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Gabe Newell on why game delays are okay: 'Late is just for a little while. Suck is forever.'
(www.pcgamer.com)
this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2023
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Fantastic advice, as a guideline in a vacuum.
No game should be shipped broken, but sometimes concessions are a reality.
Even Half-Life had to make concessions. Xen is infamously less polished and fine tuned than the rest of the game. Valve didn’t have infinite resources and time to keep tinkering. Would the game have been better? Maybe. But time is money, and Half-Life already ended up selling huge. Would taking time to fine tune Xen have boosted sales? Were people in the 90s avoiding the game because of Xen? I don’t think so.
The profits from Half Life allowed Valve to make more games and be successful. Is it worth trading off a more fine tuned Xen in order to have Valve exist as we know it today?
In the documentary, they actually expand on that, they delayed the core game until the story and levels worked out and specially left Xen to the last as if they were not having fun before, they would have given up
I know. Perhaps I was not being clear in my point.
Xen was made last, and Valve never could quite get it to the same quality as the rest of the game.
If we follow the logic, which many commenters have, that “games should only be released 100% finished” then Half-Life should have been delayed indefinitely until Xen was as polished as the rest of the game.
I was making the point that Xen is an example of Valve deciding part of their game is “good enough” and shipping it, rather than continually extending development.
There are realities of game development that even Valve isn’t immune to.