Pushing Buttons: It’s been a fantastic year for games – unless you’re someone who makes them
October has been a tough month for the games industry, even though it’s barely two weeks in. Fornite creator Epic Games is laying off 830 employees to cut costs, and UK studio Creative Assembly, owned by Sega, is axing the online shooter Hyenas before its official release, with job losses expected. It had been in development for six years.
Creating big-budget video games is tougher now than it’s ever been. The increasing complexity of new titles, with their detailed 4K visuals and elaborate cross-platform online multiplayer modes, means that everything takes longer to develop. Recently, the head of Xbox Games Studios, Matt Booty, told tech site Axios that development cycles for triple A games aren’t two or three years any more: “They’re four and five and six years.”
Big studios seem to have two options to cope with long development times: run a lengthy early access period in which players get to experience a game, for example, Larian Studios launched a beta version in October 2020 and gave fans access to the first act of the game, gradually introducing new features such as multiplayer over the next three years. Gamers had to pay full price for the game, but they got free access to all the pre-order bonuses, and the chance to play a role in the direction development took. But there are mixed feelings about this approach. “We’ve seen that in the past, other games were very successful in early access, and then on the day of release they didn’t sell much more because they saturated already,” Larian’s CEO Swen Vincke in August.
