Are game companies forward thinking enough about a product or are they far too interested in short term profits?

When I say game companies, I am referring more to those who market a game, rather than its developers. Often these companies sell more than games.

Do they diminish artist endeavor in favor of money?

It is very obvious to me that many if not most, do care more about getting a product out the door and recuperating their costs and making profits as soon as possible, and that many if not most games have suffered because of it.

The Game Marketing World seems to have this faulty notion, that a game has a use-by-date on it. This is despite places like GOG and a plethora of Abandoned Games sites out there ... not to mention the Retro movements always occurring.

Most game development seems to be rushed these days, and we are all impacted by it in numerous ways, from the bugs that need patching and don't always get fully fixed, to poorly thought through concepts, to bad game play and dull boring or pointless story lines, etc, etc.

Why they do this has always made shake my head at the stupidity of it.

There are far greater long term profits to be made.

What does it really matter, if a game takes so long to come out, that its graphics are no longer the latest state of the art ones? I call false requirement, and there are games out there, where the developer and marketers have stood steadfast together and released a very popular game, that lives on and on, despite what the critics might say about being old technology and so forth.

What matters is a good game, and how many enjoy it, and will pay for it, and whether it keeps continuing to give to users year after year, and continues to attract new users.

It is time these companies wised up and grew up and stopped being so selfish, and stop contributing to a diminished industry and a big pile of flawed or crappy games.

It is time to be fair to the consumers and developers alike.

Yes of course they are. Three simple examples will illustrate this:
Ea have a sweet sole ownership right to publish sport games ad-infinitum each year, same games, just reskins.
Beamdog have a sweet deal where they apply user mods to existing games and resell for double the price. Once they have been through the catalog they can go back and start again.
Paradox, rip every tiny bit out of a product and drip feed each tiny little bit over the course of years.

So, conclusive proof that game companies are looking forward towards their future profits, and I didn't even need to mention other companies which copy one of the above (COD for example), or MMO's, or micro-transactions or store based real money markets, or mod commercialisation, or clientwares intent on dragging you into captive markets, or intensive data capture and advertising, or streaming of games whereby the user has zero content their end...

Publishers don't care about the art of games at all. And developers are willing to make crap instead of art because publishers control the money and getting paid is the most important thing to developers too.

What you said in the OP is absolutely right. This is why ~99%+ of modern games are awful, and "AAA title" has become almost synonymous with "derivative garbage" (there are a few exceptions, but way more often than not, AAA games are trash).

Consumers in general are as much to blame as are the publishers and developers. Just look at the next Call of Duty game that is coming out. It has legions of fans who think it will be fresh & new & the best thing ever, even though it's nothing but the exact same old rehashed crap that has already been published hundreds of times.

Not all consumers are like that, but the majority are. They are happy to keep paying $60+ USD every year for yet another poor rehash of the same bad game that they've already bought in previous years more than 5 times.

Back in the good days of gaming, gamers wouldn't have put up with that crap, and publishers/developers who tried to do that would have gone bankrupt. That fear of going bankrupt was a strong disincentive to making crap. Today, the opposite is true. The best way to make huge profit is to make a game crappy.

They are surviving. Merely that. One would argue that videogames where always about money. (and L.O.L. at the notion that micro transactions are something new, removing them that was progression) For game companies games where always the means to a monetary end. Of course there is a expire date. Millions being invested and not giving enough in return is bad for business. Marketing is what is killing it. It is trying to sell the the keys to these fantastical fantasy lands, which in turn makes the public want it (because of course people pay good money for the keys to a land full of wonder, dragons and magic, who wouldn't?) but that world is far away from being finished or polished so we have the current situation. And then we arrive at the crux of the issue, the dichotomy: how will you keep making games that people like to play and then buy? That isn't unsolvable, but it is really sodding hard. Which brings us to the stalemate. Back to the beginning, they are surviving. Making the same thing for profit, because there are still people paying for it for whatever reason.

It is good to react against the treadmill approach but we just need to be careful not to just turn into a bunch of sodding cynical bastards that just tell people what they should or shouldn't do.

It is their bloody money and their magical circle of entertainment, either everyone jumps on board and change things for good or inevitably keep fighting against each other. Developers first and foremost. :)

There is a "use by" date, of sorts. Not that games are no longer playable after a set amount of time, but that the marketplace these days puts games on sale - and I mean very big discounts - shortly after release. I guess it's more of a "sell by" date, in that most games need to get as much payback as quickly as they can before big discounts greatly diminish the revenue per unit sold.

As the customer base, we have bought into it and created a lot of the problem. Why? Because - oh, look! Bright shiny objects really cheap!

Have you actually done a project feasibility study on the videogame market, or are you solely basing your opinion on your experience (and preferences) as a consumer?

Because I haven't, but I do work in the corporate software field and lemme tell ya: the gap between "what the client thinks Software Engineering is like" and "what Software Engineering is *actually* like" is unbelievably large. Feature requests needed "by yesterday", minor "so obvious" bugs coming up as result of patching huge, data-breaking ones before they break anything other than test data, time wasted debugging "oh, but Timmy in accounting thought 'Exit' meant 'Save and start processing', not 'close the program'" issues, and we're talking about contracts with many thousands of dollars on the line, not a meager <$60 a pop. Add in some basic risk and depreciation analysis, the hordes of "wow looks boring", "outdated as hell", "more weeaboo/retro/simplistic trash, pass" "too high, I'll wait for at least a 75% discount" and "eh, who cares, I'll keep playing Overwatch" present on every single user reviews site, and I really have a problem believing that endlessly delaying a game in order to quash even the most minor of bugs *then* sell it at a base price that wouldn't be enough for coffee and a muffin on Starbucks could result in *larger* profits for devs and publishers alike.

