Should publishers be more understanding of developers?

Azureth

Supreme [H]ardness
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All the time we hear how games come out unfinished or incomplete because the publisher wanted a holiday deadline or some crazy internal conflicts between the two.

Should publishers be more understanding of developers time and the resources needed to make games? What if publishers everywhere, for example, told developers they'd fund the game as much as the developers think it needs and instead of deadlines just tell them when they think the game is finished?
 
It's a never ending struggle. If a publisher didn't put a deadline on a game, the developer could perpetually extend the development time, thus keeping them self working. On the flip side, without publishers, many development studios wouldn't exist because they can't find funding to make games; look at Kickstarter as some evidence of this.
 
There have been some high-profile examples of publishers totally neglecting quality and releasing anyway, but that's not true in all cases. Deadlines are necessary, or you end up with a Duke Nukem Forever situation. Many publishers need to be more reasonable, sure. But going all the way in the other direction isn't a solution either.
 
Doesn't this go without saying? Publishers are in the business of making money. Developers are creative and mostly make money to make more games (and if so be it also have a good wage).

Marrying profit and creative is the bane of all industry.
 
I think the consumer's attitude are part of the problem too. One moment the community is pissed at EA for BF4's bad release, and next you see people coming back to pre-order the next BF game. This is basically telling the companies that it's ok to release broken games, we'll just moan about it for awhile, and still buy your next game anyway.

If no one pre-ordered or bought BF Hardline on day 1, I'll bet EA will think twice before releasing another unfinished game in the future.
 
It works both sides. RUshed games can turn the best ideas to utter crap - Alpha Protocol or Kotor 2 (unmodded). But on other hand, if the devs take more and more time to "lets just add something more that is useless, but we want it", then they need some form of control too.
 
Yea, the only language publishers speak is "money", so we customers fail pretty hard when trying to give them a clear message.
 
I think the consumer's attitude are part of the problem too. One moment the community is pissed at EA for BF4's bad release, and next you see people coming back to pre-order the next BF game. This is basically telling the companies that it's ok to release broken games, we'll just moan about it for awhile, and still buy your next game anyway.

If no one pre-ordered or bought BF Hardline on day 1, I'll bet EA will think twice before releasing another unfinished game in the future.

Except BF Hardline wasn't released in an unfinished state? There weren't many bugs, just some balancing issues and the fact that the game was just overall "meh", but it was finished.
 
Except BF Hardline wasn't released in an unfinished state? There weren't many bugs, just some balancing issues and the fact that the game was just overall "meh", but it was finished.

Well, we do not know if the game will be finished until it's actually released. So when people pre-order it, they are telling the company that they still trust the company to get it right despite previous bad decision. Therefore, there are no consequence to a company rushing a game when they get pre-orders despite previous screw up. If the entire gaming community took a more cautious approach where no one buys anything until it's been confirmed working, then perhaps the publishers will think twice before rushing another game out.

Of course if a game has been proven to be working fine, then there's nothing wrong buying it. I'm not saying people should boycott the publisher. Rather, it would be good if the community could send a message to the publishers that if they rush a game before it's complete, then we're not going to trust them as much in the future (ie. not buying the game before it's even been released and reviewed).
 
It works both sides. RUshed games can turn the best ideas to utter crap - Alpha Protocol or Kotor 2 (unmodded). But on other hand, if the devs take more and more time to "lets just add something more that is useless, but we want it", then they need some form of control too.

Alpha Protocol & KotOR2 are both great games on their own. They weren't in the state people expected, but that doesn't mean they're complete crap.
 
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