Gabe Newell on why game delays are okay: 'Late is just for a little while. Suck is forever.'
Gabe Newell on why game delays are okay: 'Late is just for a little while. Suck is forever.'
Half-Life was delayed a full year past its original release date, and Valve has no regrets.
Halflife 3 is going to be amazing you guys
Valve can't count to 3 though.
Expect after the Steam Deck 2 for its successors to be Steam Deck 2: Episode 1 and Steam Deck 2: Episode 2.
Valve can’t count to 3 though.
Capcom had years of jokes on exactly that point with the Street Fighter series, but they eventually did release Street Fighter III.
EDIT: For those not familiar, here's the relevant portion of the series timeline:
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Street Fighter
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Street Fighter II: The World Warrior
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Street Fighter II: Championship Edition
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Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting
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Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers
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Super Street Fighter II Turbo
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Street Fighter Alpha
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Street Fighter: The Movie (the video game)
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Street Fighter Alpha 2
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X-Men vs. Street Fighter
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Street Fighter EX
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Street Fighter III: New Generation
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It would be free marketing if they went with that approach. I can already see the headlines: “Why the ‘Steam Deck 3’ is called the ‘Steam Deck: Episode 1’ and other 5 things with origins on the memeverse”
Yep. I consider HL:Alex to be HL:3. It's that good.
But I still want another HL game.
Hollow Knight: Silksong is gonna be perfect.
(Actually, knowing those devs, it might.)
Their problem is they already made a perfect game. Now they have to do it again. Doing something perfectly once can be chance, doing it twice is massively more difficult.
I'd settle for an Alyx 2 at this point.
No more Alyx after that though!
I can't wait for my great grandson to play it
Here you dropped this: "great "
Confirmed!
Interesting spin on the "A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad"-quote.
These quotes are from a time when games were stamped into hard plastic and circuitry. No Man's Sky and Cyberpunk are two examples of games with rocky launches that are both amazing now. Saying a game is forever bad simply isn't true anymore provided the makers stand behind the product.
I think it depends on if the bad game has enough public attention that it can get a second chance after launch. When No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk got updated, the story was plastered all over the game news channels/sites.
Most games if they get off to a bad start, nobody gives them a second thought. How would you even know if it got better? If nobody is newly buying and reviewing it, the steam reviews won’t reflect the change in quality.
There’s something to be said for the unfairness of which of these games that botch their launch get that second chance, but it kinda is what it is. People can’t pay attention to everything.
No those two games are the exception no the rule.
The question bring why you'd keep working on something you got money for. Especially when you've been shown time and time again that people keep buying your games anyway. Seems more cost effective to pay those marketing people than your code monkeys...
Tell that to Game Freak.
Lol that quote is literally in the first sentence of the article.
Not sure why we're arguing this quote with the same two games over and over. Nms and cyberpunk are great games, but they're a rarity.
Game Dev crunch is a plague in th industry, we suffer as consumers who cop bad releases on release. The whole industry could learn from its roots and delay things for a better initial product.
Defending the current practice of redevelopment in post is almost consumer gaslighting.
Plus, the base game itself should be good. It shouldn't need updates. Post-game launch updates should be enhancements, not fixes.
I would even say NMS is a good example of this sentiment. The game has been good for years now and has had tons of free updates. There's a lot of people out there who just don't care and you can see this in forums whenever the game makes news. People still show up to decry the game for how terrible the release was.
Public sentiment on the game and the studio is still pretty mixed
The fact that it’s only the same two games is more of an argument against than for, honestly. With all of the awful launches people can think of two games that were redeemed.
That’s bad.
I think a big difference with both is that they're not big multiplayer titles that are looking to make money with cosmetics.
If a multiplayer focused game is shit at launch, it won't get a good user base and then it's as good as dead.
I’m not defending the need for post-launch patches to fix glaring issues and I’m not defending crunch, but suggesting that buggy releases and crunch haven’t been with gaming since the earliest days of the industry seems like putting on rose colored glasses. There is a lot to damn about the current industry, but painting the root days of the industry as free of those same issues just to make the comparison seems unrealistic.
suck is forever
I should call her
Tell your mom she still owes me for the Uber.
