Dragon Age lead writer David Gaider explains that Baldur's Gate 3 and Clair Obscur prove publishers wrong if games can have "time to cook".
www.videogamer.com
"The Dragon Age lead explained that both Baldur’s Gate 3 and Clair Obscur do appeal “very, very strongly to that one audience” but that appeal is so strong and so high quality that it ends up expanding the core audience."
I've been saying for years that your hardcore fans are engine of the hype machine that draws in the semicasuals who draw in the casuals, expanding your audience. You make your hardcore audience happy, that builds hype that gets others excited and wanting to try it.
On the one hand, I 110% agree with the assertion that corporate game development has an unnecessarily harsh view on perfectly meeting development timetables (and on making timetables shorter than they should be).
On the other, there are two VERY important caveats. First, if you announce a release date and then push it back three times, it's
going to dampen the response, even if the final product is pure awesome. You can usually get away with
one delay without suffering too much negative feedback, because folks understand that projections are imperfect and sometimes stuff just takes longer than you thought it was going to take. But if you push it back two, three, four times? That's going to make the hardcore, invested players annoyed, frustrated, even angry, feeling like you either never knew what you were doing in the first place, or that the game itself is floundering and not succeeding even before it's been released. (How many games get repeatedly delayed only to then be cancelled?)
Second, and I think somewhat more importantly, there is a push and pull here. Corporate types absolutely want amazing results faster than is actually possible. But at the same time, Kickstarter has shown us that being cut COMPLETELY free from timetable constraints or higher-ups with the authority to say "make SOMETHING,
NOW or else we're pulling the plug" has its own share of problems. We need a better balance between the two extremes. Right now, we're VERY far into the "deadlines are absolute you MUST meet them no matter how much you have to hurt yourself to make it happen"/"make an amazing game in 1/3 the time you actually need to make a game that good"/etc. direction. But, as we advocate for change, we should do so recognizing that a perfect diametric opposite of where we're at right now is not necessarily a good place to be
either. There
is a midpoint, somewhere between, where most games that need the extra time get it, and most creators that need a kick in the butt now and then actually do get one
now and then.
Edit: Finally...one last thing to keep in mind, not about time taken to polish something, but on having your focus be hardcore fans.
SOMETIMES that is a great move. We see it here with BG3, we see it with Elden Ring.
But SOMETIMES it is,
objectively, a very, very bad move--and we can see this with Amazon's
New World MMO, and how it faltered because it tried to chase a hardcore fanbase that
isn't going to appeal to the wider crowd, but they expected that it would and then had to scramble when it didn't. Specifically,
New World advertised itself as a "hardcore" PVP MMO. Fighting against other players, taking their dropped loot, capturing their constructed infrastructure, etc., was meant to be THE core gameplay focus.
And then they did the invite-only beta and came to the conclusion that
most people HATE that. There have been calls for many years for a "hardcore full-loot always-on PVP MMO" (or some variation of that phrase), where it's PVP 100% of the time, ALL your carried items get dropped on death, and the core focus of gameplay is fighting and killing other PCs. The problem is, while that type of gameplay has an extremely vocal minority that absolutely adores such an experience, that community simply is not large enough to actually
support such an MMO. In order for an MMO to succeed, it needs a fairly robust base of casual players, and every single one of those above features drives casuals away, consistently. Mass appeal does not appreciate those things, and nobody has yet found a way to make something in that space which gets the hardcore fans excited without also destroying the mass market appeal of the game.
So, even the very core notion--"appeal to the hardcore fans strongly enough, and everyone will come knocking" isn't really correct. It
can be correct,
if the premise is sufficiently compatible with casual players that they can continue to enjoy the game casually despite never becoming hardcore fans themselves. But some hardcore fanbases are looking for experiences or mechanics that
require the player to be just as hardcore as the fanbase. Anything that works
like that is going to be game design suicide, even though
generally speaking, making the hardcore fans happy is a good idea.
TL;DR:
I agree that we need to give games more time to polish.
BUT: (1) Don't take TOO long, and especially don't repeatedly push back launch dates, and (2) Sometimes deadlines really are useful, we need to find a balance between the current awful extreme of "flog yourself to death to make a half-baked product" and the other unfortunately plausible extreme of "it's not PERFECT yet, I need to keep FIXING it until it's PERFECT".
Also: You have to be careful to find out
what your hardcore fans want. If what they want is just the core experience executed REALLY well, then you should probably focus on pleasing them. If what they want is to force ALL players to be as hardcore as they are, pleasing them will harm your game or even kill it.
