Game Delays Signal An “Unwavering Commitment to Quality”

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Strauss Zelnick, CEO of Take-Two Interactive, says the reason his company has delayed several games, including BioShock Infinite, is because of its "unwavering commitment to quality."

The rest of the game industry is suffering from a “dearth of high quality titles,” Zelnick said. “There is no question the market is not accepting lower-quality releases.” Of course, one of the wags on Twitter noted that Zelnick was overlooking Take-Two’s own poor-quality release, Duke Nukem Forever (rated 49 out of 100), from last summer.
 
It's also a signal of laziness, lack of goals/direction/deadlines and poor management.
 
Unwavering commitment to distracting people's attention from their own low quality games for the sake of the others.
 
I have no problems with delays, its the communication that usually gets me.

Though you do have go give some of these companies a break. Creating a game, a good one at least is a very complex project to manage with tons of resources and unknowns.

It is VERY easy for seemingly small issues to suck up resources beyond planning/scheduling. I see this all the time with smaller projects, action items that seem to be simple, turn out to suck up 2-3x the alloted resources.

Yes bad management comes into play, but so does scope creep and enthusiastic hard working people estimation of labor. I swear I have to always double my estimates for work, cause though every "should" take x amount of time, in most cases it takes more.
 
It was so good it was bad?

It was funny at first, but it got old fast. The rooms all felt too small and cramped and there were too many not-so-obvious "figure out how to get that door open" mini-games. I stop playing after the RC car level.
 
Yes bad management comes into play, but so does scope creep and enthusiastic hard working people estimation of labor. I swear I have to always double my estimates for work, cause though every "should" take x amount of time, in most cases it takes more.

Yes. More importantly though - every time something isn't documented 100% or another area needs to be fixed adds a lot more time to original estimates.

The games that do get 100% documented and built-out correctly with robust toolkits are games like Half-Life 2... delayed years and years and years.

It's also not even remotely a sign of laziness. These people are all probably in crunch time. Deadlines mean nothing if the product just doesn't work. This isn't like "write me a 20 page paper and stay up all night until it's done." Often times even with great programmers (an incredibly rarity) that have awesome design skills there will be setbacks and refactoring decisions that will delay the product. Learning from that for future products is important, but there's a lot of turn over at game companies so delays are to be expected with green devs.
 
If delay after delay results in better product, how do you explain Duke Nukem Forever?

Oh that's easy, 3D Realms started work on it, then changed the game engine a couple of times, then went bust, someone thought it would be a great idea to continue working on the turd, and then released the game with minimal effort to the existing POS, the game was unfortunately too old to rip out existing content and sell in pieces as DLC.
 
It's because developers have become to reliant the "Patch". 20 years ago when you shipped a game that was it. You had to be damn sure that when Mario was burned to the ROM that it was as close to 100% as possible. Even PC games had to be right because there was no guarantee that the end user would have Internet access. Now nearly every PC and console game I have plated in the last 5 years has required at least one patch/update of some kind. Even Diablo 3 is still missing the feature they hyped the most about it (auction house).
 
If delay after delay results in better product, how do you explain Duke Nukem Forever?

But if you think about it, the game was delayed as they kept switching engines/other things. It's not like it as so delayed because they thought it would make more money 100 years later, however bad it was, the delays were probably to do with immprovements to "quality" at some level. :D
 
It's because developers have become to reliant the "Patch". 20 years ago when you shipped a game that was it. You had to be damn sure that when Mario was burned to the ROM that it was as close to 100% as possible. Even PC games had to be right because there was no guarantee that the end user would have Internet access. Now nearly every PC and console game I have plated in the last 5 years has required at least one patch/update of some kind. Even Diablo 3 is still missing the feature they hyped the most about it (auction house).

Man this is it right here! They need to get back to this top quality out the door and enough with the DLC shit too! Gotta love broken games and then being nickle and dimed to death.
 
If delay after delay results in better product, how do you explain Duke Nukem Forever?

It was worth more putting that game down than it was to allow the joke to continue. Take-Two took one for the team by putting an end to it.
 