Delay No More
I don't disagree that often an early release can really kill a game. I think that Fallout 76 would have done much better had it not gone out the door for a while, and I think that the poor quality at release really hurt reception; despite Bethesda putting a lot of post-release work into the game, a lot of people aren't going to go back and look at it. CDPR and Cyberpunk 2077 might have done better by spending more time or deciding to cut the scope earlier in development too. But, a few points:
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First, game dev is not free. The QA folks, the programmers, all that -- they are getting paid. Someone has to come up with money to pay for that. When someone says "it needs more time", they're also saying "someone needs to put more money in".
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Second, time is money. If I invest $1 and expect to get $2 back, when I get that $2 matters a lot. If it's in a year, that's a really good deal. If it's in 20 years (adjusting for inflation), that's a really bad deal -- you have a ton of lower-risk things than you could do in that time. Now, we generally aren't waiting 20 years, but it's true that each additional month until there is revenue does cut into the return. That's partly why game publishers like preorders -- it's not just because it transfers risk of the game sucking from them to the customers, but also because money sooner is worth more.
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Third, I think that there are also legitimate times when a game's development is mismanaged, and even if it makes the publisher the bad guy, sometimes they have to be in a position of saying "this is where we draw the line". Some games have dev processes that just go badly. Take, say, Star Citizen. I realize that there are still some people who are still convinced that Star Citizen is gonna meet all their dreams, but for the sake of discussion, let's assume that it isn't, that development on the game has been significantly mismanaged. There is no publisher in charge of the cash flow, no one party to say "This has blown way past many deadlines. You need to focus on cutting what needs to be cut and getting something out the door. No more pushing back deadlines and taking more cash; if the game does well, you can do DLC or a sequel."
EDIT: I think that in the case of Cities: Skylines 2, sure, you can probably improve things with dev time. But I also think that the developer probably could have legitimately looked at where things were and said "okay, we gotta start cutting/making tradeoffs" earlier in the process. Like, maybe it doesn't look as pretty to ship with reduced graphical defaults, but maybe that's just what should have been done. Speaking for myself, I don't care that much about ground-level views or simulated individuals in a city-builder game, and that's a lot of where they ran into problems -- they're spending a lot of resources and taking on a lot of risk for something that I just don't think is all that core to a city-builder game. I think that a lot of the development effort and problems could have been avoided had the developer decided earlier-on that they didn't need to have the flashiest city sim ever.
Sometimes a portion of the game just isn't done and you might be better-off without it. Bungie has had developers comment that maybe they shouldn't have shipped with The Library level in Halo. My understanding is that some of the reason that different portions of the level look similar is that originally, the level was intended to be more open, and they couldn't make it perform acceptably that way and had to close off areas from each other. I didn't dislike as much as some other people, but maybe it would have been better not to ship it, or to significantly reduce the scope of the level.
I mean, given an infinite amount of dev time and resources, and competent project management, you can fix just about everything. Some dev timelines are unrealistic, and sometimes a game can be greatly-improved with a relatively-small amount of time. My point is that sometimes the answer is that you gotta cut, gotta start cutting earlier, and then rely on a solid release and putting whatever else you wanted to do into DLC or maybe a sequel.
I won't lie: That's the kind of talk that really makes me wish Valve would quit playing around with Steam and weird hardware experiments, and go back to making new games.
I don't agree at all. There's one Valve and Steam. If it's not Valve, it's gonna be Microsoft or someone, and I'd much rather have Valve handling the PC game storefront than Microsoft. There are lots of game developers and publishers out there that could develop a game competently, but not many in Valve's position.
I think that pretty much every great game, especially those boxed and released before digital distribution, was made by a passionate and talented team.
I’m just about certain that every team on those games would have at least one person pushing for more development time to make it just a little bit better.
