Can this continue?

As you can see, it's not a healthy situation. Despite protests to the contrary, gamers want flashy graphics, they want amazing sound. Of course, they also want all those things they insist do matter – AI, level design, openness, cool scripting, great stories, and uniqueness. Then there's everything that people can't quite put a peg on that falls under the “fun” category. Weapon feel in Call of Duty, the intricacies of the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system from Fallout, movement code from Quake, the announcer in Unreal Tournament, the degree to which player actions change the world in an RPG, the pause/unpause combat option in BioWare games.

Let's look at that last example in particular (we're just going to make this up, I have no idea if the following happened and I doubt it did). Imagine Knights of the Old Republic had initially been conceived as a fully real-time game, with no pause. It's well into alpha or even beginning beta, and while the game has a great story, dialog, good graphics, a cool skills/powers system, when you get to the combat, it's too chaotic. It's not too hard – the game has difficulty levels and the combat has been balanced for real-time, it's just that dropping grenades and using force powers in real-time combat is so fast that it's hard to enjoy it when it happens. The team, being ambitious, isn't satisfied with this. It's a good game still, but it's not worthy of that AAA Alberta Beef rating that BioWare is famous for.

So, hypothetically, they begin to tinker. They slow combat down, but that results in fights that are too long and there are now a lot of “attack” animations that don't actually do damage, instead waiting on player input. So the team goes to the next logical step and tries increasing hit points and putting the abilities on timers, but making them more powerful. That feels artificial and stagnant though, not to mention requiring a lot of re-balancing. Finally, they decide to take an old trick from their old games and include pausable combat. It works! The game is fun. That one little change made it all better. The downside is that you still have to re-balance it. The skills need looking at, the enemies need to be tougher, the boss encounters have to be re-thought, and development extends by 3 months. BioWare tweaks some more “not fun” issues along the way, and the game is delayed 6 months total, adding millions to the development cost.

Game development is inherently unpredictable. Even with an elite developer like BioWare, for every Knights of the Old Republic there's a Jade Empire (good, not great), or MDK 2 (decent, but way too hard and didn't sell). Possibly the only company that always succeeds with their games is Blizzard, and that too comes at a cost – tremendous development times, constant “delays” (though the games rarely have a set date), high expenses, huge expectations, maintaining a massive support structure (battle.net, Blizzard forums, PR, marketing, and patch teams), and so on.

Almost every publisher is running at the ragged edge, EA excepted. The risks are high and the rewards, while great, are not so great as to cover all the bases. Activision is the second-strongest publisher out there, but a year where their major titles bomb would put them on the ropes, and if the following year was bad as well, the company could be in real trouble. The safety margin is slim for them, and for publishers like 2K, THQ, and Ubi, it's almost non-existent.

Publishers are upset with Sony for bombing with the PS3. Their plans to develop games for it, even exclusives, have been shelved or altered. Suddenly the Xbox 360 and Wii need serious looking at. The market for next-gen entertainment is much smaller because the PS3 isn't selling anywhere near what it was expected to, and certainly not along PS2 lines. Yet nobody can afford to alienate Sony, because they still need the PS3 and maybe PS4 will be huge again.

Remember how developers would talk about hitting milestones in order to see further funding? That's not that big a deal any more for two reasons. First of all, publishers own many of the development houses out there. Secondly, if a company is funding five major games in a year, and one developer is having trouble which results in delayed milestones, what's the publisher going to do? Sink the $20m investment so far? Bite the bullet? It's better to power through and simply overlook development more, maybe demand a new project lead, changes, or feature cuts (S.T.A.L.K.E.R. comes to mind).