Question : Who determines what is quality and what is crap? Just going off of what I've seen from Take Two recently I am concerned.

Does this mean I won't get Bioshock I? Nope, defiantly getting that game because I like Bioshock and until it turns into a mess of a series I'll keep getting them. It's their fringe titles that I'm semi-interested in that quality vs crapity is important to watch.
 
If delay after delay results in better product, how do you explain Duke Nukem Forever?
With as big of reputation that DNF had before release, it was already setup for failure. You can't take on a game like that and expect to have much success as a developer
 
I wish they would just come out and tell us the real reason which would be it was a business decision. With AAA games out like Diablo 3, Borderlands 2, GW2, etc coming out or out there is not much room for other games right now. Heck I would call the game market a bit saturated right now. Why release now and lose sales and waste advertising dollars due to competition when you can wait a few months and have the market to yourself.
 
It was so good it was bad?

Actually it wasn't. It was so horrible it fucking felt like the worst waste of my time during that 13 year wait.

Duke Nukem Forever sucked. It was dumb , it wasn't cute or funny and it felt like it had been through exactly what it had gone through .. that is to say lots of delay's , lots of rewritten code and a poorly executed final product that shouldn't have been released. I don't hail Gearbox for releasing it , in fact I think it was a typical business strategy to capitalize on hype and that's exactly what happened.

I don't mind THQ's view on game delays , but nothing like Duke. X-Com is another game that needs to die if it can't be done right (as a strategy game) and in a short time frame (2 years at most). Game delays for the most part are only a good thing as it gives developers more time to polish up the final result , being against moderate delays makes no sense to me.
 
If you aren't valve I don't care.

If you are valve you can release the game whenever you want.
 
Personally I thought the whole Duke Nukem fiasco was a non issue. As young adult Duke was funny but after 13 years, the toilet humor and pervert jokes just get old fast. Not worth a Steam sale honestly.
 
It's because developers have become to reliant the "Patch". 20 years ago when you shipped a game that was it. You had to be damn sure that when Mario was burned to the ROM that it was as close to 100% as possible. Even PC games had to be right because there was no guarantee that the end user would have Internet access. Now nearly every PC and console game I have plated in the last 5 years has required at least one patch/update of some kind. Even Diablo 3 is still missing the feature they hyped the most about it (auction house).
Well games gave gotten exponentially more complex since your Mario days. This is a fact a lot of people seem to forget when complaining about the reliance on the patch.

It was worth more putting that game down than it was to allow the joke to continue. Take-Two took one for the team by putting an end to it.

I would like to add that Take-Two also finished the game so they could get their hands on the license so that they can make an awesome one from scratch, later. DNF wasn't bad but it wasn't all that good either. It just felt unrefined and not so much specific things were wrong with it. I forced myself to beat the game just so that I can say that I did. I owe Duke that much.
 
Everyone up in arms over Duke... At least DNF was released. What about Half-Life Ep3/Half-Life 3? I think devs are less inclined to take big risks as they were back in the 90's. That's why we keep ending up with console ports. Innovation is being stifled, gamers are becoming ever more critical, and big budget AAA titles are becoming more expensive to make. It's a losing situation all around, and more devs are focusing on mobile since it's less costly to develop. How much did Angry Birds cost to make, and look at how well it's done?
 
Everyone up in arms over Duke... At least DNF was released. What about Half-Life Ep3/Half-Life 3? I think devs are less inclined to take big risks as they were back in the 90's. That's why we keep ending up with console ports. Innovation is being stifled, gamers are becoming ever more critical, and big budget AAA titles are becoming more expensive to make. It's a losing situation all around, and more devs are focusing on mobile since it's less costly to develop. How much did Angry Birds cost to make, and look at how well it's done?

I guess you do not remember the delay between Half Life 1 and 2? I think it was about a decade. Valve has always been extremely secretive and quiet about projects and they always take forever. That being said, they very rarely, if ever, make poor games, so in their case the wait does lead to better products most of the time.
 
Bioshock 2 was a shining example of "an unwavering commitment to quality".

I'm being VERY sarcastic when I say that.
 
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