It’s a romantic idea to say devs should have all the time in the world, but somebody needs to be the voice saying, “No, it’s done. We are boxing it.”
If enough of the development team can articulate why they need a delay, and if it looks like they are making actual progress, delays are good. If it’s just constant iteration and tweaks, that’s not enough justification.
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This is true, but gamers are so impatient. I am in early access with my Virtual Reality Theme Park and have been busting it for 3 years as a solo dev, and of course it is not a full Theme Park yet. What does exist has put me into the top 10 on the Meta Quest App Lab store, but I get bounced out of the top 10 now and then as I will get 3* saying new rides are not coming fast enough. People are so impatient just like shareholders.
Make sure you put in the description you are a small one dev team. Most people are reasonable and understand you can only do so much.
People are way less patient with asshole AAA studios that crank out garbage because they waste time implementing micro transactions or bullshit DLCd
Game of Thrones agrees with him.
Suck is forever
"Hard disagree." -- person who played FFXIV before the realm got reborn
The memories are fantastic though.
I'd almost argue vanilla and realm reborn aren't even the same game. As you said, the realm had to be reborn. It's like they nuked it and then started over.
...They did.
I dont think any creative would disagree shareholders and useless management however
Yeah, but there's only so much delays can fix. Sometimes suck is sticky.
Duke Nukem Forever PTSD
Perhaps. I suppose saying: “Delaying a game which is making coherent progress is better than forcing devs to cut their work short.” is a much less catchy quote.
Duke Nukem Forever suffered both from not giving the appropriate development time to a single workflow, and from the related problem of upper manglement constantly demanding changing the game so much it was like starting over again and again.
The leaked 2001 Duke Nukem build is promising. If the devs had been supported in focusing on that rather than constantly retooling the game to chase trends, it may have at least been decent.
It can also be difficult to determine when a game has had enough development time. Pretty much every game considered good or great has had some content cut for development time reasons. At the end of the day, somebody does have to be the person who reigns in the excess.
Sometimes cut content would have been better if left in, sometimes cutting it was clearly a good choice.
And then there’s the simple reality that a studio that delays too much risks going under, which kills that game and all future games by them, so when is good enough good enough to ship a game?
Fantastic advice, as a guideline in a vacuum.
No game should be shipped broken, but sometimes concessions are a reality.
Even Half-Life had to make concessions. Xen is infamously less polished and fine tuned than the rest of the game. Valve didn’t have infinite resources and time to keep tinkering. Would the game have been better? Maybe. But time is money, and Half-Life already ended up selling huge. Would taking time to fine tune Xen have boosted sales? Were people in the 90s avoiding the game because of Xen? I don’t think so.
The profits from Half Life allowed Valve to make more games and be successful. Is it worth trading off a more fine tuned Xen in order to have Valve exist as we know it today?
In the documentary, they actually expand on that, they delayed the core game until the story and levels worked out and specially left Xen to the last as if they were not having fun before, they would have given up
I know. Perhaps I was not being clear in my point.
Xen was made last, and Valve never could quite get it to the same quality as the rest of the game.
If we follow the logic, which many commenters have, that “games should only be released 100% finished” then Half-Life should have been delayed indefinitely until Xen was as polished as the rest of the game.
I was making the point that Xen is an example of Valve deciding part of their game is “good enough” and shipping it, rather than continually extending development.
There are realities of game development that even Valve isn’t immune to.
Why don't they just not bother with a release date and release it when the game is 100% ready
A lot of the time in the industry, developers are using money loaned by publishers. Things like getting more development time, which means asking for more money is a negotiation that the devs aren’t guaranteed to win.
Valve is one of the successful developer & publisher companies that managed to survive. The 90s were a much smaller time for video games, and a small startup like Valve could compete with the big names out there. They had more freedom in a sense, but they also were taking quite a gamble. Other companies tried the same and didn’t survive.
