Let’s look at the initial comment in the chain:
all game developers need to put their foot down and say “it’s ready when it’s ready.”
No marketing deadlines, no “crunch time,” make the game until the game is made
It isn’t saying publishers should be more flexible about deadline delays, it is saying there simply shouldn’t be deadlines at all.
Shoveling infinite money at a developer who tells you it will be ready when it’s ready is the Chris Roberts model of game development. While it certainly produces interesting results, it is unrealistic and undesirable to expect it as the standard.
Games that are developing well but need a little more time to fix issues should be given flexibility by publishers, but at the end of the day there are stretch ideas and content that has to be cut. Doing that cutting and keeping the project focused is what a lead on the dev team should be doing throughout the entire development. If a game has a realistic deadline given the expected scope and the dev team comes back and says they actually need another year of production, then it is worth looking into if that extra time is going to make the game a year’s worth of investment better or not.
JcbAzPx@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Rather than choosing an arbitrary time, you should choose a state of the game to call finished. Limited time will always lead to crunch inevitably.
setsneedtofeed@lemmy.world 1 day ago
In a publisher fronting money to developer situation, without a fixed time limit (or money limit, which functionally translates to a time limit) is the publisher just infinitely on the hook to pay for dev time “until it’s done”?
JcbAzPx@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Depends; do they want the game to sell or not?
setsneedtofeed@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
I’m not trying to be cute. If a publisher company gives money to a developer who is a separate entity, they’ve got to have some kind of contract. If there is no timeline or total budget written into the initial contract, how could a publisher pull out of that agreement?
If the answer is going to be “publishers can just pull out when they feel like it” then that’s neither adhering to the “let devs develop ‘until it is done’.” philosophy that is the entire point of this hypothetical restructure, and it for practical terms it does impose a deadline based on the publisher’s patience, except now that deadline is not expressly clear and simply defined.