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[Fasty1]

 Judging from the rage in this forum TODAY particularly, what do you guys think the consequences bioware will receive from its fan if ME3 falls short of expectation(which seems to be the vibe here). Will the company goes bankrupt in the future because of fan desertion, or Bioware learning from its mistake and redeem itself(which is surprising since they didnt learn from DA2) or will they just ignore the problem and start another franchise?

[Stanley Woo]

BrokenPolygon wrote...

Seeing as it already went gold, I'm pretty sure they are fine

"Going gold" is a game industry term that means the game has been approved and sent to manufacturing. It does not mean it has sold a certain number of copies, as it does in the music industry.

[Stanley Woo]

Deganis76 wrote...

Well said.  I often wonder how developers filter that signal to noise and actually get a good "pulse" of how their game is recieved:  sales, obviously, are a huge factor, but I imagine critical reviews and focus groups probably play into their quality assessments significantly.  If they assessed the quality of their games solely based on forum reception: well I think they may be compelled to commit ritual suicide.

Some people think we are so blinded by our own corona of awesome that we completely ignore any and all the faults in the game. These people tend to forget that game development is more of an art than a science and that, if we could, we would spend years perfecting the product and tweaking everything just that much more. Unfortunately, the realities of business means that the game has to be released in order to be sold, and that usually means making really difficult decisions on when the game is "good enough" to release.

That's not to say "eh, it's good enough," but when deadlines are looming and release dates approach, you'd better be darned sure that your game is "good enough" to release because developers are dealing with tens of millions of dollars in risk. We are extremely concerned about any released game doing well, but there's no way to know just how well it'll do until it's out there on store shelves.

How do we get a sense of how well we're doing? You've pretty much got the gist of it, Deganis76. Critical reviews, sales numbers, and general "buzz" are good indicators of where we're sitting. Forums are good up to a point,but tend to exhibit rather extreme biases. And these days, social media can be an indicator of success as well. We have many different ways of gleaning information that, when analyzed together, tell us what's up.

[Stanley Woo]

TheKillerAngel wrote...

Stanley, how come companies like Blizzard can take as long as they damn please to make a game? What's preventing Bioware from doing the same?

Just guessing, of course, since I don't know their inner workings, but it makes a whole lot of sense: fewer, bigger titles, popular franchises, a gigantic fanbase in an even bigger potential market, and past successes. Also, regular money coming in from one of their ongoing workhorse titles.

But I'm sure they have their issues with deadlines and releases; their cycles are just a lot longer than everyone else's and somewhat sustainable.