It’s easy to simply say “only release a game when it’s 100% done” but it’s a lot harder when you’re watching money that keeps your company afloat dwindle with each delay. Also, “100% done” is a very flexible concept. Games almost always have to cut content or make concessions in some way, so figuring out what a done version looks like while working on it can be difficult.
The modern version of a small Valve style startup would be something like a Kickstarter funded development. Again, unless you are (for some reason) a Star Citizen dev, people are going to stop giving you money and you have limited funds and thus limited development time.
And just because you delay to try and release a superior game doesn’t mean it will be a smash hit.
baldur's gate did that and other companies were complaining about the high standard it set
Definitely a "change some words around" from Miyamoto, whom this is usually attributed to.
There isn't any solid evidence that the quote originated from Miyamoto.
Which they would know if they read the article.
I will wait for Silksong like a good little boi, if it ends up as good as the original.
The art is a fair bit more detailed, but I’m fascinated with whatever might be taking them so long. The original took about two years to finish and is ridiculously polished, so doubling the development time is wild. Is Hornet’s movement system just terrifically prone to breaking? Is the game simply gargantuan? Did they make a game of sneezing into each other’s coffee and lose a few years to the kitchen camping meta? All equally possible.
Mighty GabeN is getting pretty deep into his wizard years, I best prepare myself for his passing.
The dude is 61, not even retirement age in the US. You don't need to be dramatic just yet.
Before anyone gets their "um actually" comment in...
Yes, he would be eligible for retirement, but your average retirement eligible american isn't expecting to retire until 65-70.
Okay, so there's game delays that actually have helped some games. Then there's games that sit on Early Access for what seems like forever, wondering what the fuck are they doing, like 7 Days to Die.
I like and respect games that, take their time because they want a certain vision of a game to work itself out as intended. I don't like and respect games that need to rush for the holidays or need to rush for company appeasement.
Some of my favorite Early Access games, I'd actually rather just finish development and then start on a new release.
Take Nova Drift and Caves of Qud. Both games, I think, are in a state where I have gotten my money's worth out of them many times over. But they're still Early Access.
But, hey, as a player, who is going to complain about more stuff being provided for free?
At this point, my preference would be to say "Okay, you did a good job with the resources you had. Now, I would like to give you more money and you can hire more people and produce content at a higher rate, because I really like the stuff you make."
Or at least DLC or something. Like, I don't have a problem with blocky pixel art as a way of reducing dev costs. I think that many traditional roguelikes have benefited from just using text -- means that gameplay revisions are easier, and that one doesn't need an art team. I think that it's an effective tactic. But having seen how much art has added to, say, Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, I'd like to be able to purchase high-resolution art for Caves of Qud. I pay for tons of art in many, many games that I enjoy much less than Caves of Qud. Ditto for a number of other pixel-art indie releases that I like.
I'd like to see more content coming out at a higher rate, and that is gonna require funds.
Paradox does this. They have a deal where they make a game and if I like it, I can send them more money and they will make more game at a pretty good clip. Now, maybe not everyone wants to spend what some Paradox games run if you take into account all DLC -- okay -- but I'm not left in a situation where I want more of Game X but I'm unable to buy it.
And a canceled game is never bad
It's just not true anymore, especially with Steam. If a game releases in a sucky, broken state where more development time was definitely needed, nowadays the game companies will often just fix those games over time.
Well it stills impacts the game and the brand, The smash-like game that got out in Beta that was almost great has fallen down to me not remmebering the name of the game because it was not memorable enough and not fully polished. They will have a second chance then the game will "fully launch" but for a lot of people the Beta launh was the full laucnh
Yeah, 100%. If a game gets released in a mediocre unfinished state, and it doesn't capture the attention of the player base back then it can certainly kill the game, I agree completely.
However, my original comment was mostly referring to the fact that games can be updated nowadays, unlike in the older days when you bought a game (when buying games was mostly done via retail stores and physical copies) and if the game was bad, it would be bad forever. There's also the fact that there were a couple of high-profile cases where the game came out clearly unfinished or even unplayable (such as Fallout 76 and Cyberpunk 2077) that have fixed themselves, and if you were to mention that the game was bad at launch and how it was a bad business practice, you'd immediately get told to shut up and to look at what state the game is now.
