Gabe Newell on why game delays are okay: 'Late is just for a little while. Suck is forever.'

Halflife 3 is going to be amazing you guys

Interesting spin on the "A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad"-quote.

Not sure why we're arguing this quote with the same two games over and over. Nms and cyberpunk are great games, but they're a rarity.

Game Dev crunch is a plague in th industry, we suffer as consumers who cop bad releases on release. The whole industry could learn from its roots and delay things for a better initial product.

Defending the current practice of redevelopment in post is almost consumer gaslighting.

suck is forever

I should call her

Sometimes late is forever too, Gabe.

I don't disagree that often an early release can really kill a game. I think that Fallout 76 would have done much better had it not gone out the door for a while, and I think that the poor quality at release really hurt reception; despite Bethesda putting a lot of post-release work into the game, a lot of people aren't going to go back and look at it. CDPR and Cyberpunk 2077 might have done better by spending more time or deciding to cut the scope earlier in development too. But, a few points:

• First, game dev is not free. The QA folks, the programmers, all that -- they are getting paid. Someone has to come up with money to pay for that. When someone says "it needs more time", they're also saying "someone needs to put more money in".

• Second, time is money. If I invest $1 and expect to get $2 back, when I get that $2 matters a lot. If it's in a year, that's a really good deal. If it's in 20 years (adjusting for inflation), that's a really bad deal -- you have a ton of lower-risk things than you could do in that time. Now, we generally aren't waiting 20 years, but it's true that each additional month until there is revenue does cut into the return. That's partly why game publishers like preorders -- it's not just because it transfers risk of the game sucking from them to the customers, but also because money sooner is worth more.

• Third, I think that there are also legitimate times when a game's development is mismanaged, and even if it makes the publisher the bad guy, sometimes they have to be in a position of saying "this is where we draw the line". Some games have dev processes that just go badly. Take, say, Star Citizen. I realize that there are still some people who are still convinced that Star Citizen is gonna meet all their dreams, but for the sake of discussion, let's assume that it isn't, that development on the game has been significantly mismanaged. There is no publisher in charge of the cash flow, no one party to say "This has blown way past many deadlines. You need to focus on cutting what needs to be cut and getting something out the door. No more pushing back deadlines and taking more cash; if the game does well, you can do DLC or a sequel."

EDIT: I think that in the case of Cities: Skylines 2, sure, you can probably improve things with dev time. But I also think that the developer probably could have legitimately looked at where things were and said "okay, we gotta start cutting/making tradeoffs" earlier in the process. Like, maybe it doesn't look as pretty to ship with reduced graphical defaults, but maybe that's just what should have been done. Speaking for myself, I don't care that much about ground-level views or simulated individuals in a city-builder game, and that's a lot of where they ran into problems -- they're spending a lot of resources and taking on a lot of risk for something that I just don't think is all that core to a city-builder game. I think that a lot of the development effort and problems could have been avoided had the developer decided earlier-on that they didn't need to have the flashiest city sim ever.

Sometimes a portion of the game just isn't done and you might be better-off without it. Bungie has had developers comment that maybe they shouldn't have shipped with The Library level in Halo. My understanding is that some of the reason that different portions of the level look similar is that originally, the level was intended to be more open, and they couldn't make it perform acceptably that way and had to close off areas from each other. I didn't dislike as much as some other people, but maybe it would have been better not to ship it, or to significantly reduce the scope of the level.

I mean, given an infinite amount of dev time and resources, and competent project management, you can fix just about everything. Some dev timelines are unrealistic, and sometimes a game can be greatly-improved with a relatively-small amount of time. My point is that sometimes the answer is that you gotta cut, gotta start cutting earlier, and then rely on a solid release and putting whatever else you wanted to do into DLC or maybe a sequel.

I won't lie: That's the kind of talk that really makes me wish Valve would quit playing around with Steam and weird hardware experiments, and go back to making new games.

I don't agree at all. There's one Valve and Steam. If it's not Valve, it's gonna be Microsoft or someone, and I'd much rather have Valve handling the PC game storefront than Microsoft. There are lots of game developers and publishers out there that could develop a game competently, but not many in Valve's position.

