Something I want to teach these people is that a lot of the big-name repetitious games we have now started as largely singleplayer efforts.
Early Halo/COD didn’t have much effort in multiplayer, just putting all the SP tools in. As that saw appreciation, they built more effort in. Even the famous CODZombies mode was originally not even in the budget, and came in specifically from overtime actions.
Fortnite started as a coop zombie defense game. It pivoted based on trends but had a decent basis.
One game I play, Dead by Daylight, premiered as a low-effort 1v4 party game that the devs expected to last a year at most. It’s now at year 7 with 44 characters across many franchises.
Part of the point is, it’s not punitive to grow and pivot into live service. Each of those projects started off small and low budget, and only grew once it was clear players were going to spend hundreds of hours in it. Hence it feels so dumb to invest that cash early, à la Concord, BGE2, pretty much anything decided in a boardroom before release.
It’s the trend chasing that is a problem it is one thing for a publisher or developer to notice what their players are doing and favoring and optimizing and developing for that and a completely different thing when like you said these things are decided on in a boardroom.
Executives function only through their spreadsheets and what appears to make money they are disconnected from how these things actually work.
Something I want to teach these people is that a lot of the big-name repetitious games we have now started as largely singleplayer efforts.
Early Halo/COD didn’t have much effort in multiplayer, just putting all the SP tools in. As that saw appreciation, they built more effort in. Even the famous CODZombies mode was originally not even in the budget, and came in specifically from overtime actions.
Fortnite started as a coop zombie defense game. It pivoted based on trends but had a decent basis.
One game I play, Dead by Daylight, premiered as a low-effort 1v4 party game that the devs expected to last a year at most. It’s now at year 7 with 44 characters across many franchises.
Part of the point is, it’s not punitive to grow and pivot into live service. Each of those projects started off small and low budget, and only grew once it was clear players were going to spend hundreds of hours in it. Hence it feels so dumb to invest that cash early, à la Concord, BGE2, pretty much anything decided in a boardroom before release.
You cant force lightning into a bottle. You put the bottle out and wait for it to strike.
It’s the trend chasing that is a problem it is one thing for a publisher or developer to notice what their players are doing and favoring and optimizing and developing for that and a completely different thing when like you said these things are decided on in a boardroom.
Executives function only through their spreadsheets and what appears to make money they are disconnected from how these things actually work.