I think the main problem is that it’s a business. Whilst I understand that people need to make a living, chasing money via games is the best way to make shitty games.
It certainly is a massive failure when you spend over $100 million just to advertise it. That was such a huge moronic move on 2K’s part because the game was not going to sell tons more units than previous Bioshock games with their pure shit ads, and not a lot more even if it had amazing ads. The people who should have been fired are the marketing teams and executives who obviously have no idea who or how large their audience is. But of course they always go unscathed.
It has gotten to a point where you either need to downsize to something manageable or grow large enough to have multiple AAA projects on a staggered schedule so staff can roll back and forth during different phases. Carrying 150 staffers for 6 years and only getting one game is brutal.
Not advertising something is a surefire way to guarantee you won’t sell more copies. They took a risk. Maybe it didn’t pay off. Regardless, I thought the TV ads were pretty great, but I’m not an, er, irrational “you have to show gameplay” purist. (I didn’t actually like the games all that much, though.)
The people who should have been fired are the marketing teams and executives who obviously have no idea who or how large their audience is.
They were obviously going for the hail mary, attempting to take a successful game into the realm of the uber-successful. You don’t grow an audience by sitting on your hands. You either get lucky and it just sorta happens, or you have to spend a buttload of money to remind people that your game exists.
There are a lot of Captain Hindsights chiming in on this thread. Of course 2K would throw a hail mary on Bioshock Infinite. All signs pointed to it being a game that could become mainstream and sell 6-8 million units. Look at what they did with Borderlands. Look what Bethesda did with Skyrim. You have to take risks if you’re in the gaming industry and this was as good a one as you generally can find. Anyone who suggests he or she knew that it would fail is the standard naysayer. It’s super easy to predict failure, because most projects actually do fail. That doesn’t make you Nostradamus.
The issue is that BioShock Infinite didn’t “fail” so much as it just didn’t live up to the unrealistic sales target it needed to hit for the investors.
Yeah, that was my point. An expensive studio in an expensive state took a long time to put out its game. That made it look bad in comparison to a cheaper studio in a cheaper state that put out a more successful sequel faster. (Never mind Gearbox’s other issues like Colonial Marines, they screwed Sega not 2K). Remember, they also closed 2K Marin after The Bureau, which suffered direction changes and production delays and disappointed in sales.
The corporate guys are always going to love the cheaper faster more revenue. That’s just corporations.
I wonder if Gearbox will be asked to do a BioShock game?
Anyway, I hope the former employees of Turbine and Irrational find themselves on their feet soon.
You mean so they can use the money they get for the new Bioshock game to fund borderlands 3 instead?
No thanks.
The increasingly transitory nature of the gaming industry is sad to see, especially for developers who are are older who may have more difficulty in finding new gigs or uprooting their lives.
From a consumer’s perspective, I actually prefer Ken Levine and crew moving onto smaller games that they’re passionate about. Many of the most interesting, innovative games are now coming from smaller studios pursuing passion projects, thanks to digital distribution channels, additional funding options, varied payment models.
I actually think that the AAA games we’re getting from major publishers have been of relatively high quality (especially when compared to how Hollywood is doing), and some major developers like Bethesda Game Studios, Rockstar, Naughty Dog, etc. have been more creatively enabled than constrained by large budget – but for the most part budgets for games by major publishers are now so massive that creative risk-taking is difficult to justify, and sequel changes are often superficial – working on yet another Assassin’s Creed, BioShock, Halo, Call of Duty, Gears of War etc. just seems soul destroying, so it’s not surprising to see developers want to escape that rut.
I have so much more interest in passion projects like Divinity Original Sin, Kingdom Come Deliverance/Warhorse, Pillars of Eternity, Elite, Star Citizen, Don’t Starve, Papers Please, FTL, etc. than I have for most games from large publishers. I have bought zero (non-BioWare) games from EA in the past 10 years, and zero (non-Blizzard) Activision games in the past 10 years.
Word for word, I couldn’t agree more.
I think at the AAA big-budget level, proper project management is essential to the process. Failures in project management (i.e., significant gameplay / asset changes late in the process) lead to failures to meet revenue targets. Just about every game with a “troubled” development process (DNF, A:CM, XCOM) ends up a commercial failure (yes, even Psychonauts, which had the benefit of actually being good). Whereas a focused project from a well-established studio can succeed by executing the vision it had from the beginning and polishing the core gameplay throughout the process, not just in a hurried rush at the end.
