With the recent blunders when it comes to delaying the release of Cyberpunk 2077 and the subsequent price drop in CD Projekt Red’s stocks it’s becoming abundantly clear that delaying your game and crunching your developers will ultimately cause financial as well as internal problems for the development of not just this one game, but also your company.
This brings up an interesting question then, should developers just remain silent on the issue of release date until they are absolutely ready for the game to come out? This way people don’t get their expectations dashed due to a failure to reach the previously agreed date and you don’t ever have to crunch your developers as you don’t have to meet a specific deadline. The downside is of course that you may end up like Valve having almost no interaction with your audience and being frequently told that you are lazy or just not working hard enough despite you actually working on the projects they want.
I think a middle ground might be best, not announcing any full release dates butr notifying your core target audience that there are indeed projects in the works, you can even share some of the stuff you have been doing so that people can get hyped about it. I feel like Digital Extremes, makers of Warframe, do this well as while they only announce release dates in a vague sense when it comes to game updates they frequently have streams with their developers showing off the latest things they have been working on and things they are planning to add in future updates. Following this kind of example allows you to still drum up hype with your content while also not shooting yourself in the foot by subjecting your developers to crunch.
Anyway, what do you all think about this concept? Is radio silence better in the long term for the healthy working environment of the games industry or is sticking to a rigid structure and release schedule better? Be sure to share your opinions with us all. That’s all for now, and as always. It’s not just a game, It’s a Life.