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[Africa's Toto]

Or has it ever been valid? Should Miyamoto have said "... a rushed game only stays bad if you forget to release roadmaps and content-design updates"?

Of all the aspects of development, marketing has the greatest impact on initial returns for publishers and investors (in my opinion anyway). It's what indie developers are told will lift them up out of obscurity and so on.

Following a traditional development/marketing cycle, publishers force a game out, get huge launch sales and then work on adjusting the game's core design, balance and performance post-release;
That decision is made easier with the potential for feedback directly from players and the apparent ease of delivering updates directly to players.

Of course, developers and producers with unfocused development and overambitious goals contribute to this too.

Still, this practice will probably only get worse as the need for external investment grows with the complexity of games.






Of course, I don't know shit about what actually goes down behind closed doors. Pure speculation here.

Tl;dr: Do "bad" games stay bad these days?

 

[NeilH1982]

A rushed game has no guarantee of being bad. Likewise, there is no guarantee a delayed game will be good. This has always and will always be true

 

[GreenAlien]

It's mostly true. Sure, there are exceptions, but bad games tend to fail their sales target and failed games get their support and roadmaps cancelled..

 

[Miles708]

Provided you have the skill, you need time and money. You take out one, and the game will suffer.

You can get away if you consider your customers idiots and your product as disposable service.

But that statement is and remains true.

 

[Danjin44]

A rushed game has no guarantee of being bad. Likewise, there is no guarantee a delayed game will be good. This has always and will always be true

This is true, CP2077 got delayed multiple times but that didn't stop the game from being released broken.

 

[SJRB]

I think this is a gross oversimplification of current-day videogame development.

Delay is no sign of quality by default, just as "forever bad" is a non-applicable definitive statement considering patches and hotfixes are common good now.

 

[GreenAlien]

This is true, CP2077 got delayed multiple times but that didn't stop the game from being released broken.

It's still rushed if it wasn't ready for release.. which it clearly wasn't.

 

[FromDuskTillGameOver]

This was true for the whole industry until the suscess of Minecraft and but its also still true for Nintendo. And there is also No Mans Sky redemption story.... so EVERYTHING goes nowadays.

 

[SkylineRKR]

No this comment was likely made during the old age of gaming. When you put a SNES game up for sale, then that was it. If the game was broken, it was broken forever.

But these days there are some games that became good post-launch. Like Driveclub, Days Gone. GT Sport perhaps. Those games would benefit from a delay but they wouldn't become entirely different games unless they do a 180 on the project.

 

[kyussman]

I guess it depends how long you are willing to delay it.....they tried to give Cyberpunk the time it needed with the delays,but the pressure to release it just became too much for them and they pulled the trigger knowing full well it still wasn't ready....not making excuses for them but as a business it must be difficult burning all those development costs and really needing to start seeing some money coming back in but not having the game ready....the result of course is they released the game,sold plenty of copies but tarnished their good reputation with a lot of gamers.

 

[Nico_D]

First impressions are pretty hard to get rid off.

For example, Disco Elysium would've have had a much bigger impact on me if it had been in a better state. Now the final image of Harry sitting outside of the car and flying to the end credits is what I will remember.

The bugs ruined my experience and my memory of it and opened it up for me to be critical about other things in the game which might not have bothered me otherwise.

 

[Danjin44]

It's still rushed if it wasn't ready for release.. which it clearly wasn't.

The game was teased back in 2013 for fuck sake and delayed multiple times. They had budget, enough to hire famous actor to be in the game they had lots of time and the game still end up broken. At that point it's really not "rushed" it just bad development cycle.

 

[Miles708]

The game was teased back in 2013 for fuck sake and delayed multiple times. They had budget, enough to hire famous actor to be in the game they had lots of time and the game still end up broken. At that point it's really not "rushed" it just bad development cycle.

It's still rushed, because they've wasted a ton of time.
It needed at least another year and a half.

 

[Danjin44]

It's still rushed, because they've wasted a ton of time.
It needed at least another year and a half.

But game got delayed multiple times to give themselves more development time and still end up severely broken, I think they were already in big trouble and at that point even another delay wouldn't helped.

 

[Miles708]

But game got delayed multiple times to give themselves more development time and still end up severely broken, I think they were already in big trouble and at that point even another delay wouldn't helped.

Yeah fair enough. Their problems run deeper than just time.

 

[vito_don_corleone_]

Yes, it is.

 

[Danjin44]

Yeah fair enough. Their problems run deeper than just time.

Exactly! After that all that you would think be little bit more working order but even delay after delay the game still end up broken.

I don’t see how another delay would have helped unless they go Star Citizen route and delay it for infinity.

 

[Clear]

Mostly true, because nothing coding-wise is ever completely finished, just abandoned.

Rush and abandon = high likelihood of bugs, oversights and omissions.

Take as much time as possible = higher likelihood that every issue has been found and addressed, greater chance of feature completeness.