Reading the LucasArts post-mortem made me realize how much bad (or mercurial in LA’s case) management & planning can kill an otherwise viable project.
I’d like to think that Mr. Levine is going to take this opportunity to attempt to deliver on what his original intent for Bioshock was-- to popularize the action/FPS/RPG hybridization of the System Shock games. Instead it was left to the likes of Oblivion, Fallout 3, Human Revolution, etc to take up that challenge, proving that well-made FPS/RPGs, even somewhat complex ones, can be both popular and profitable on consoles. So now that it’s proven, perhaps we’ll finally see a *Shock game worthy of the name.
Longer piece over at Gama: "Irrational Games, journalism, and airing dirty laundry "
The game was also supposed to have a Vita version, if you remember. Where did that go? Someone Else Who Works In The Industry told me that a lot of the Infinite content that was polished and then never implemented became the Burial at Sea DLC. Someone Who Works In The Industry told me that thanks to Ken Levine’s breadth of endless ideas and philosophy of fearlessness and un-planning, Infinite grew far, far over its budget and far, far beyond its scope.
What I remember about meeting Wells and Gerritsen is that they liked to talk far less than Ken did. They looked to me very much like they wanted to be getting back to work. It’s not that they weren’t nice to me, they just seemed restless. I felt self-conscious, like I was imposing on their time. A year after I met them, Gerritsen and Wells left Irrational. Right after that, Epic heavyweight production director Rod Fergusson joined the studio, ostensibly to replace Gerritsen. People In The Industry said someone like Fergusson had to come in and pull the many-headed Irrational ouroboros into line, else Infinite would never ship.
Foreshadowing
The following spring, Levine was telling the media that his disinterest in traditional process meant his team just had to crunch. Around the same time, Nate Wells, who had become Naughty Dog’s art director, marveled to the press about the ego-free process he enjoyed with The Last of Us’ team.
That was when I started to hear a lot from People In The Industry about how people at the studio were unhappy at work. I heard from People in the Industry that turnover at Irrational was very high. More than one Person in the Industry told me that almost no-one who made original BioShock stayed on to make Infinite. At the time, a year out from shipping, Someone Who Worked There told me they believed the studio would close if Infinite didn’t sell very, very well.
Someone Else Close To The Situation told me the same thing yesterday. That everyone in the studio probably knew.
I didn’t care if they showed actual gameplay or not. I am an unabashed Ken Levine and Bioshock fanboy. But after seeing those ads I actually didn’t want to play because it looked so lame, especially the short spot with the guy falling. Now that is bad advertising. If you’re going to spend $100 million on ads and try for a home run, you’d better make a Cosmos like trailer to get people excited about your game. Marketing failed this game in a big way.
I don’t know if there’s much else marketing could’ve done to increase sales. I think anyone who was interested in BioShock was going to buy BioShock Infinite regardless of the ad, and I don’t think people that normally didn’t buy singleplayer shooters were going to be swayed.
Really, for the amount of money they wanted, a strictly singleplayer game was never going to get Take-Two the kind of sales they were projecting. They couldn’t pump out DLC fast enough to add recurring revenue, and MP got killed off - not that it would’ve been very popular anyway.
I guess what I’m saying is the failure of marketing was that they even spent that much to market it at all.
Yes that too.
Shawn Elliott (former Irrational level designer) responds to the Gamasutra piece.
https://twitter.com/ShawnElliott/status/436201392311894016
https://twitter.com/ShawnElliott/status/436200999108489216
One I can squash is the claim that Infinite content that was polished and then never implemented became Burial at Sea DLC." Categorically false
I think the only way this up-front vision-driven process really works is arguably on a franchise with an established engine and core gameplay. Creating the first Assassin’s Creed or Mass Effect or COD or Uncharted can’t work that way–it needs to be highly experimental and that means it needs to be either a light, agile, fairly unplanned process (rare in large companies, more common for indies) or a high-risk, expensive, probably money-losing venture intending to make its returns on the later franchise games built upon its foundation.
I’m not sure Infinite is similar enough to Bioshock to be called part of the franchise (I have barely played either game); it seems more like a new project. That means it’s going to be expensive and they’re almost inevitably going to start making assets and building levels way too early in the process. It doesn’t help (the bottom line anyway) that Levine has a fecund mind and probably a lot of charisma and confidence in communicating a vision, even when that vision means throwing out millions of dollars of past work.