onnes

Furry Physicist and Lead Engineer

  • they/she

Avatar by @stratica
NSFW: @darkonnes


bruno
@bruno

If a game is announced, takes many many years to come out, and it feels shallow/rushed/unpolished/bad nevertheless, and you're asking yourself "what did they spend all this time doing," the answer is almost always rebooting production multiple times


mrhands
@mrhands

I once joined a project in June that was supposed to come out by the end of that year, and it was in a pre-alpha state. It had already been in development for four years at that point. A month later, studio management decided to change game engines. When the project inevitably failed to meet the end-of-year deadline, it was canceled, and the team breathed a collective sigh of relief. Only to be told by upper management six weeks later that the project was _un_canceled, and to "continue as before." So, we completely overhauled the game's design, we upgraded the tech to actually make the game possible to make, and then the company slowly bled to death over eighteen months.

Vidya Gaems™


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @bruno's post:

  • Yes, it's often sunk cost fallacy
  • Everyone underestimates how hard games are to make, even industry professionals
  • Sometimes projects keep going because it's the brainchild of a Legendary Name
  • Sometimes it's just nepotism
  • And sometimes it's a lil bit of the ol' tax fraud

It's always a small tragedy when an exciting project gets cancelled, but there are definitely games that get released where you can look at it and say "you had to know that cancelling this would be a smaller loss than finishing it, like a year ago".

I understand why small developers get tied up finishing the flawed big-dream project, with big publisher-backed stuff it's honestly just kind of embarrassing.