Why ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ and Other AAA Games Flop – Yahoo News

The production process for big-budget video games leads many major studios to overpromise and underdeliver on the games they make.

- Imagine if a TV show accidentally left a blooper in an episode.

- Do I say something? Is it me? What do I say?

- Or if a Marvel movie forgot to take out the green screen in one of their scenes? Those kind of screw ups are pretty rare in big budget entertainment, except in video games.

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From "Cyberpunk 2077," to "Fallout 76," to "No Man's Sky," gaming's history is littered with high profile titles that flop on release, burning their hundreds of thousands of day one customers. To understand why so many games come out buggy, broken, or unfinished, we need to take a look at the industry that produces them, why it builds such lofty expectations, and how things can end up going off the rails.

Video games come in all sizes, but the massive blockbuster games we're talking about usually fall under the designation of AAA development. These are the most expensive, most stunning games the industry can make, all of which requires a ton of effort.

RENEE GITTINS: Sometimes, people say, oh, you know, it's easy. You just drag and drop things into a scene, and then it's all magical, when there's really so much more that goes into it.

- Renee Gittens is the executive director of the International Game Developers Association, a non-profit that advocates for game developers around the world.

RENEE GITTINS: Every single button click is designed. Each instance of those interactions has sound effects, and art, and animations, and planning, and code behind it. So games themselves are very, very expansive.

- Making a AAA game often means pushing gaming technology to its limits with expansive virtual worlds, stunning visual fidelity, and complex artificial intelligence systems, all while allowing an unpredictable player to bounce around a it like a chaos gremlin.

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It can take years of work and many millions of dollars. And that kind of investment makes a strong marketing push a must, helping ensure game makers recover those heavy costs. But games run into trouble when their marketing promises a game that the developers can't deliver.

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- What we're trying to do is make an entire universe generated by the computer. And then we're going to set people loose in it.

- Sky high expectations can easily sink a game's launch. 2016 release "No Man's Sky" was a fine game in its own right, but it fell flat at launch because it couldn't live up to the wildly ambitious expectations generated by fans and the game's marketing.

- It's got trading, fighting, exploring, survival. And it's a huge game.

- Still, that doesn't account for games like "Cyberpunk," which shipped with glitches and bugs galore. Those kind of problems are unique from game to game, but they do have a common root cause in a game's production process.

AMANDA COTE: Big budget games are a huge risk. You're putting in millions of dollars. You're putting in hundreds of person hours and time. And you're never really sure if the game is going to be a success or not.

- Amanda Cote at the University of Oregon recently published a paper studying crunch, a semi-mandatory period of grueling overtime game developers go through to finish a game before its release. Game production can be unpredictable, and developers often end up crunching for months to catch up on deadlines or fix unexpected problems. Worse, some studios rely on crunch to make up for planning or budgeting shortfalls elsewhere in the project.

AMANDA COTE: It's easy to understand why people feel like they have to rely on tactics like crunch, why they have to finish and release a game no matter what. But doing so before a game's ready can sink an otherwise potentially excellent product.

- Crunch culture has deep roots in the industry, including at award winning studios like Naughty Dog and Rockstar. But the practice has a lot of downsides-- burning out developers and leading to mistakes.

AMANDA COTE: There's a lot of research on how overwork makes it impossible for you to catch small things like bugs, or how at a certain point of overtime, you actually start introducing more problems than you're solving. So crunch can lead to these really buggy, disappointing games.

- Right now, there's not much incentive to change the way games are made. Half baked or not, blockbuster titles usually still bring in massive sales. And post-launch work can give games new life beyond their ship date. Several games judged dead on arrival at release have made astonishing comebacks. But as AAA games grow bigger, the game production process is coming under more scrutiny, and every big budget flop shines a spotlight on the way games are made and what might need to change.

AMANDA COTE: I think we have an increased recognition that that's the case, and that it's better to allow developers more flexibility in their schedules if that gives them the time to make the product really good.

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Why 'Cyberpunk 2077' and Other AAA Games Flop - Yahoo News