#exploring design space

[askagamedev]

Back in the 90's, space sims were very popular. Proportional to the number of games being released, they were a much bigger chunk than they have been in the last 15 years. With the amount of money people are throwing at Star Citizen, it seems like there is still a viable population to play these games today -- so do you find it a little strange that there aren't more companies trying to jump on the bandwagon and release something before Star Citizen, even if it's just single-player?

There are still space flight games being made. We’ve still got games like No Man’s Sky, EVE: Valkyrie, House of the Dying Sun, and Elite Dangerous, as well as games with spaceflight as a game mode like Star Wars: Battlefront. There just aren’t many AAA big budget space flight games being made because most publishers are (rightfully) skittish of dropping that much money into development when there’s not a lot of estimated players out there.

Star Citizen is a strange outlier at this point. It’s really hard to call it a success when they haven’t actually released a game yet, and nobody else has managed to replicate their funding model or player base. If it isn’t something that other publishers can do, it isn’t something they can comfortably invest in. Once Star Citizen is released and we get some data on its reception, we can decide whether it’s a success as a game. But, as it currently stands, Star Citizen’s main success is obtaining a lot of funding for a constantly-in-flux product that has yet to materialize, and nobody else has been able to repeat this process (though not for lack of trying).

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[askagamedev]

Is it profitable for a company to piggyback off the popularity of a certain game type or mode? For example, there seemed to be a boom in fps team games because of overwatch, and now the most recent e3 joke prediction is everyone going for battle royale type gameplay because of pubg and fortnite. Can companies even implement modes that fast becuase of a trend? Is the accusation that anthem is only a thing because destiny is popular even a reasonable one since it's been in the works for years?

That’s certainly a bunch of questions. Let’s see if I can tackle all of them.

Is it profitable for a company to piggyback off the popularity of a certain game type or mode?

It certainly can be. League of Legends supplanted Dota as the premiere MOBA game. World of Warcraft was certainly not the first MMOG, but it is certainly the biggest. Also, there have been very successful other MMOGs that came after WoW. GTA3 was the first big open world 3D sandbox game, but we have successes in Saint’s Row, Just Cause, Infamous, Horizon Zero Dawn, etc. That said, it isn’t always the case - I’m sure you can think of plenty of failed MOBAs, MMOGs, team-based shooters, fighting games, and other types of games built to follow a genre leader. It really just depends on whether the new game can carve out enough of an audience to sustain itself. I think the answer to that is statistically about 50/50.

Can companies even implement modes that fast because of a trend?

It depends on a lot of factors - their technology, the amount of content they need to build for it, how much money they are willing to dump into it, etc.  Epic was able to pivot quickly with Fortnite because the engine was built to be extensible with lots of possible types of gameplay. You can compare this to something like the Frostbite engine, which is notoriously difficult to make do anything that isn’t a FPS game. Scope is the largest determining factor of turnaround time. Mobile games are notoriously easy to turn around quickly, but MMOGs are almost impossible due to just how much total development and content is needed for release.

Is the accusation that Anthem is only a thing because destiny is popular even a reasonable one since it’s been in the works for years?

Anthem has been in development for a very, very long time. Its design has certainly changed over time, but the general idea has always been there. I can’t say that Destiny hasn’t had an effect on it, but I know for a fact that the idea of Anthem as a multiplayer cooperative science fiction shooter has been in place since at least early 2014, before Destiny was released. You also have to realize, Bioware’s been working on MMOG content and technology since ~2008; they’ve got a lot of experience building that sort of thing. 

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