Suck is forever.
Unless you're No Man's Sky? Or Cyberpunk? Like games have been getting patches and updates for a long time, sometimes they get better, sometimes they get worse. Maybe he means your reputation as a developer and as a publisher is forever tarnished no matter how well you patch up the game post-launch.
In the days of Half Life 1? Yeah, it wasn't really feasible to patch games after they got printed on discs and left the warehouse.
I'm sure they got better, but they never won me back, that original feeling of disappointment is still associated with the games for me.
I'm pretty sure this is what he means. It's like first impressions with people. You only get one shot. Yes, you can improve the initial release to be playable and amazing but people will remember you put out a shit game to start with and that alienates people.
Yeah reptuational is part of the issue but there is also a big financial issue too. Delaying a game is financially difficult as it affects financial projects for each year with shareholders (who only care about share price growth). If you release a game in a poor state you get to hit some of the financial targets which benefits the publisher particularly, but for the developer it means longer terms sales are much lower as reviews and feedback come in that the game is crap. You then have to patch and repair the game.
Patching has allowed publishers and developers to get away with this releasing of games in bad states, but it doesn't change that fundamental issue which disproportionately affects the developer. Dev studios often only have 1 game being worked on at a time. An unready early release which is poorly recieved can be an existential crisis. For publishers, a poorly recieved game is a disappointment but generally have other many other games also on release so they can move on and not care as much.
No Man's Sky and Cyberpunk are high profile exceptions. The gaming world is littered with abandoned flops, often due to not being ready for release.
Agreed. And many of counterexamples belong to the Live Service model. Halo Infinite, Anthem, Evolve (I'm digging deep on that one), etc.
I'll never touch No Man's Sky because of the rugpull they did. It is sucky to me forever. If they made that game from the start - I would probably be playing it.
In the days of Half Life 1
Literally what the headline, article, and quote are about. Half life 1. When half life 1 released. When they delayed it because they didn't want it to suck forever.
It's an oversimplification, but first impressions do mean a lot. A lot of people will forever remember No Man's Sky as being a terrible game, even though they did do a lot to fix it later.
Sounds like he stole that from Nintendo.
I mean who cares? Truth is truth.
HL2 EP3 any day now boyz.
Is that why they still have yet to make hl3 TF3 or update TF2 give portal 2 additional support
When you can literally change the entire game over time with updates to be something entirely different from what it was: Suck isn't forever. But neither is good.
Even the perceptions don't necessarily stay forever. Look at NMS.
Preach Gaben!
But he said that in the context of releasing Half Life 1, back when there was no way to patch a game after release. This isn't the case anymore and it's been proven many times that games can come back from sucking.
A game can, but the reputation of it can't. The reality of it is - it's unacceptable and always have been. Producers have just pushed for releasing buggy crap and the "fix it later" mentality.
I'd generally agree, but one huge exception that comes to mind is No Man's Sky. It feels like its updates get far more attention than most games' just because they did manage to turn it around. Even though it was generally considered "redeemed" years ago, it still gets credit and publicity for its redemption every time there's an update, to the point where I think it does far better today than it would be doing if it had released in the state it was supposed to.
It's not a strategy I'd recommend other companies try to emulate, though. I think Hello Games got very lucky with people letting them redeem No Man's Sky, along with it taking them a lot of extra time and work. It was a phenomenon, not something that can be worked into a strategy.
You only get to make a first impression once, after all.
Very few games actually come back from that though.
And patches even existed before the advent of internet, they just were also rare.
The spirit of your point is right, but: game patches existed back then. The first patch for Half Life was 1.0.0.8 released in 1999 (release version was 1.0.0.5). I cannot find the patch notes or exact release date as my search results are flooded with "25th anniversary patch" results.