Obviously time taken vs time needed is not a constant, it depends on the scope of the project and at what point its made available for sale versus when work is deemed "all done".

 

[Ozzie666]

Just ask FFXIV v1.0 and Cyberpunk. The launch damage was done, only one recovered. The game can become forever tainted, making it forever bad. Even if it turns around like FFXIV, which is the anomaly and not the norm.

The quote itself goes much deeper than how a game eventually turns out.

 

[Krizalidx11]

Miyamoto be like "A good employee works from 9am to 11pm, a bad one asks for a 1 hour break"

 

[Tomeru]

This was said in time when consoles did not have access to the internet.

 

[Rolla]

 

[ToTTenTranz]

In the era of post-release fixes and feature upgrades that go on for years on some games, I don't think this statement is true at all.

For better or for worse, there's a bunch of games that became great after a rushed release. No Man's Sky is the best example, and I'm sure Cyberpunk will follow eventually.

 

[ZywyPL]

Not entirely. In modern era a rushed game can eventually get good thanks to post-launch patches/support, and even fade away most of the initial reception like for example Witcher 3 or No Man's Sky did, but unfortunately many games fail to get past that initial bad taste, as very often before the patches are rolled out there's already no community left anymore that would make it worth working on the game, so as a result many rushed games eventually end in a "halfway there" state.

However first half of Miyamoto's quote will forever stay true, if you delay the game to finish/polish it before the launch day, it'll forever remain as a complete product.

 

[Tschumi]

I mean, the old republic, duke nukem whatever, etc etc.. there's evidence to suggest there's a third category, a "psyched out" game, a game which trips itself up with internal trouble

 

[Kenpachii]

Lots of games got endlessly delayed and ended up bad. so i would so nope.

 

[GeorgPrime]

A game that gets delayed has more time to get polished and deliver the promised experience but if you delay it into production hell it may be a bad game to begin with and it wont be ba good game later too.

 

[phil_t98]

If a game is bad then only delaying it to work on it more can only be a good thing

 

[Laptop1991]

Maybe it used to be, but if the focus of the publisher is on monetization instead of gameplay as a lot of new games are now then in my opinion it really doesn't matter in the end as a delay won't guarantee good gameplay or a stable release, you only have to look at how many bugs Valhalla had and still has, but the store worked flawlessly.

 

[GrayFoxPL]

Means all modern games are forever bad.

Gamers don't seem to care anymore.

"Day one patch? Only 97 gigs? Cool, I'll wait."

 

[vaibhavpisal]

"A rushed game is forever bad.

A delayed game could be bad too. "

This should be updated version as proven by Cyberpunk with its delays.

 

[Ellery]

I just know that Squaresoft released FF7 in 1997, FF8 in 1999, FF9 in 2000 and FF10 for a new console with massively different graphics in 2001 and all those games are timeless masterpieces.
How they did it no idea, but they announced FF15 in 2006 and it released 10 years later in 2016 and it was a massive piece of garbage.

 

[ChuckeRearmed]

Game released any time can be bad.

 

[Miles708]

Of course a game in dev hell will not benefit from a simple delay.
But still, time IS a fundamental asset when creating a game, or anything really. Of course more time means more polish and more quality. We're infested by silly day-one patches exactly because publishers don't want to delay 1 month a project that takes 5 years. That's asinine, but luckily for them, gamers are mostly idiots.

 

[rolandss]

At this point. I feel like Cyberpunk will never be a good game, or at least the game they said it’d be, because there’s so many problems with it they seem like baked in stuff. I’d like to be shown I’m wrong though.

 

[Sid Of Bee]

I think the basis of this statement is true, and that most of us are overthinking it. Of course there are lots of examples showing otherwise, there's the impact of game updates and GaaS etc. Yet, this is true, particularly when you take it in it's most basic context and likely more accurate than the translation... If you rush a job or project than your outcome will be worse than if you take the time to do it right.

 

[KungFucius]

It's still rushed if it wasn't ready for release.. which it clearly wasn't.

But the game is still good. It plays like a Bethesda game on PC, buggy but serviceable. I know it plays like ass on cheap 7 year old hardware, but on PC it is good.

What would people really prefer, games that are a little buggy on release or games that are less buggy 6 + months later? If you answer the latter note that 6 or more months added to every game would substantially reduce the volume of games released and many of the bugs take thousands of players to even find.

 

[The Cockatrice]

Too many factors. We've seen rushed games end up good, we've seen delayed games end up bad. It does not matter. What matters is the management and the people in charge of the development team. Thats all it matters. If they're idiots no matter how many times you delay it will end up a buggy mess, look at Cyberpunk for the perfect example. Obviously the team that handled the architectural design of Night City and the atmosphere must've had quite a nice team in charge because the map carries the whole game. It's incredible and it shows what good management can do even in bad times. The management team that handled AI/gameplay probably needs to be fired or move on to something else.

 

[YeulEmeralda]

Delay your game for too long and it's gonna look dated.
Not a problem for cartoony Nintendo but it is for most games.

