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Comment by brucethemoose2 | Hacker News Reader

> then it just shouldn't ship

Part of the problem is that AAA is just (IMO) too big and expensive. Devs might actually have to ship a broken game around holiday time just to get enough sales to survive.

And the other extreme can be dangerous too, like how Mass Effect Andromeda's development dragged on forever, and EA let it happen because its such a golden IP.

I think the ultimate solution is to just scale down most studios a little bit, so the studio and publisher can afford to delay. Medium sized studios are the sweetspot, especially going forward with GenAI.

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If a studio downsizes, they might be able to survive making lower budget games. And while it's true that if every studio does this, the industry would get better, there's incentive for _one_ studio to pump up their funding and make a super-high-fidelity game, and grab all marketshare.

This makes it a 'race to the bottom' style (or a race to the top?) competition, where higher funding gets you more marketshare, but only against lower funded studios. It's akin to advertising budgets. Mostly a zero sum game in the end.

> super-high-fidelity game, and grab all marketshare

This is not necessarily true any more. I think smaller studios chipping away for a long time are making better games than most big ones.

Hopefully this dynamic creates a cascading market crash to wipe out all the biggest players and force the industry back to its proper size.

It's not like this is unique to AAA. Unless gamedev is your hobby and not full-time job you simply have no choice other than ship game and try to fix it.

Any small indie studio have to deal with it.

EA were the culprit for those delays by forcing bioware to use frostbite. Blame rests solidly with some synergies savings suitsuperman.

Going by the allegations in the reports, it wasn't just frostbite. Bioware chose to dump a lot of time into features like procedural generation (and having to use Frostbite exhasterbated this problem even more).

They defacto threw out a working pipeline for a beloved product for no other reason then cost savings and project expenses justification. It was a disaster that basically destroyed bioware.

The procedural stuff was just a " while we leap of the cliff with no plan" let's make the cost cutters happy who wail because there "abandon working system" for completely different system that's working for a completely different usecase did not work out. Honestly for decisions this clueless and value endangering a whole executive floor should have been let go.

Nobody is forcing anyone to sell unfinished product as if it were finished product at finished product prices.

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