Gone are the days when a major studio could put a new video game to tape or floppy disc every few months. Even in the 90s, as cartridge-based games grew in popularity, a brand new IP could go from drawing board to release over a couple of years. SEGA managed it in three with Sonic the Hedgehog, while Squaresoft (now Square Enix) managed to release five Final Fantasy titles between the years of 1987 and 1992.
Cost and Complexity
Obviously, as hardware grew more capable, games became projects on the same scope as blockbuster movies. Red Dead Redemption 2, for example, required up to US$550m to build, while CD Projekt Red spent US$87m on Witcher 3 and then US$316m developing Cyberpunk 2077. To put those figures into perspective, the most expensive movie ever made cost US$379m. It was Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides.
Sadly, due to the exploding cost and complexity of video games, franchises are spending longer and longer outside the public consciousness. In fact, some beloved games have become almost mythical. It’s been ten years since the last main series Elder Scrolls title was released – and according to https://www.gamesradar.com, the only evidence that Bethesda Game Studios has provided of the sixth entry’s existence is a short landscape video.
It’s hard to see this as a positive. CD Projekt Red promised gamers the moon with Cyberpunk 2077 but, despite eight years in the oven and a marketing campaign that involved Keanu Reaves, it released in a broken state, lacks promised mechanics, and still isn’t close to completion. It’d be easy to blame this on the developers but it’s arguably other influences that have the biggest effect on the final product.
Investors
While the technology and a studio’s creatives may be willing, increasingly, investors and customers are not. Cyberpunk 2077 was reportedly forced out the door to appease backers who wanted a Christmas release. The same issue blighted the release of Fallout New Vegas a decade ago. Created by Obsidian under license from Bethesda, New Vegas has one of the most unpleasant real-life epilogues in gaming history, reports https://gamerant.com.
Fallout New Vegas was developed over a much shorter period of time than Cyberpunk was, due to the availability of its predecessor’s assets and the premade Gamebryo engine. The creation of pre-made tools like Unity3D and the Unreal Engine is a popular means of shortening development cycles. Hearthstone, Cuphead, and adventure game Subnautica were all developed in Unity, for example.
Casino and eSports platforms use similar software. Pronet Gaming offers an accelerated time to market and product localization services for its partners, which include Quickspin, Kiron, and Concept Gaming, among other brands. Pre-built engines can significantly reduce the overall cost of future development and, in cases such as https://pronetgaming.com/, marketing and databasing tasks too. Yet in this industry, the outcome seems far more successful than it has been in recent video gaming releases.
The question that needs to be asked of gamers is whether the bells and whistles are worth the decade-long development period, especially as it tends to come with an above-average risk of producing a title riddled with bugs and with missing content. Cyberpunk 2077 and Fallout New Vegas have millions of variables and processes that are easily broken. It’s debatable whether developers can truly keep up with the enormous scope of modern video games.
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