Umbasaborne
Banned
The last several years has seen a flurry of unfinished games release. from cyberpunk, to halo infinite, to battlefield 2042, and even star citizens. This release now and finish it later approach seems to be doing more harm than good, and creating a lot of animosity between developers and their fans. Developers try to smoothe things over by releasing road maps that more often than not, they are unable to stick to.
I dont think developers are being lazy, i think creating and maintaining these massive games is a difficult feat, and us as players dont quite understand how hard it actually is. Conversely i think it means that developers need to avoid making public promises that they are unable to keep, just because its difficult, does not give you an excuse to lie to the community.
The real ultimatum lies with publishers. The publisher should be stepping in when a project is scoping out of control to reign it back to a shippable complete product. The publishers also need to avoid forcing the teams to provide public release dates or road maps, and let them work. Much of the animosity created can be avoided if fans dont know which internal deadline was missed to cause a delay, or which features needed to be cut in order to ship the game. Its why games should not be shown publically until they are at least 5
Months from launch, real launch, not the soft launch date publishers give to get pre orders.
I dont think developers are being lazy, i think creating and maintaining these massive games is a difficult feat, and us as players dont quite understand how hard it actually is. Conversely i think it means that developers need to avoid making public promises that they are unable to keep, just because its difficult, does not give you an excuse to lie to the community.
The real ultimatum lies with publishers. The publisher should be stepping in when a project is scoping out of control to reign it back to a shippable complete product. The publishers also need to avoid forcing the teams to provide public release dates or road maps, and let them work. Much of the animosity created can be avoided if fans dont know which internal deadline was missed to cause a delay, or which features needed to be cut in order to ship the game. Its why games should not be shown publically until they are at least 5
Months from launch, real launch, not the soft launch date publishers give to get pre orders.