What was true is that players patching their games was not a matter of course for many years. It was a pain in the ass. The game didn't update itself. You didn't have a launcher to update your game for you. No. Instead, you had to go to the game's website and download the patch executable yourself. But it wasn't just a simple "Game 1.1 update.exe" patch. That'd be too easy. It was a patch from 1.0.9 to 1.1, and if you were on 1.0.5.3 you had to get the patch for 1.0.5.3 to 1.0.6.2, then a patch from that to 1.0.8 then a patch from that to 1.0.9. Then you had to run all of those in sequence. This is a huge, huge part of why people eventually started to fall in love with Steam back in the day. Patches were easy and "just worked" — it was amazing compared to what came before.
The end result being that patches existed but the game that people remember (and played) was by and large defined by what it was on release. Also console games weren't patched, although newer printings of a game would see updates. Ocarina of Time's 1.0 release was exclusive to Japan; the North American release was 1.1 for the first batch of sales. After the initial batch was sold out the release was replaced by 1.2. That was common back then. As far as I know there was no way for consumers to get theirs updated, or to even find out about the updates. But they did exist.
There were also revisions of even game cartridges for consoles.
I remember having a first revision of the first Legend of Zelda for the Game Boy. A bug meant that hitting a particular button combination (Select or Start+Select, can't recall) precisely when crossing a screen boundry would let you cross two screens rather than one.
That was patched in a later revision of the cartridge.
Steam literally started as a way to easily patch and find servers for your valve games. They didn't start selling other games on there until a few years later.
Praise be unto papa Gaben.
suck is forever
Why is the consumer just expected to roll over and take it when a game sucks instead of the responsibility being on the publisher to release updates until the game resembles what was originally advertised? Games aren't on ROM cartridges anymore, you can still improve the game after it's released.
Look, No Man's Sky set the precedent for what you're supposed to do when your game sucks at launch. And we should expect nothing less from game studios with ten times the person-power and money.
That's not what Gaben meant.
He is saying that games that were released despite being buggy or unfinished or both will have a permanent stain in the user reception. Basically, updates cannot fix a bad first impression.
Fair enough, if that's what he meant it's a good point.
The problem is had the No Man's Sky team did nothing, nobody would've really done anything about it.
And even now there's people who won't come back because of the release issues.
There's just no incentive other than whether or not the company wants to do it, not even much of a reward for doing so.
🙄
Can't stand this Miyamoto quote. Not only it's contentious at best (think of all the terrible games the kept getting delayed), it's factually untrue since the mid to late 2000s when online patching for games became common practice across the industry.
I think there's a kernel of truth to it. A poor first impression followed by a subsequent recovery tells us that a game could have been good at launch, but was rushed out for various reasons. This practice of forcing the public to pay to be beta testers for a half finished product should be punished.
And nothing's going to erase a garbage launch. It will always have been garbage and the shit launch will always be a part of the conversation about the game. Hence why we still talk about it even in games that have recovered.
You can't patch history.
I agree with the first impression aspect and I believe it's important to get the release right because of it, but the phrase deliberately implies a bad game will always be bad which just isn't true. "Bad impressions are forever" would be more accurate.
I loved Half-Life and played through it several times to get all the details. However, watching the 25 year anniversary about it is about as boring as watching the anecdotes from some old rock band describing their amplifier setup in the 1970s. I's interesting in some technical historical way, but it also seems soo out of touch with what's happening today. These guys aren't going to put out a new banger.
I didn’t find this boring whatsoever. It was great seeing the creation process of such a foundational game.
Why does to have to be relevant to modern gaming?
Also, I’d love some old band talking about their pedals, and I’m not a musician. It’s cool to see how the creative process works, no?
Your analogy sucks because knowing your tools, even old ones, is important in both of the fields you're talking about. Funk and soul are using old music tools to create new and unique sounds in their genres regularly (see vulfmon). You apparently just hate the history of music/gaming or have no interest and that's fine, but you are a FOOL to think these tools can't still be used today. Low fidelity is a choice you can make that has no actual bearing on the final product's quality overall (See Lethal company).
Bad take