You may have seen a lot of video game news recently about projects that have been in development for a long time while still in preproduction getting cancelled. This is normal behavior for the current economic climate - things are cooling off and the big publishers are essentially cutting all projects that aren’t on track to ship within the next two years because they don’t have the money to keep paying for such long term bets. Many of these projects are said to be “doing well” or “coming along”, so why do these projects get killed if they’re so promising? As somebody who’s been on a couple of these projects (including recently), the view from the inside is often very different.

My studio was in a somewhat similar boat to many of these - we had one major money-making franchise at our studio that paid all of our bills and a small incubation [blue-ocean] project in preproduction (for several years) that studio execs hoped would be a new franchise we could start. All of the demos and video we saw looked absolutely amazing - the studio devs were super excited about it and most of the devs I spoke to wanted to join the team because of how awesome it looked.

This project was looking so promising that it got green lit for a [vertical slice] - the next step in the development process, where all of the separate demo and preproduction game systems get integrated into a single cohesive gameplay experience that’s representative of the whole. As such, the small team that was working on this project got additional resources (developers) to build that vertical slice. I was one of the developers tapped to join this team to help build things out. I wasn’t actually super enthused about this - the greater economic situation in the industry had already started to sour and I really would have preferred staying on the money making franchise for safety. I was also bit leery of the experimental project with its grand ambitions - the scope seemed like way too much for the number of people we had and the time we had to build it out.

Once I joined, it became clear to me that my concerns were validated. The project absolutely needed to switch gears from “make cool ideas” to “bring everything together and work towards this major goal”, but the team’s leadership was still very much in blue ocean mode. We chased down many cool new ideas, but the integration of everything lagged behind. For the kind of game we were building, we absolutely needed a well-established workflow and tool base to build enough content for players to engage with… and very little of that was even on the horizon - a large part of it was me personally pushing for it directly and personally because I had worked on the kind of game we were building in production and I knew that we needed those battle-tested tools and workflow.

Instead, we spent the first few months building another awesome set piece and cool one-off scenario that would look amazing in a demo. The set piece scenario was held together by shoe string and bubblegum but it mostly worked, was mostly playable, and it looked fantastic when it didn’t break. I did my part and built the stuff I was tasked with, but the kind of hacks and shortcuts we were forced to use made it very clear that we needed a reliable and systemic method of creating much more content much more quickly if we really wanted to build a real game out of it.

This is the curse of these kind of projects - most games that have been in preproduction for years are stuck in this “cool amazing demo” mode and have a really really hard time switching gears to “making the damn game” mode. They show great in demos and videos, igniting the imagination on what the game could be if/when everything comes together, but the actual coming together portion is one of the hardest parts of game development.

Almost a year after I joined the experimental project, I was reassigned back to the mothership game because the main franchise needed more people to get it to a shippable state and the overall industry economic situation had continued to turn sour. Internally, I was actually extremely relieved for myself, but I felt very sorry for the team I was leaving behind. A few months later, the experimental project was cancelled and the remaining team was let go in a situation very much like what happened to Perfect Dark, Everwild, the Zenimax MMOG, and all the other preproduction games that met their demise during the recent Microsoft culling.

This isn’t my first time (or even second time) on a promising project that failed trying to go from preproduction to production - the core problems have been very similar on multiple projects I’ve worked on. Dialing in the core gameplay, recognizing the need to shift gears, and then actually executing on that major change in team direction is one of the most difficult problems in game production. It’s difficult to do and there are innumerable buried and cancelled projects over the years that were unable to do it. I mourn for what could have been but I also understand that many of these dream projects just weren’t meant to be.

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