Oddworld creator Lorne Lanning believes publisher’s push out “incomplete” triple-A games just to please shareholders, without consideration for the hard work put in by developers and the experience of the player.
He was speaking after the announcement by DICE that the Battlefield 4: Naval Strike expansion for PC would be delayed due to an “issue” that needed to be resolved.
“I’d rather not make games than go f***ing be a slave for public companies who care more about their shareholders than they do about their customers,” said Lanning in an interview with VG24/7.
“Why did Battlefield 4 ship? You know that team was crying. You know that team knew that game wasn’t ready to go… “F**k that business. I don’t want to play with that business, because it was a losing business,” he said.
“You know that team f***ing spent a lot of sleepless nights building that s**t out to look as good and play as good… as they were intending it to be played. Someone made a decision that the shareholders are more important than the customer. And we see a lot of that. How do you blow that? How do you take that f***ing jewel and ship it with dirt all over it?”
Lanning recently spoke about his plans to launch a new Oddworld game if his latest creation New ‘n Tasty sold over 500,000 copies. He said the game, which will retail for just over R300, would look and play better than games that cost R650.00. “If this had a publisher, the price would be higher and they’d be calling it a triple-A,” he said.
Go for the money or give gamers the best experience possible – what should publishers be focused on? Let us know in the comments and forum.
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If you haven’t been gaming in the last 5+ years then you would surely disagree with a statement like that. And asking if they should go for the money or experience? if a game is good then the money will follow. the biggest marketing gimmick that publishers count on these days are hype and pre-order.
If we as gamers will wait a month before purchasing a game then we may see a decrease in weak games. And publishers push out games more than a teenager push out pimples. Look at the Assassins creed franchise. I get that number 3 had to come out that time to go with the whole end of war thing, but for the ok game it was , it had too many small bugs.
I do hope in the next few years publishers will grow a soul and just allow developers to produce decent games .