Image by AFP/Getty Images via @daylife
~ Guest Post by Nob Akimoto
The recent kerfuffle over the day one DLC for Mass Effect 3 brought back to the forefront an issue I'd not thoguht about in months: the gap between design objecties and project management. Just about every high profile game suffers from some sort of fault. Release dates are missed, features are cut, bugs run rampant.
Developers and publishers are often praised for waiting until a product is "done" rather than releasing it on schedule. PC Gamers have long been used to this, with the ubiquity of patches and expansion packs. With the rise of XBox Live and PSN, we're seeing a similar trend for console games. What does this state tell us about the gaming industry?
The Roots of Evil?
The instinctive habit for gamers has been to blame the publisher for this state of affairs. The publishers are a great target. They usually set the deadlines, they're the ones who market the game and they're the ones who get most of the profit. Just as often they're viewed as the responsible party when mismanagement kills a promising franchise.
We've seen the likes of Atari and THQ squander away profitable franchises. We've also seen the likes of Activision or Electronic Arts squeeze every last bit of profitability out of a franchise.
Publishers do bear a burden on pushing unrealistic deadlines or release dates.
That being said, developers are far from blameless. The development process for a game is often long and complicated. Even a brief look through a development postmortem from the Game Developers Conference (GDC) will tell you that a producer or director's job is a hard one. Balancing the conceptual design elements and the actual direction of creating a game are both multilayered and complex. This has only gotten more complicated as the degree of art resources, writing and coding has gotten deeper in modern games.
A developer of course has two levels of management.
First, it has to sell the game to the publisher and then meet its expectations, including for budget.
Second it has to look internally to meet said deadlines. There's often a disconnect when bridging the two requirements, and this gap if anything appears to have grown larger as the number of big budget AAA titles has shrunk. Setting realistic expectations seems to be a perpetual problem. Indeed, project management in the gaming industry seems to have taken a page from weapons development. Overpromising and underdelivering is both a developer and a publisher problem.
The Cutting Room Floor: A Source for DLC
Anyone who has looked through the files on a video game can attest to the fact that there's piles of unused material. Sometimes it's relatively small. Text file references to content that was cut. Scripts that have names, but no actual code. Other times we see potential that was never fulfilled. Full voice-overs, art assets, levels, even gameplay mechanics. Enterprising gamers often even reenable some of this content often with remarkable success.
This "missing content" is often the result of overambitious design. There is nothing wrong with aiming high when you begin game development. It's easy enough to underestimate the amount of effort bug fixing might consume. In the end, so long as too much content isn't cut or stability sacrificed in the name of meeting deadlines, this is relatively harmless. (Now there are cases where the results are egregious, but that's an issue for another time)
What is different today is that anything that wound up on the cutting room floor can be quickly repackaged or developed as DLC. Compared to expansion sets that would often have limited sales, the (*relatively) low price of DLC and the ease of distribution make it a substantially more profitable way to expand the game's post-release appeal.
At a glance such a trend is a good thing. After all, more content for gamers is always good, right? Further, anything that keeps a developer continuing to work on a game would also mean that a litany of bug fixes would also be included…or so you would think.
The trend can also work the other way to the detriment of gamers. Day One DLC can often appear to be selling "incomplete" games new content to fill out the game. The content itself can seem integral to the release version of the game. This of course is often true, simply because of the fact that the DLC content was likely conceived during the planning process and only turned into DLC when it became clear there wasn't sufficient developer resources to include it in the final game. Whether or not this is an intentional outrage against the gamer, it does show two problematic aspects of game development: The tendency for developers to overestimate the amount of content they can produce for a given game, and the importance that cut content can pose to the game's overall design.
The way the certification process for games works will often leave a 2-3 month window where the developer can either create a patch, or work on additional content. DLC creates an opportunity to actually make this window profitable for a game that has already gone gold. This presents the developer with an opportunity to use more resources for the game to patch, extend or expand the content. Unlike in the past this means that the post-release support for a game can be relatively robust.
But at the same time, it's hard for developers and publishers to avoid the appearance that they've cut out integral content and put it up for sale. Just because there are vaguaries in the process doesn't mean gamers should be required to know all of them. Perhaps a reappraisal of the industry's management and production processes is in order.
Nob Akimoto is a policy analyst and part-time dungeon master.
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