Developers at 343 Industries, makers of Halo 5: Guardians

I know the man who runs Ubisoft, but don’t ask me who the creative director of Assassin’s Creed Syndicate is. Black Ops 3 just made $550 million in 3 days, but does anyone know (or care) about the people who made it? Game developers spend years working on multi-million dollars games that rake in billions of dollars and we have absolutely no idea who they are. More surprising than that, we don’t really understand how they do what they do and the economic responsibilities they bear. Failed game launches combined with an unstoppable marketing machine have damaged the possibility of genuine conversation between developers and their audience.

Gamers search for ulterior motives at every turn. Single-player DLC? Content that was cut from the disc! Season pass? MORE CUT CONTENT! Halo 5: Guardian Forge Maps? Lazy developers had 3 years and still can’t make real maps! The needs of development and publishing teams is a mystery. This wouldn’t be such a problem if it weren’t for 2 things: Price and Performance. Games are expensive and consumers spend more time evaluating the “value per dollar” than they do in other entertainment mediums. Performance is a concern because unlike other mediums, you interact with games, how they run is of high importance. Well, games are buggier than ever and $60 dollars doesn’t feel like it gets you all that much anymore — bless your heart Treyarch, there may be too much game in Black Ops 3. We may not know who developers are, but that doesn’t stop us from cursing them from our keyboards. We have proclaimed games art, but struggle to see their creators as anything but sleazy salesmen, and for no fault of their own.

Marketing Machine of Doom

The now aborted pre-order plans for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

Pre-Order exclusives, Day 1 DLC, REQ Packs, and Emotes, the gaming industry’s always looking to squeeze a little more out of your wallet. But is this greed or the financial realities of AAA game development? Someone has to pay for that Wasteland and all the things you want to do in it. The intricacies of AAA game development evades us. Dave Lang of Iron Galaxy Studios alluded to this on a recent episode of the Giant Bombcast. In a game with as many variables as Fallout 4 jankiness festers in the wasteland like radiation. QA testing is an arduous process for a game of this magnitude. Catching all the bugs in time for launch could very well be impossible or at least financially irresponsible. But how are we supposed to know that? Development struggles are never addressed or explained outside of superficial terms.

Batman: Arkham Knight, Rocksteady Games

Lang couldn’t even answer questions about the disastrous Arkham Knight PC port his team was in charge of. There are few opportunities for developers to keep it real with their audience, perhaps that’s why we appreciate developers like David Jaffe so much. Developers, tied up in NDAs, leave it up to an uninformed and disappointed group of players to form their own conclusions. The seedier parts of the community, the pitchfork-carrying trolls who are aroused by forum warfare, get to dictate the conversation around troubled releases. When developers finally emerge from the concussive aftermath of crunch-time, it’s too late. Damage Control is initiated.

Sometimes transparency isn’t enough. 343i has been incredibly forthcoming about the development of Halo 5: Guardians. The Sprint, their web-series documentary about the development of Halo 5 is a rare glimpse behind the curtains of the AAA game development. This level of transparency hasn’t prevented them from being torched by the community and accused of foul play.

Headlong in Halo 3, Halo 2 Anniversary, and Halo 5

But seriously, what is going on here? Halo 5 Forge maps are reminiscent of UE3 maps before the textures load in. How does a game with a budget assumed to be in the triple-digit millions launch with so few maps for their multiplayer offering? How does a game of this scale launch with so few playlists for multiplayer? We know multiplayer is important to them, they have their own internal Pro team! Is it a matter of resources being put into the new Warzone mode? Or maybe getting the game to run at 60fps ate up development resources? These things happen in parallel though, right? No one knows! Leave it up to the community to discern and this is what you get.