Why Unfinished Games Keep Making Millions

Almost everything AAA you see now a days is buggy and unplayable. But why is this, and how do they keep making money?

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📃 Research Links
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First ever console internet game update
Halo Infinite Steam charts
FIFA Ultimate Team Has Made EA Over $6 Billion Dollars Since 2015
Business Insider on Anthem crunch
Halo Infinite x Monster Energy
EA spouse story
Communication channels
Jeff Bezos and the 2 pizza rule
GDC talk on Crunch

[GoingIndie]

Who’s the best video game studio, and why?

🟥 Grow your indie studio and help fund indie games!

[RGARnator]

TotalBiscuit used to warn people never to pre-order, and that is a battle he lost. When people criticize a gaming company, they talk about "cancel your pre-order". People keep pre-ordering unfinished games, no matter how much they keep getting burned. Pre-orderers are the problem, become a patientgamer, take advantage of wishlists to get that 75% off sweet spot, and play through your backlog or older games in the meantime.

[TheTraveler]

Reasons that many video games release unfinished:

1. Development teams are too many in one company, ruining communication efficiency and consistency.

2. Leaders of companies want money sooner than later, even at the expense of the game and development team(s), along with pleasing stockholders.

3. Crunch Time due to impatience and negligence with both devs and consumers.

4. Dumbass consumers who continue to pre-order no matter what.

[mrbigglezworth]

It doesn't work for most things. You don't buy a car off the lot riddled with issues with the understanding that the dealership will "fix it later". You don't buy a meal at a restaurant with the idea that the other half of the meal may or may not be delivered to your table. It's actually amazing that this one exception is allowed for digital products, when no where else would anyone be okay with it.

[ferlicia]

As a indie game enjoyer and someone who buys games 6 months after release I see this as not my problem. It does sadden me that we can't have games like Portal or New Vegas anymore

[astranger]

Once upon a time Larian Studios/BG3 was a small indie studio . They managed to buy the rights to the Baldur's Gate IP and found themselves with a choice, to shrink the game to fit the studio or to grow the studio to fit the game. They decided to grow the studio. They asked their players to fund the whole thing and the players responded, 2.500.000 copies sold at $60 each in Early Access, years before the game came even out. Larian Studios had the money to make BG3 into what it is so they did. They transformed from a small indie into a big indie to make it all possible.

And larian is still majority owned by their founder Swen Vincke who multitasks as owner/founder/CEO/Creative director/bear wrangler/armor wearer. Keep out the big money(as much as you can), gain and keep the trust of your player base, work smart not hard, let your workers share in the glory.

And always respect your customers.

[arrowghost]

Todd Howard once said this about Fallout 76, "It's not how you launch, it's what it becomes." They want the money on Day 1 while we want the game all good on Day 1 which failed to meet our expectations.

[Ramitaken]

that fact that fallout 76 still has the audacity to make dlcs is crazy

[megamachine]

I wish we could go back to the old way of buying games: begging your parents to take you to GameStop so you can play a new game with friends

[Lord_of_ChaoSan]

I was into Game Development for a long while, 15 Years or so- I don't mess much with it anymore beyond modding my own games to be how I want. I've always thought the best way to make a game- make the game in secret, only start advertising when the game is completely READY to release- then advertise finished game for a while as you begin the next game or DLC. Money People are freaking stupid though, they'd rather get a little now than make something great that could rake in x10 times as much if they just waited a little longer.

[ZealotFeathers]

7 years preproduction for Anthem??? My goodness, that’s what prototypes are for!! If there’s one thing I’ve learned as software engineer, YOU CANNOT PROGRAM ON A WHITEBOARD!!

I blame this entirely on the gaming community, we swallow up every thing the AAA publishers shoved down our throats, remember kids, we allowed games to become what it is today, we only have ourself to blame.

[matthewhardwick]

Since the dawn of game updates and Internet being a requirement games have been changed to a service business model. We don't own anything or have any control of the product in any meaningful way. Serious questions have to be asked about game ownership and the companies in control of these products. That includes free to play games and how they are designed to be predatory in terms of manipulating people to spend money.

[LookjaklooK]

'Release now and finished later' is acceptable only in early access games. That is literally why it exists and that's how Baldur's Gate 3 managed to release a full game. This is also how Slime Rancher 2 is being developed and they literally said in the description that 'we don't believe in crunching and we only gonna release the game when its ready'. When you release a game, people have high expectations, and it shouldn't be otherwise in my opinion.

[SirZelean]

THANK YOU. As a dev, I'm getting tired of hearing from gamers everything is the devs' fault, and trying to explain to them it's much more complicated than that. In my experience, there are two big parties to blame:

1) the people with the money. They don't know shit about how to make games, but they keep forcing us to follow shitty decisions because that's what they think is best. I've spent hours arguing in meetings trying to convince these people we shouldn't do it their way. This is so fucking tiring, and the devs are the only ones to lose is situations like this.

2) the people who buy games before they are sure what they're getting into. The capitalist market works as long and the consumer makes educated decisions on how they should spend their money. The consumer should buy what they think is worth their money. This way, companies are incentivized to give the best product possible so they become competitive. But in the gaming industry, this doesn't happen. Gamers are moved by hype and expectations, not by brains. They buy whatever products they are hyped for, and THEN they go yelling on the internet demanding the game to meet their expectations. But by then it's too late - investors already made their money, and we devs are left on the battlefield to clean up the mess and deal with an angry mob of internet nerds. And this incentivizes investors and publishers to keep repeating this toxic cycle that gives them more money for less effort.

Really, people. PLEASE. Stop spending money on games so early. Stop buying games that don't meet your standards. Become responsible adults and control your spending impulses. Yelling on the internet won't solve ANYTHING because it's not the investors who will have to deal with your complaints - it's us, devs, who know *very well* how shitty our games are.

Because people keep pre-ordering. It doesnt even matter if you only pre-order from game companies you trust, because it's not about you risking your money, it's about the company making money out of games they havent done yet. Pre-ordering is a bad, anti-consumer practice that pushes companies into greed and hurts the games and the players

[vocalcalibration]

One thing I will say in EA's defense, something I very rarely do, is Bioware spent five years not actually getting work done. EA should have delayed, yes, but they also didn't make Bioware waste all of that time either.

[spakentruth]

One more thing to add: these companies have been over reliant on contractors because they drove out the people that could've actually had any kind of passion, hence why these new games feel so soulless. Instead these AAA publishers will stop to hiring anyone that's willing to implement their version of monetization hell while leaving a game floundering in dev hell.

Activision/blizzard/EA/Bungie are not interested in making games, just money traps that gets interested people into sliding them $60-$70. As a consumer, if you enable corruption in your backyard, you get it everywhere in your life. These copmpanies have been getting away with these antics for 15 years now, and the fucked thing is kids are coming to in a day and age where all they see is this MTX hell and see so many streamers promoting them and think, the games might be cool. And the vycle continues.

[NourArt]

There is also another major flaw in AAA game companies. While software companies can choose from millions of types of software, because AAA games are too expensive to make these major companies funneled themselves in only few tried and true categories, and because of that if a new game comes out bugged gamers won't tolerate it because it would be just another open-world adventure or an FPS game, in which case gamers can ignore it and move on to a better game

[Wizard_Lizard_]

The culture of pre-ordering needs to die...