Blog FeedLucas With the Lid Off
In the time when MTV still aired music videos, you may have seen a video by a rapper called Lucas. It was a strange music video done in one take, by the master of the single take video, Michel Gondrey (certainly not a one trick pony either as he has countless great videos that aren’t single take, he’s just indisputably better than anyone else when it comes to one shot videos). The idea was simple and strong. Tell a story with multiple locations but all done in one studio.
Numerous in tricks with projectors and mirrors and such were used to achieve the effect, and it’s a very memorable video.
However, it wasn’t something that was going to happen first time. One mistake at any point in the video meant they had to start over. All in all it took them seventeen takes to get it right, and the end result was definitely worth the effort.
This though is an article about Lucasarts… EA… movie tie ins and more.
You see, miracles can and do happen. We all know the general rule of the movie tie in game. Don’t buy them. Most recently X3 failed to impress, and I’m sure that next week, Nacho Libre on Nintendo DS will fail to impress too.
But as I said, miracles do happen. Escape From Butchers Bay, for example. A movie tie in game that not only turned out to be an extremely polished title, but pushed the Xbox in ways no other games of the tie had, while at the same time trying some experiments with the first person viewpoint, and genre mixing.
Oh and it came out on time, just before the release of Chronicles of Riddick.
But mistakes do happen… and as everyone knows, the movie tie in game generally suffers mostly from having to meet a release date. See, a movie tie in is a sure fire seller. Big brand name, and even if it’s crap, people that don’t normally buy games probably won’t be quite so upset about that as those of us that buy games all the time.
If you miss that release date… well. Every week that passes you lose sales. Movie tie in games don’t sell on quality usually, just on visibility.
Escape from Butchers Bay has proven to be a game with selling power unusual for a movie tie in. Heck, Spider-Man 2: The Movie sold pretty damn well all summer the year it came out even though it needed more polish, because it was a solid game with appeal beyond the film…
But those are the exceptions. Most movie tie in games are just cheap low budget titles almost guaranteed to more than break even. That’s good for publishers, but bad for any gamer that cares about the franchise being made into a game.
Ask a large enough group of people what the worst game is ever made is, and I guarantee you that one game will crop up more than once: Superman 64.
Not strictly a movie tie in by any means, but with a big Superman film coming out this summer and with EA trying to resurrect the Superman license with a tie in game, it would remiss of me not to mention what happened last time someone made a game bearing the name and famous red S. Gamespot said of the game ‘It serves no purpose as to firmly establish the bottom of the barrel’.
Now for the interesting part. EA have delayed their Superman title which now, won’t be coming out at the same time as the film. Perhaps we’ll see it tie into the DVD release instead… but this kind of move from EA is so out of character that you have to start pinching yourself.
Perhaps they didn’t want to be faced with reviews saying it was worse than Superman 64. Perhaps they couldn’t get it together into a remotely playable state… but all the same, for such a big movie tie in game to be pushed back by the biggest publisher there is, says something rather positive. You don’t have to hit the release date of the film.
Should it sell well, more companies might follow suit, and this could only be a good thing for gaming.
Another thing I feel I have to mention, is Jason Hall. Superman is a Warner Bros film, and Jason Hall of Warner Interactive has been kicking all kinds of ass since being hired by Warner. He drew some heat for his ‘if you make shit games using our licenses, we’re going to pay you less money’ approach from developers, but it’s something that as a gamer I have to cheer.
Perhaps Superman has been delayed because of Jason Hall swinging his rather muscular frame around.
Surely a Superman game worth buying that’s a few months late would be better than another Superman 64.
While queuing past the DS area of the Nintendo booth at this year’s E3, waiting to get in to see the Wii, Superman on the DS was eliciting laughs from the line. It was probably the worst game in the Nintendo booth. Delaying to improve seems laudable behavior from EA.
But LucasArts seem to think other wise.
And I was just starting to feel optimistic about them too. Next Generation have an interview up with LucasArts president Jim Ward slamming publishers that fail to meet deadlines and stay on budget, claiming that at LucasArts they have a new philosophy. They think the rest of the industry should follow their philosophy.
It’s this ‘Make kick-ass games, but on time and on budget.’
Who knew it was that simple! All EA and other publishers have to do is to make kick ass games on time and on budget. That’s the secret of publishing!
I have a philosophy I’d like to share with you too. If everyone adopted my philosophy the world would be a better place: Make lots of money but in a job that leaves you with lots of free time to enjoy it with your friends and family… oh and win the lottery.
Restoring my own sanity briefly, LucasArts are saying that failing in any of those three aspects is a failure of the project… but what do they propose happens to a project that falls behind in its schedule. Contrary to what they say, gaming is not the only business where this happens. Films, books and albums are all often delayed for the sake of quality… and I think anyone trying to push such an idea would be as laughed at as Jim deserves to be.
Imagine someone telling J.K. Rowling that she has to finish the next Harry Potter book by a certain date so that they could tie it in with the next movie in the series and that if she failed to do so the whole project would be considered a failure.
