritize quality of content at the benefit of the consumer. And lastly, big business has yet to prove it has any quality objectives in the gaming sphere. Business practices need to change across the board, not just in gaming. That’s no surprise. To avoid a winded take, I’ll just say that business’ responsibilities lie in change. I see business, and all that it stands for in this modern era of ours, as a wholly negative and inhumane practice that has lost sight of – or perhaps never had – what makes the things it sells so important in the first place, and for who those things are made.
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This Epilogue Gaming Roundtable was written by Blake Andrea, Barry Irick, Preston Johnston, Ben Vollmer, and Andy Webb. Edited by Blake Andrea.
