There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about the effect that the inflation of development budgets has had on the industry. As budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars have become common, cracks have emerged in the foundations of the entire model for funding new games. Attitudes to risk have been warped in strange ways under the weight of those financial expectations; a desire for the certainty of proven IP, twisted around by a reckless willingness to take huge swings at incredibly slim chances of equally huge rewards.
The other side of the same coin, however, is the effect that these inflated budgets have on the games themselves. To be sure, a lot of that budget is often visible on screen, in the form of expansive, high-fidelity game worlds packed with detail. The pursuit of that kind of experience – on the not-unfair assumption that players now expect that from AAA games – has been the keeping-up-with-the-Jones’s engine that fuelled a great deal of budgetary inflation.
In other cases, though, huge amounts of budget end up in places that players never see – often being spent on round after round of reworks, edits, and alterations, which at their most expensive can see whole swathes of finished assets being thrown out or major sections of games being cut or remade entirely.
This isn’t a bad process in and of itself. Editing is part of any creative workflow; the rare auteur may be able to produce pure brilliance on their first pass, but it’s far more common for something truly great to emerge from the polishing and honing of an initial rough-hewn version. Reworking parts of a game before launch is a key part of the process, and far more games have been undermined by not leaving enough time at the end to go through that reworking process than have been damaged by spending too much time iterating and changing things.
As budgets have grown massively, though, that iterative process seems to have become something of a millstone around some AAA studios’ necks – in part because it’s the one part of the process that commonly has far, far too many cooks standing around the broth. Having hundreds of millions of dollars on the line inevitably means that there are a lot of stakeholders with a hand in the process and a strong interest in ensuring that every risk is managed and every sharp corner knocked off the final product.
The classic image that many gamers hold of this process is of a “suit”, a beancounter who holds their joypad upside down, coming to the studio and making the developers take out all the fun stuff. The reality is, unsurprisingly, a bit more nuanced. Sure, most development veterans have a few war stories about a publishing executive with minimal knowledge and maximal demands – but those are the exception, not the rule. The more common scenario is that commands from the boardroom aren’t actually to do with specific features and content, but instead insist on a specific approach in the latter stages of development, one which leans heavily on data from focus groups and other market research signals.
“Many of these market research approaches are deeply limited in their usefulness”
From a business perspective, this looks like smart risk management. You’re acknowledging that game design isn’t your expertise and staying in your lane; you’re simply saying that this enormously funded project needs to have all the data it can get guiding its direction. Who doesn’t want all the facts at hand when making decisions?
The problem with this from the creative side is that many of these market research approaches are deeply limited in their usefulness. That’s not to say they’re useless by any means; creative processes are by their nature somewhat insular, and those closest to the process often end up unable to see the forest for the trees, so external input and feedback is genuinely valuable in moderation. Such feedback needs to be carefully interpreted, though, which often means taking it with a hefty pinch of salt – not least because product and market research can all too easily veer over the line between fact-finding and fact-creating, tangling up decision-making in spurious data points from self-selected participants.
Those are the real development horror stories of the current era of game creation; not an executive who thinks they’re a better game designer than any of the developers, but an executive who thinks a room full of random strangers is a better game designer than any of the developers. These projects bounce back and forth between reworks and focus groups in a loop that crushes not only the originality of the game itself – with every iteration smoothing the game into an undifferentiated Product – but also the spirits of the people working on it.
It doesn’t help that focus groups are one of the key tools employed here, and while they have their place, they’re a shockingly badly named concept – because “focused” is often the very last thing focus groups actually are. People’s attention wanders, they zone out, and often they’re not really there for the right reasons – many participants are either enticed by a freebie or are arriving with an axe to grind, rather than being someone properly representative of the target audience. (This is true in any field, it seems; my personal experience with focus groups is primarily in public policy, not games, but comparing notes with developers shows that the problems are universal.)