He thinks delaying games out of the overly crowded Christmas season is something that you ‘can’t do anymore’, when it’s probably more true to say that a game needs to be polished at that time of year more than any, and a title lacking polish is going to stay on shelves as the dozens of other solid available titles fly off them. If there’s ever a good time to delay a product to improve its quality it’s that time of year.
Jim Ward should realize that LucasArts still need to sort their shit out, before they start criticizing anyone else… and last I checked, all the prequel trilogy games, that they released along side the premiers of the films, sucked pretty hard. They need to start making great games again, and not just half decent Star Wars cash ins.
Publishers should decide on whether or not a game is a success or failure in the same way that movie studios do. How much a return did we get for our money? Whether the film took longer than planned, or whether it ended up costing more than expected to make don’t define success… and no one is going to be celebrating LucasArts for hitting the release dates they set. Sales and quality are all that people care about at the end of the day… and if the ‘take your time to get the game right’ approach doesn’t work, someone ought to explain to me why Nintendo games continue to sell in great numbers.
18th June | Reply
What LucasArts needs to do instead of making games on budget and on time are the following: Day of the Tentacle 2. TIE Fighter 2. Until then, they can pretty much shut their damn mouths.
There is one thing I specifically want to touch on: Q4 release dates. I’m not a business major but even I can tell that Q4 release dates are probably the worst thing imaginable for the industry.
Sure, Q4 is the big holiday rush and a few of the great games sell really well then. The key word there being “few.” People have X amount of dollars they can spend on anything at any given time. X is divided and strained to the breaking point in Q4 as many of us are spending not only on ourselves for basic need, but on others for the holidays as well.
There are only so many games one can buy during Q4 release and as the number of games are scheduled to release then, the odds that it is your game that will be purchased drops significantly.
What I’d like to hear an executive say is that not only will they delay a game to make sure that it is a quality purchase, whenever they are able, they’d like to spread out their releases so the consumer has the time and money to enjoy them.
Now maybe I should stop dreaming.
18th June | Reply
No, sadly Jim is right, as indicated by the fact that the Revenge of the Sith made the top 5 sellers last year. Tie in games are not bought by discerning customers who expect to get a good game; tie in games are bought by the mindless masses out there who do exactly what they’re told. Considering that Chronicles of Riddick was something of a failiure as game to be the kind of mega-blockbuster it deserved to be and Revenge of the Sith was a huge hit that it is more important that the film be good with regards to the game than it isthat the game have any qualitative value all it’s own.
If you actually look at the numbers on Q4 a lot of games sell a lot more copies than they deserve just by being out at Christmas. Simply being on the shelves gives you a higher chance of a sale than being good in the rest of the year. A great game Shipped in off peak season may sell but Resident evil 4 took from January till March to sell a quarter million units whereas Halo 2 sold that in weeks not months.
Yes some companies can get away with breaking these two rules but most companies need to have there games on shelves by christmas and the industry is marginal enough that the difference between a hit or a break even a break even or a loss can be if you’re 5% overbudget or on budget. In many cases making a good game is a secondary issue to getting it out on time and on budget.
18th June | Reply
Yes, it’s Devil’s Advocate time. In this article I completely agree with LucasArts because the alternative is Duke Nukem Forever and number of other titles with exceptionally long development times (”when it’s done”). Video games need to be developed in the same manner as any other software project where budget and duration is set to deliver a number of known features (i.e. the game). Unfortunately, a lot of gaming studios seem to be populated by gamers that appear to have no grasp of project management and who embark on projects that they have no real clue about what it will take to deliver. Advocating this “when it’s done” attitude is tantamount to business suicide. Advocating that projects be delivered on-time and on-budget is a very good thing that the video game industry would do well to embrace. It’s not impossible and the “boring” software industry has gotten much better at achiving this since The Standish Group published “The CHAOS Report” back in 1994. There is no reason why video games can’t achieve the same and there is enough documentation and research that shows how this can be achieved. However, for some reason we seem to treat games as “art” and believe that timelines and budgets can’t be set on them. This explains why a lot of gaming studios go bankrupt…
I do, to a degree, agree with you that games cannot be “rushed” out to meet a calendar date. However, this makes the assumption that the game’s projected development time was set to deliver at a different point during the year. If the game was started with the targeted release date of, for example, Christmas, then as long as the schedule was realistically set (some that, for the most part, only comes from experience although complexity metrics do exist) there is no reason why that date should not be achieved, unplanned external events notwithstanding. For example, Apple’s unexpected migration to Intel processors can be considered an unexpected external event that could not have (realistically) been planned for and which would have impacted development schedules/roadmaps. Risk Management and Planning, however, should be part of any major software development process so that most encountered risks (key staff members leaving, for example) can be avoided entirely or at least minimised.
Seriously, games consume too much resources these days to be developed in garage-game style. LucasArts might not know how to develop a good game these days but they do at least understand how to make a gaming business work.
