The simple discrepancy between constant wages and big returns at the end of development means that non-established companies need to focus on small, frequent returns. But fashion and buzz mean that you get much more money from a big release. Now if graphics is a pre-requisite for buzz more than gameplay, then the best way to do that is to make a crappy but awesome looking game. If demos sell stuff not magazine/website pics and trailers, then time length gets cut, or you develop for a phone where graphics can be bad.

Interest payments and fading savings push you to crash something, and it’s generally wherever it will hurt the least in terms of starting sales. With the hope that when that cash comes back in thanks to the big release and stabalises you, you can fix whatever you couldn’t before. And hope the gamers forgive you.

There are alternative models, like cheaper pre-orders when the game is still in development, but these have not yet got off the ground much, and tend to keep the same problems with interest payments as debt funded development, except that you are in debt to hardcore early-adopter customers instead of banks or publishers. Naturally this tends to produce a different kind of game!

In a certain respect many games already work like this, in that if you buy a game you will spend the first month helping to finish it’s testing, but this is without the extra influence that the other model would give to the guinee pigs!

I agree that the video game industry as a whole has a tendency to release shoddy games, especially during the early part of a new console’s lifespan, just to ‘finish’ them and get them out on the market.

But there are notable exceptions. The Metal Gear Solid series, for instance, takes a long time to release a new game. The last two playstation consoles have not had a metal gear solid game available at the time of their release. But when the games came out, boy were they great!

Another great example is Blizzard, with the Warcraft and Starcraft series (can’t comment on WoW cause I don’t play that). There is a long time between games in the series, but every game is a very well designed game – usually a classic.

So there are still “real” video game designers/design companies out there that are willing to wait seemingly forever to release a new game, only to have it turn out to be totally worth the wait. But there are also a lot of ‘get it to the stores now’ designers/companies that are more interested in making an acceptable game that reaps huge profits instead of making an honest-to-God good game.

Speaking of “commitment to finishing over quality.”

Does the video game industry’s manual fixation on opening day numbers and pre-release hype fuel the majority of their rushed and shoddy titles?

I’m glad that WotC operate in a realm where gradual sales are acceptable.

But while many video game companies would argue they live in a different word, I wonder if that is a world of their own making.

Anyway, I’m also glad to see Wizards ballsy enough to do such a heavy redesign, and what they’ve showed us so far looks promising. Whether it can stand as solidly a few years down the road remains to be seen, but I guess my game group and I will just find out for ourselves.

As far as future killer combos… yes, there’s going to be bugs for sure, but enough to necessitate a new edition? We’ll see. However, the simpler a ruleset is, the less chance you get hidden bugs like that. Also, 4e is a much more exception based model, which means you can just adjust the exceptions instead of tweaking the core system.

The way I see it, 98% of 3.5e worked well with only 2% needing fixing. That’s not a reason to do a re-write and risk introducing new bugs. If D&d were an application and me the business analyst (my day job), I’d advise against it.

We’re going to need a new edition to fix the new, as yet unknown, problems very, very soon down the line. There’s going to be killer combos that the designers haven’t spotted, spells that are too powerful and classes that are over- or over-powered in actual play. 3rd Edition has been through all that already.

4th Edition though, is a whole new beastie.