This is true, but gamers are so impatient. I am in early access with my Virtual Reality Theme Park and have been busting it for 3 years as a solo dev, and of course it is not a full Theme Park yet. What does exist has put me into the top 10 on the Meta Quest App Lab store, but I get bounced out of the top 10 now and then as I will get 3* saying new rides are not coming fast enough. People are so impatient just like shareholders.

Game of Thrones agrees with him.

Duke nukem forever says hi

Suck is forever

"Hard disagree." -- person who played FFXIV before the realm got reborn

Obviously CS2 has sucked for a while and is gonna suck forever...

I dont think any creative would disagree shareholders and useless management however

Yeah, but there's only so much delays can fix. Sometimes suck is sticky.

There's only so much delaying can help a badly designed game, delaying only really helps those games that need that extra polish and likely won't be receiving it afterwards.

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?

Definitely a "change some words around" from Miyamoto, whom this is usually attributed to.

Why don't they just not bother with a release date and release it when the game is 100% ready

I will wait for Silksong like a good little boi, if it ends up as good as the original.

Mighty GabeN is getting pretty deep into his wizard years, I best prepare myself for his passing.

Okay, so there's game delays that actually have helped some games. Then there's games that sit on Early Access for what seems like forever, wondering what the fuck are they doing, like 7 Days to Die.

I like and respect games that, take their time because they want a certain vision of a game to work itself out as intended. I don't like and respect games that need to rush for the holidays or need to rush for company appeasement.

Gabe starts looking like Game-Gandalf more every day

And a canceled game is never bad

It's just not true anymore, especially with Steam. If a game releases in a sucky, broken state where more development time was definitely needed, nowadays the game companies will often just fix those games over time.

Okay but Gabe, you're looking like a grandpa nowadays. Maybe you're waiting just a little too long.

Suck is forever.

Unless you're No Man's Sky? Or Cyberpunk? Like games have been getting patches and updates for a long time, sometimes they get better, sometimes they get worse. Maybe he means your reputation as a developer and as a publisher is forever tarnished no matter how well you patch up the game post-launch.

In the days of Half Life 1? Yeah, it wasn't really feasible to patch games after they got printed on discs and left the warehouse.

Sounds like he stole that from Nintendo.

Ironically, this was contadicted in the same documentary by the Half-Life devs when they were talking about Xen and how they were aware that it kinda sucked but the deadline was coming up…

When you can literally change the entire game over time with updates to be something entirely different from what it was: Suck isn't forever. But neither is good.

Even the perceptions don't necessarily stay forever. Look at NMS.

Is that why they still have yet to make hl3 TF3 or update TF2 give portal 2 additional support

HL2 EP3 any day now boyz.

I also liked 'the narcissistic injury of the level ignoring me' as an excuse for unrealistic hit decals.

I didn't care for his 'so what?' attitude about someone pointing out they were unrealistic - because the game's supposed to be immersive. If you want an effect and the excuse doesn't fit, find a different excuse. What else would justify the mechanic you're trying to convey?

Preach Gaben!

This is why Half-Life 3 is gonna be so good, you guys.

Or anyway, we'll get to test whether this is true.

But he said that in the context of releasing Half Life 1, back when there was no way to patch a game after release. This isn't the case anymore and it's been proven many times that games can come back from sucking.

Praise be unto papa Gaben.

suck is forever

Why is the consumer just expected to roll over and take it when a game sucks instead of the responsibility being on the publisher to release updates until the game resembles what was originally advertised? Games aren't on ROM cartridges anymore, you can still improve the game after it's released.

Look, No Man's Sky set the precedent for what you're supposed to do when your game sucks at launch. And we should expect nothing less from game studios with ten times the person-power and money.

🙄

Can't stand this Miyamoto quote. Not only it's contentious at best (think of all the terrible games the kept getting delayed), it's factually untrue since the mid to late 2000s when online patching for games became common practice across the industry.

I would like to hear the Gabe Newell on why steam promotes gambling to kids

I loved Half-Life and played through it several times to get all the details. However, watching the 25 year anniversary about it is about as boring as watching the anecdotes from some old rock band describing their amplifier setup in the 1970s. I's interesting in some technical historical way, but it also seems soo out of touch with what's happening today. These guys aren't going to put out a new banger.