To be honest, I’m seriously considering doing a Phd at some point in the next few years and the study of video game development metrics could be something of interest. Such metrics exist for “normal” software but I’ve not heard of any for games that measures the complexity of a project so that a realistic estimate of the number of manhours (and therefore duration and cost) can be performed.
21st June | Reply
RE4 and Halo 2 were on consoles with different install bases, and the RE franchise was worth less than the Halo brand at the time after too many sequels that didn’t make enough difference.
Halo 2 sold millions in a day and it would have sold millions whenever it came out. Would the Sims have been noticed in a christmas market? We’ll never know as it came out in February.
christmas is a time of year where a dozen or so games will sell more than they would have done at other times of the year, but it’s also a time of year where quality titles like Sands of Time and Beyond Good and Evil get buried.
there are already too many games out at that time of year for anything but the very best to recoup rewards. the godfather may have been such a game as EA always tend to do well at christmas, but it’s hard to say whether the extra time spent polishing it made up for any sales it might have lost. EA obviously thought it worth doing, and unlike LucasArts they were fully aware what state the game was in at the time they made the decision to delay it for further work.
who is better at the yearly release date cycle than EA? who has more experience at that? I don’t think anyone can claim to match them in that field. if and when they delay a game you can bet it’s for good reason.
i really don’t see how LucasArts think they can give EA business advice.
on the flip side of the coin, are they saying that Half Life 2, Halo, and Doom 3 were all mistakes?
digital distribution is slowly bringing back garage style developers as Steam, Xbox Live Arcade and others bring in revenue streams for smaller simpler games.
21st June | Reply
In Reply to #4: I think the answer to whether Half Life 2, Halo and Doom 3 were mistakes depends on whether they were considered “late” against the project plan that was agreed. If so then, dependent upon the degree that they were late, they were indeed mistakes. You’re looking at this from the basis of whether the game itself was good. That’s not how business works. Games that cost more to produce (for example, because the project overran by 3-months and so 3-months worth of unplanned wages had to be paid) don’t normally sell for more in the shops and there is no guarantee that they will sell for more copies, so the return on the investment is under threat. Since games are not generally made without external investment (bank loans, venture capital, stock sales, etc) the uncertainty of a return on any investment means that the cost of the investment will go up (higher interest rates, lower stock prices, etc) because investors want guaranteed money sooner. The only way to ensure that the industry can continue to be funded is for developers to deliver games on-time and on-budget, and that requires rigorous project management.
However, I do agree that lower distribution costs through Steam and the like will benefit the industry since investors always like lower costs.
21st June | Reply
half life 2, halo and doom 3 all took longer than planned. half life 2 was over a year late (and it’s release date was announced six months before the first release date).
21st June | Reply
How can these guys be sure they have a kickass (by their standards) game until it hits the shelves? I’m pretty sure no developer puts a game out thinking “oh well, it sucks but I hope I get some money out of it”.
P.S. I like your philosophy.
21st June | Reply
In Reply to #6: Over a year late? Yes, I’d term that a failure regardless of the reviews. Personally, I didn’t think much of the game anyway but that’s besides the point. It sounds harsh, particularly when much of the gaming world waxed lyrically about how great Half Life 2 is but over a year late for a relatively minor IT project isn’t very good. Still, it’s nowhere near as bad as the likes of Duke Nukem Forever and Daikatana where the investors in the publishers would have been really annoyed since they were handing over their money and getting no return on it because none of these projects were delivering.
Personally, from a business perspective, I’d like to see an end to this “when it’s done” mentality and see gaming projects actually delivering on-time. Such project successes makes games much more attractive to investors and therefore easier (and cheaper) to finance. It just may be that developers have to forget grand visions for the timebeing until they get good enough at IT projects to achieve them.
22nd June | Reply
just an aside, MANY games have been in developement longer than Daikatana these days. DK fell foul of a change in engine leading to a lot more work than the team predicted. they thought that quake engine content would be compatible with the quake 2 engine and that it would take a few weeks, not an entire year as happened. there was also a major team walk out… but it was ultimately only in development for a little over 3 years.
if your lead programmer quits, your project is going to be set back as the next one comes in and tries to work out where the previous one had gotten too.
DK did break even, believe it or not, after selling through 200,000 copies worldwide.
most of the problems can be attributed to bad ‘people’ management.
anyways. wasn’t that informative and boring?
22nd June | Reply
In Reply to #9: Interesting and, ultimately, not very surprising. I think it’s fair to say that the Daikatana team didn’t perform a Risk Management process before and throughout development and got bitten in the ass for it. Assumptions made will often turn out to be incorrect and it’s pretty clear from this that the development was performed by people with no idea of project management, just that they wanted to make a cool game.
As far as I am concerned with my argument, games can take as long as they like to be developed as long as that duration is in accordance with the plan presented to those payinig for the game. As long as everyone understands that Game A will take 9-years to produce and they are still happy with that then everyone got what they expected. It’s Game B that was projected to take 3-years to develop but actually took 9-years that worries me, no matter how wizz-bang it is.