Yeah, pretty much. This was their first real 3D game, and a much bigger project than any of their previous ones (~24 developer years, compared to ~4.5 for GalCiv2). 3D is completely different than 2D in terms of the technical challenge of making the engine, and potentially being on the bleeding edge of technology (if you are pushing the envelope, or just aren’t experienced enough to stay away from the danger areas).
My impression is that Stardock’s game division is Brad’s hobby project, and that, as much of a gamer as he is, he is also a business guy who works hard on his hobbies and thinks of them as businesses first. Not primarily in the sense of being motivated by profit, but in the sense of things like rating the relative importance of components by their percentage of the budget, and not being especially concerned about game design.
I suspect that Brad is pretty clear about this in his own mind. He’s said himself that “I’m not a game designer. Not really. I’m a gamer who happens to make games. … Our games are not a work of art or a craft or even a job. They’re games designed to be fun and we’ll do whatever we have to do to make sure they’re fun.” I think for Brad, this means that making games is fun for him, and that his goal is to make games that are fun to play, but that’s all. It’s just one thing he does, one of many. It’s not his life, and it’s not even really his job.
Gamers see a guy who seems to have a great deal of time and passion for games, and a guy who likes many of the games they liked, games that by and large aren’t being made any more. What they don’t see is that Brad probably has a great deal of time and passion for everything he does. He owns Stardock, and he says in this podcast that when he’s not working on games, he works seventy hour weeks on non-game software. That’s probably just the way he is. To many gamers this comes across as indie, but a real indie is making games because that’s the one thing they are most passionate about. I think Brad makes games because he thinks they are fun, and he’s so passionate and active because that’s the way he is about everything.
The most telling information in the podcast starts coming in around minute thirty-seven, where Brad says that the development team wasn’t playing the game. A few minutes later, Brad explains that for some developers, software is just software. The Stardock developers were given a release date, so they hit all the bullet points by the release date, the game ran fine on their machines, and as far as they were concerned the game was ready. The QA team was a company wide QA team that didn’t do any gameplay testing and probably had no experience compatibility testing a real 3D game, and didn’t have a proper test setup for 3D games (which are extremely finicky). They had an acceptably low number of bugs on their test setup, so they said the game was ready. I have no idea who was responsible for checking bugs reported by beta testers, but it’s hard to fix bugs you can’t duplicate. I also don’t know who was responsible for evaluating beta tester feedback on other issues, but it’s possible that Brad did most of all of it himself. It’s possible that Brad was the only person at Stardock who actually looked at the game as a whole, and possibly the only person who even really cared to do so. And he says himself that he’s not really a game designer, and it’s pretty clear by now that he’s right.
Brad seems to have created a business culture of working hard over at Stardock, but they are not a game company. If you don’t scale the game culture, you are going to have problems scaling the game development. To his credit, Brad seems to realize at least part of this, and will probably be taking some steps to correct the problems.
However, judging things like this, especially from a distance, is error-prone at best. Everything I say is pure conjecture. It is not a reason to buy or not buy Stardock games. It should also be clear by now that buying Stardock games is neither necessary for supporting Stardock, nor sufficient for encouraging the development of games that don’t suck. If you want more TBS games, especially if you want TBS games that don’t suck, do everyone a favor and buy based on the quality of the game, not some imaginary insight into, or relationship you think you have with the company, or the developer. Don’t preorder, don’t rely on reviews. Wait for the demo.
