The Season of Delays
You didn't think making virtual worlds was easy, did you?
2022 was well positioned to be the year of landmark releases in gaming…right up until it wasn’t. As things stand, it is looking downright barren out there.
Delays are nothing new in gaming, but the why, how, and general reaction to the latest push-backs warrants due consideration, particularly among marketers and technologists who have had their interest towards the gaming ecosystem piqued in recent months.
The pandemic has impacted ways of working across basically every industry, and video games were no different. Through 2020 and 2021 gaming studios flagged a number of push backs that were, for the most part, wholley expected given then-fresh logistics related to shifting work streams to the home. The result was loading a lot of very big releases into 2022.
Things were looking promising at first - the latest expansion for Destiny 2 is the best in years, Horizon Forbidden West (delayed from 2021) landed to broad critical and technical acclaim (it’s truly one of the first games that feels “next gen” to me), though quickly had their thunder partially stolen by Elden Ring, which has managed to up-end expectations for open world games from both a commercial and mechanical standpoint.
Truly an embarrassment of riches, though leaving the latter half of the year as that much more of a stark contrast. We learned in March that the (still unnamed) sequel to the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was now slated for early 2023. This past week Bethesda announced that their much-anticipated new IP Starfield would be pushed to 2023, along with Redfall. With many speculating that the latest installment in the God of War series is unlikely to be released this year, the holiday season may be left bereft of any mega-hits.
Again, nothing too surprising - delays in gaming (and draconic measures to avoid them, largely in the form of the legendary “crunch”) are a fairly well known and well documented phenomenon. What seems a bit different this time around is considering these delays amidst a broader interest in virtual worlds/gaming among tech companies and marketers, in addition to how the gaming industry is contextualizing these delays to their fans.
In terms of the latter point, we now have what we can call the “Cyberpunk Effect” to thank for creating a sliver of empathy between demanding game fans and game developers. More specifically, no one wants another Cyberpunk. Game developer CD Projekt Red, at the pinnacle of game development esteem based on the smash hit Witcher 3, launched their new IP in a state that can only be described as demonstrably unready. Over two years from the original December 2020 release, it’s finally been argued that Cyberpunk is just now in a state where it is “playable.”
The disastrous launch of Cyberpunk has biased even the not terribly developer-friendly pockets of the gaming fandom to air a bit more towards the sentiment of “take as much time as you need.” In this way, Cyberpunk had quite a monumental impact on the gaming ecosystem, though probably not the one CD Projekt Red intended.
What went wrong for the developer has been discussed fairly exhaustively, but the short answer is money. Execs wanted the revenue to be recognized in that financial year, the devs churned hard towards what in hindsight was an impossible goal, and no one was left happy. The fact that Cyberpunk was almost ludicrously heralded by extensive merchandising makes it difficult to analyze the problem through many lenses aside from “profit.” This is where the crux of the matter lies.
Making a game is really hard - and by extension, really expensive. It’s a mix of art and science where the dependencies between the art and the science can be at odds in unexpected ways. Delays happen, in part, because the mix of these disciplines (compounded by non-standardized tools, studio-specific design or engineering practices, etc.) can break downstream dependencies that no amount of foresight could predict. Game fans become frustrated by the lack of fidelity or accuracy in release dates, but misunderstand that this is not a product of developers being cagey so much as them truly not knowing when the hell they will be finished. No one can, really.
As games become more sophisticated, this is a problem which is going to get worse before it gets better. The increasingly sprawling scope and technical/artistic complexity of these games takes a long time to create. The recently delayed Starfield has been in production for over six years already and yet Bethesda had to push the (already announced) launch date. All those hours add up - the prohibitive costs of game craft are necessitating all manner of mechanisms to supplement in recent years (subscriptions, ads, micro-transactions, etc.). Marquee titles such as those that have been pushed to 2023 have millions of dollars already sunk into them, and anything short of these games being a hit has the potential for major financial (and reputational) damage to the studio. I don’t suspect CD Projekt Red were in dire straits financially, but as much as we may cluck our tongues at the team that pushed for Cyberpunk to be released (complete with some cash-grabby corporate alliances) the reality is that many studios are vacillating between “sink” and “swim” on a fairly regular basis in these choppy waters.
It’s why major technology companies such as Google, Amazon, and Facebook/Meta haven’t really found much in the way of success in gaming - this type of development is somewhat at odds to how they typically like to work from a technical perspective, and the margins aren’t nearly as good as (say) a single app that can command a significant portion of the dollars in Ad Land. It’s hard to “move fast and break things” when production moves quite slow at best, and breaking things has the potential to derail it completely.
It’s similarly why marketers, brands, and technologists interested in virtual worlds will struggle. I don’t suspect anyone is underestimating the enormity of the task to build such worlds, but I”m not yet convinced there is a complete appreciation of the task at hand. There is a reason that entities such as Roblox or Epic are finding much in the way of momentum with brands - they provide a ready-made palette for brands to activate within, instead of forcing something built from the ground up (there is also an argument to be made that this is why many popular metaverse upstarts will struggle, and the metaverse will share much more in common with Web 2.0 than Web 3.0, but we’ll save that for another week).
While it is precisely the sink/swim and hit-based nature of game development that has opened up opportunities for marketers - things like advertising and sponsorships exist precisely as a means to find flexible ways to transact with a broad audience - taking the next step to build more seriously in these worlds is a much bigger step. Not entirely unlike good marketing, it is a mix of art and science - though one that remains esoteric and challenged by a general reluctance by marketers and technologists to engage with gaming in a serious way. You’ve heard this sentiment from me before, but like the growing complexity of gamecraft and potential for game push backs, it is a problem that is going to get much worse before it gets better.
In the meantime, one shouldn’t worry too much about the game fans this holiday season. Most, like myself, have a near-impenetrable backlog of games to work through (no joke, I keep a list on my phone). It might very well give me an opportunity to finally get around to Cyberpunk.