A developer closely watching a focus group session can pick out the problems and filter the genuine signal from the noise – but iterate the exercise over and over again, and all you’ve got is noise. Moreover, once those session reports get booted upstairs to the boardrooms that demanded the market research in the first place, it’s often impossible to tell which points need to be taken seriously, and which were raised by people who were half-asleep or staring at the ceiling most of the time.
“It turns out that the smartphone isn’t the second screen after all – all too often, it’s the primary screen”
Yet even making that argument has become tricky, because of another under-discussed pressure that AAA developers face right now – which is focus itself, or rather, the lack of it.
About a decade ago, there was a lot of interest and enthusiasm around the idea of the “two-screen” future we were entering. Some developers tried making games that used players’ phones as a secondary interface, or they built companion apps with hints and tips. That enthusiasm has now been replaced by a sense of tired defeat. It turns out that the smartphone isn’t the second screen after all – all too often, it’s the primary screen, and whatever is happening on the TV or monitor is relegated to the player’s secondary level of attention.
Game publishers and other media executives have seen that trend, and many are minded to capitulate to it – to deliberately build entertainment that caters to people who aren’t fully engaged or paying attention. Allegedly, Netflix has pushed its creative teams to plan their episodes on the assumption that audiences are on their phones and not really paying attention, so key points will need to be explained multiple times. That’s how TV waves the white flag to this trend. For games, that same surrender looks like endless hand-holding, characters who constantly, repetitively narrate what they’re doing, and games that almost play themselves so that nobody ever has to feel frustration or experience a genuine demand on their attention.
(In case you’re wondering, yes, I’m thinking specifically of exactly the game you think I’m talking about – though Marvel’s Wolverine is merely a somewhat egregious example of a broad trend, not in any way a unique outlier.)
If that’s how you perceive the audience – slack-jawed and distracted, half an eye on your game while whatever endless scrolling algorithm they’re hooked on keeps its claws firmly in their dopamine receptors – then knocking off every corner and smoothing off every rough surface until nobody who wandered into the focus group in search of free sandwiches ever gets confused or lost in the game is perfectly reasonable.
“It’s about trusting that the people who spent $70 on your game actually want to play it”
Is it justified, though? There’s obviously a large, and certainly noisy, contingent of consumers who abhor this trend. Maybe they’re outnumbered by an immense contingent of people who like games enough to buy expensive hardware and software, yet cannot, or will not, keep their attention focused on the screen for more than 30 seconds at a time. Yet plenty of creators – in games and in other media – have found that a better solution to the fragmented focus of modern audiences is not to pander, but to demand; to insist upon their attention and reward them for giving it.
This isn’t about guiding players through levels (and it’s certainly not about providing accessibility options – that’s a baby that absolutely shouldn’t go out with the bathwater here). It’s about trusting that the people who spent $70 on your game actually want to play it; about creating guidance in a way that enhances the experience, subtly pushing players in the right direction while still letting people feel like they’re exploring, discovering, and overcoming.
It’s worth noting that lots of developers still do this (I really enjoyed reading Control Resonant senior level designer Ahri Makkonen talking about overcoming these challenges in this week’s feature) – and for all that some people have been quick to hold up Wolverine as evidence that Sony has “lost its touch”, I’d argue that their studios are no stranger to doing this kind of design really well. Both the Horizon and Ghost of Tsushima/Yotei games are solid examples, and perhaps more relevantly, the previous game worked on by many of the lead creatives on Wolverine, the excellent Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, also did a great job on this front.
That, more than anything else, points to the likely culprit here; an encroaching culture of risk management, spurred by massive budgets (and perhaps, in this instance, by the moon on a stick which Sony allegedly promised Marvel in terms of sales), which conflates more data with good data, and demands that everything be optimised for the lowest common denominator. The irony, of course, being that in the long term – perhaps not even all that long – the worst risk of all is the risk of releasing a game that insists on so little attention, and has so little to say, that everyone’s forgotten it as soon as the credits roll.