 

[Red Crayon Aristocrat]

The opposite is true, if a game gets hit with a bunch of delays it means something has gone wrong and it's going to disappoint.

This goes all the way back at least to Tomb Raider The Angel of Darkness and Daikatana and their many delays, it's not a sign of a dev making a game better, it's a sign of a dev trying to salvage a game.

Of course I'm talking anything more than 1 or 2 delays, a couple of delays doesn't mean it's going to be bad, more than 2 is a bad sign though.

 

[ZywyPL]

Keep in mind guys that the release dates are being set by the publishers (who have obligations towards the investors, have to reach a certain target for the fiscal quarter etc.), not the dev team, who has no idea how long the game will actually take to make, what challenges will appear down the road etc. So sometimes a few delays still don't mean the devs are given enough time to fully polish the game.

The best practice is to not give any release date to begin with if the game's not close to being finished (but then again, investors obligations...), otherwise you either have to delay it indefinitely, which IMO isn't bad, it just saying "guys, we didn't make it in time, we will finish what we promised and then release it", which for whatever the reason I see makes a lot of people angry, or you can keep delaying the game game again and again, giving people false hope that the game is just around the corner (which honestly seems to be working as I don't see as many people offended, saying "that's the last one (delay)" etc.).

Or a game get's delayed to fix just the most critical/game-braking bugs and still ends up overally as a buggy/unpolished mess on launch day, with the promise of post-launch patches.

 

[Birdo]

Talent is the only deciding factor.

 

[Raonak]

It's not even a valid statement in any period. You can easily have a game is delayed a lot and still comes out bad. And one that is rushed and it's still good. A delayed often signifies troubled development.

A more accurate saying for modern contexts is:
A delayed game is eventually completed. A rushed game is incomplete for now.

 

[Sid Of Bee]

Talent is the only deciding factor.

Talent, resources and time. Give a talented man no resources or time and he wouldn't produce a smile never mind a product.

 

[Shodan09]

Not true these days. Sea of Thieves and No Man's sky were both rushed out before they were ready and poor at launch. Both basically different games now.

 

[Birdo]

Talent, resources and time. Give a talented man no resources or time and he wouldn't produce a smile never mind a product.

A talented developer could create a masterpiece in a cave with a box full of scraps.

 

[luffie]

This is true, CP2077 got delayed multiple times but that didn't stop the game from being released broken.

"A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad"​

obviously, this sentence is not entirely accurate, but "CP2077 being delayed and still bad" is a grossly oversimplified situation.

Cp2077 is by all means "rushed". Everything they have conceptualized and developed was scrapped on 2016, causing them to start again.... while developing a new engine.

When a game is delayed, what people usually mean is "allowing it to be developed completely", it isn't necessarily going to end up good, if it isn't, it's because of the way the game is inherently designed, some bad choices etc, but rushing a badly designed game is inevitably going to be worse.

When most people mentioned a game is "rushed", it usually means they sell it without even completing it's development, and that is inherently bad.
In fact, cp2077 is a good example of that. Because they need to embellish their earnings report to please the shareholders, and also catch that "holiday" season, it ends up like a clusterfuck.
Result? Stock nosedived, loss of a lot of goodwill, lots of bad report, and an embarrassing apology video, and a loss of after sales.

Nobody ever buys a game and says "oh boy christmas is over, you know what, I'm not buying that game ever again"
Nobody is going to say "If cp2077 isn't releasing now, I'm not buying it anymore". There is literally no reason not to delay cp2077 release when they knew it was that broken. Stock will drop, so what? It will literally skyrocket again when people found out how good cp2077 is. There wouldn't be less buyer, but more buyer, more goodwill, which will lead to even more sales in the future, and cp2077 multiplayer wouldn't need to be cancelled. The only reason they did is because management foolishly think they can get away with it and everyone is dumb.

 

[AncientOrigin]

Depends on the game.For example Path of Exile is an amazing game.The first time it was playable it had not the content it has now was still a great game years ago.It is constantly adding content and gameplay elements new graphics and so on but it was a great game from the beginning.It depends on the game how much content does it have how good is the game in its state how does everything work.

 

[Punished Miku]

It's not technically true all the time now when you can deliver large patches digitally.

However, I still think his logic holds merit. The consumers remember, and the shape your games are in at launch shapes the perception of your brand, and your IP, and what you can sell games for. Look at the reputation of Nintendo's games, the perception of their brand, their IP strength and what they sell games for. It clearly still matters.

If you put out a broken game then patch it together over the next year, that is how people will look at you - the company that puts out broken games that are maybe good at a later date when they're half-price or less. So now Miyamoto should probably update it to saying:

"A company that puts out a delayed game that is eventually good will be remembered fondly, while a company that puts out a rushed game will be remembered poorly."

 

[Sid Of Bee]

A talented developer could create a masterpiece in a cave with a box full of scraps.

I think you've confused talent with the beginning of the movie "Ironman".