#green light process

[askagamedev]

Highguard got announced and released after Concord’s legendary failure, and it currently is sitting at a few hundred players. Releasing Highguard after Concord’s launch seems questionable. How often are games canned in light of the failures of similar games in the same genre and design space?

The ease of cancelling something is proportional to how close to the beginning we are. When it's still just a small number of devs coming up with an initial pitch, it's super easy to cancel because it doesn't cost very much. We haven't done that much work on it, so at most we lose some documents and maybe some prototypes that we built. Remember, the majority of the cost of any development project is proportional to its team size. During incubation and early preproduction, the teams are a lot smaller - we're only building prototypes and coming up with proof of concept, not building out a whole world/system/game. This means that things are relatively cheap, so the executives are less afraid of throwing out what we've built.

When we're fixing the last cert bugs after spending years of dev time and millions of dollars building and marketing a game, it's more rare to pull the plug and eat all those losses rather than try to put it out and see if we can get some return on that investment. This typically applies regardless of the game genre. Most bigger publishers already have a good idea of what the expectations are for their projects by the time they get the green light for full production. Any game that gets approved for production and its increased costs is usually expected to release.

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[askagamedev]

Recently, Jason Schreier revealed some bts talks with Blizzard devs who told him that they were trying for an RTS for years but were denied by execs. I understand that execs weigh risk/reward in terms of profitability but from the consumer side, these sorts of reveals makes it seem like innovation is being stifled and shifted to the indie scene like the nothing but superhero movies. What's it look like from the dev and creative side?

Creatives want to be creative, so they pitch creative stuff. Executives care about the bottom line and return on investment. Unfortunately, the real story in the AAA space is that experimental and niche games like RTS games don't have as much of a potential market anymore. The biggest RTS in the world was Starcraft 2, and [Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty didn't earn as much as the glowy mount in World of Warcraft] at the time.

"But why not just form smaller teams?" you might ask. The problem here is that the game development specialties don't typically lend themselves to being evenly distributed between smaller projects and larger ones - every project needs at least a tech artist, an engine programmer, a strong generalist programmer, etc. just to get off the ground. These kind of roles are rare and highly sought-after in the industry, while the others - character modelers, environment artists, level designers, gameplay programmers, AI programmers, texture artists, UI artists (and so on) aren't needed in the same numbers on small or big projects. If the studio doesn't have a good distribution of work for these devs to do, that inevitably leads to layoffs.

We want to make these games, but the feasibility of such at a studio with a large headcount of varying discipline distribution is a numbers balancing optimization game. The incentives and needs are more than just "we want to do this" - the biggest question is "Can we make this game idea work financially within the studio constraints?". Some studios have tried to make it work - Double Fine focused their development on smaller titles, Crystal Dynamics tried some smaller Tomb Raider titles, my own studio is currently trying to get approval for a new game, and so on, but it is a much more complex problem than "we want to do it but the executives don't want to".

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[askagamedev]

Do you think Steam should have enforced quality control so that the platform is more of games very positively received? because Steam is full of pretty bad and mediocre indie games if you ask me.

Steam could do that, but that would make it a much more strongly-curated platform similar to the game consoles. This would ultimately result in games that had a higher quality bar, but also a lot fewer games in general because there's no way to automate testing games like that. Further, it would also significantly raise the cost of publishing games due to needing workers to do the vetting and quality assurance - they would have to test every game that gets submitted to make sure they comply with Valve's theoretical regulations and either pass or fail those games. Paying for those costs would have to come from somewhere, either cutting into Steam's margins or raising Steam prices.

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[askagamedev]

Quick question. I often hear people say "digital games should be cheaper than physical games because you aren't getting a tangible item." Do you guys actually factor the cost of cart/disc, case, and paperwork printing into the *MSRP* of a game?

You're asking about a business term called COGS (Cost Of Goods Sold). It does factor in, but not exactly in the way you're probably thinking. Game prices don't really fluctuate all that much - most games cost around $60. That price might go up or down in increments of $5-10, but that's basically our target price. COGS absolutely factors into our metric, but because customers tend to balk at (especially upward) prices changes, the determination is about whether the game gets made at all. If the executives don't think a pitched game will be able to sell enough copies to be sufficiently profitable with the given costs of development, marketing, and distribution, the pitch won't get the green light.

I'll reference Mark Darrah's retrospective on Sonic: Dark Brotherhood for this next bit. As an example, the cost of old DS cartridges ranged from $3.50 each to $10.50 each and how that cost had a huge effect on the feasibility of a game that was expected at a $40 retail price. Factor in additional percentages being taken out like platform, retailer cut, licensing, etc. and the cost difference between a $3.50 cartridge and a $10.50 cartridge can easily become a dealbreaker for a particular pitch.

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[askagamedev]

How much freedom does a game designer have at a non-indie studio? Are they able to pitch and create their own ideas or are they basically project leads that get assigned games to make/design (ie that time everyone was making a WW2 shooter)?

I think you have the wrong idea about what game designers do. We're not project leads that pitch entire games, we're [content creators] that build the bits of specific content in games - the spells, the monsters, the fights, the classes, the races, the quests, the environments, the stats, the companions, and so on. Your typical AAA dev team has hundreds of developers, including dozens (or even hundreds) of designers there to create the items, quests, abilities, enemies, fights, crafting recipes, and other content that players engage with.

There are times when studios will solicit pitches from the rank and file, but these are few and far between. Everybody from the oldest of the old to the newest of the new have their own game ideas that they want to get made. Only those who have amassed sufficient experience and influence with publishing executives are typically given this opportunity, often because anyone who leads a new game's development is being trusted with hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars.

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[askagamedev]

You say that petitions don't work, but in 2011, a group of fans started a campaign called Operation Rainfall to localize three Wii games to the West. The campaign succeeded in its goal and it helped bring Xenoblade Chronicles to a wider audience. Without Operation Rainfall, Xenoblade wouldn't have become a major Nintendo IP today. Doesn't this campaign prove that dedicated fans can create an impact?

Of course, there are exceptions to every rule. On occasion, under rare circumstances, the stars align and things happen. Despite the odds, there are also lottery winners chosen regularly. That doesn't mean it's a feasible or repeatable strategy for success, or that it's a good idea for the multiple millions of lottery losers to keep playing in hopes that they, too, will eventually win.

Honestly, petitions fail the vast majority of the time because there are just too many mission-critical elements outside of the petitioning players' control. The licensor not be willing, the funding might not be there, the size of the spending audience might not be there, the technology might not be there, the dev team might already be busy with other projects, the slot in the release schedule might not be there, the executives in charge at the publisher might not be willing, the console generation might be about to turn over, and so on and so forth. There are so many separate individual pieces that must align for a specific project to get the green light. Any single one of them not being there spells doom for the project. Player enthusiasm is only a single piece of a much bigger puzzle.

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