Obviously, many gamers don't care about any of that and just want to play something as "polished" as they (mistakenly) remember from the good ol' days. But then again, they're only risking $20-30 out of their pocket, $60 at worst scenario, *and* with the option of crying for a refund afterwards; not two years' worth of salary and the livelihood of their families, with bankrupcy their only recourse in case of failure.

But that doesn't matter, because big discounts also greatly increase the number of units sold, and therefore they also increase the amount of revenue. Big discounts, or better yet, low prices in the first place, are in everyone's best interest.

That's why, for example, Amazon is one of the biggest & most profitable companies on the planet.

*Adjusts glasses*

Um, actually, Amazon is not very profitable at all. It does have an amazing amount of cash flow and market share, but all the money it makes goes straight back into the company to fund its massive infrastructure. It's its size and ubiquity that drives its shares prices so high, but quarters with actual profits, that go back to the shareholders, those come less often than not.

Mmmm a lot of comments from all to respond to. I don't think anything you say, is about long term, just repeated short term over & over .... and steadily diminishing quality.

I am going to rephrase what I said at the start of my first post a little, because what you say is true of most industries ... they just sell a product and move onto the next. That focus is purely on making money and nothing else ... so a very limited form of forward thinking. A bit like the banks who gave us the Financial Crisis a few years back and caused a recession for many. I think you have to be careful using the term 'willing'. Most developers I find, are often between a rock and a hard place and do indeed need to put bread on the table. You don't have to look too far to find complaints from them though about the current state of affairs. And many games get part made and then dropped. You can't imagine that those who have put heart & soul into their creations are happy about that.

Many consumers, to some degree are indeed to blame, but there are many factors they are not in control of, that companies are. All they can do, is protest and spend money elsewhere, but that's a hard ask, for fans especially.

Of course they are about money, more and more as time goes by. There was a time when they were also about other things, and a true artist always cares for more than just money. However, the artist/creator is not usually calling the shots and needs to put bread on the table, so they are forced to do things that doesn't please their artistic desires. I think we are talking about two different things here. You are talking about making huge profits in a short amount of time. There is indeed an expiry date for that. However the game lives on afterward, still selling years later in many cases. The original Quake for instance, is a game that will never die, and is still making profit 20 years later.

I think it wrong to dismiss the profits made on sale as being minor. I think it more a case of impatience and wanting to recuperate expenditure as soon as possible, especially if bad reviews might occur. There are many cases of games being considered a failure, because they don't make enough profit in that expiry window, to only have their status reviewed months if not years later, to be a resounding success .... many developers who were involved having been dropped by then, alas.

What comes a round goes around.

It must be mentioned, that not all companies are so faithless, and do indeed allow enough time for decent development, and reap the rewards for doing so.

As customers, many of us are indeed impatient, gullible, foolish and just too well off sometimes .... and not forward enough thinking ourselves.

I'll take it that your responses were to me. No I haven't, and I don't believe in them. I think they are always based on false presumptions and misunderstandings and not enough data, and are usually based in a heavy bias. Look, I know a lot of money is on the line, but hey it is not usually some small endeavor, and one needs to be realistic about the time needed, and not just fit it into some marketing schedule. If they are that worried, they shouldn't finance this type of thing in the first place.

I never said anything about endlessly delaying development of a game, but from what I know, it is usually down to changes requested by the marketing/financiers that causes many delays ... sometimes a change of ownership.

Others have proved you can indeed bring a game out late, and if well done, still reap plenty of profits, even though it gets criticized for not being the latest state of art game. The problem though, is you need to be smart about what you charge. Charge too much, and it does indeed get compared to others in the same price range, which may be detrimental on the flashiness front. But hey, a good game always sells well, with enough backing or time. That's happening already with the current model, so it seems obvious to me, that a different approach needs to occur. That things need to be looked at more long term ... and that is not just in the game industry.

At the moment, everything is just too cutthroat, and quantity not quality is the current regime.

I know what you're talking about, but as I've said companies (as in the big publishers) aren't making bank always, they are merely surviving, not huuuuuuge profits, not doooooowwwn profits, just stability.

I don't think that the market and/or their approach is healthy, I'm saying it is harder to make about something else given the current situation.

But that is why they need to change their model.

And while we are talking about many game companies, many are owned by big ones, like Warner, who are doing more than surviving, but who don't care much beyond the mighty dollar in a very short term manner.

The money is there in the longer view, which is the model they need to move to.

It is the only way to break the current stalemate of the throwaway society.

It is a false dichotomy that a game has a use-by-date or that its value is diminished after the first month. The only reason the last seems that way, is because it was a false price to start off with, that doesn't reflect the real value, that is ongoing. So much is propaganda and falsity ... just like what gave the world the Financial Crisis. It is about overpaid managers who only care about one thing, and not thinking about the benefit to all of taking the longer term view.

They have gotta stop thinking Get-Rich-Quick and take on the realistic view.