Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Some bad games are beyond redemption. That’s clearly what Sony thought earlier this month when it shut down its big new shooter, Concord. It had been in production for a reported eight years, but was pulled offline after just two weeks for one simple reason: nobody was playing it. Sony did have another choice, though. Sometimes developers stick with flops, trying to improve them in the hope that they will eventually come good.
Such redemption stories have become increasingly common lately and are unique to gaming — you may get a director’s cut of a film, or an extended album, but games are mutable in ways other media are not. They are regularly updated for years after launch, sometimes becoming fundamentally different in how they play. This alters the equation of a flop: so much time, money and effort has gone into a big game that developers might judge it’s worth investing more. They might be able to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear — it’s just a case of rearranging the pixels.
The poster child of gaming comebacks is No Man’s Sky, a space exploration title released by Hello Games in 2016. Before launch, the developers promised near-infinite worlds to explore. When it came out, however, players discovered that many of the features they had been promised were missing, and they abandoned the game in droves. Hello Games believed it could make it right, and has spent the best part of a decade on improvements. It keeps adding new features, polishing the graphics and tweaking systems to make the game more accessible. Painstakingly, it has earned back the trust of fans by making No Man’s Sky into the game it originally promised to be. Crucially, each of these updates was offered for free — the most recent one lets players go fishing on alien planets.
Another game that suffered from too much hype was Cyberpunk 2077, billed before its 2020 release as a thrilling sci-fi adventure featuring Keanu Reeves made by the creators of the beloved Witcher series. On launch, however, the game was unplayably glitchy, especially on consoles, and the backlash was harsh. Sony pulled the game from its digital storefronts and investors sued developer CD Projekt Red for causing the value of their stock in the company to plummet. But the developers knew they had the bones of a great game and kept working to fix it, overhauling progression systems, enemy behaviour and stamping out bugs. Last year’s Phantom Liberty expansion, starring Idris Elba, underlined how far the game has come since its disastrous launch.
In order to make a comeback work, developers must listen carefully to player communities. Games evolve according to player feedback, almost as if they’re made in collaboration with audiences. When the online role-playing game Final Fantasy XIV had a terrible launch in 2010, developer Square Enix took the unprecedented decision of taking the game offline and rebuilding it from scratch. It relaunched in 2013 as the far superior A Realm Reborn, and remains one of the most popular online RPGs today. Developers not only improve their games when they listen, they also earn the respect of their communities, whether it’s by adding more content to bulk up the pirate fantasy of Sea of Thieves, removing the controversial real-money auction house from Diablo 3 or even recasting the voice actor of a key character in Destiny.
Of course, sometimes developers make the bet and lose. Bioware’s high-profile 2019 shooter Anthem suffered a troubled development and launch, and the company committed to making it right. But despite new content, the audience never took to the project, and Bioware stopped adding gameplay in 2021. This year’s Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League was panned by critics and players on release in February and, while new content is still being released, it seems only a matter of time until the game’s life support is switched off.
How can developers assess whether a flop can be redeemed? Partly it depends on whether they believe the core ideas have the potential to be truly great — in the case of Concord, Sony clearly judged that they did not. It helps if it is a game that players, too, want to believe in — a concept that sells a fresh and alluring fantasy, rather than a belated attempt to join a crowded genre. Then there’s the hard work and diligence developers have to put in, adding improvements for free and communicating regularly with fans to regain their affection — in other words, treating the audience with respect. If all the pieces fall into place, like many a gaming hero, a game might be granted an extra life.
Read the full article here