dumb question, but why is it that way. like why do most teams shoot for the moon, instead of starting from a more realistic scope?
I could easily list a thousand reasons, but here's a few:
- with the extremely competitive market, you need to be able to pitch a vision that even from a basic premise sounds like potentially investing 100-200 million USD so a "slightly better existing game" (which you can better scope for) isn't necessarily a very good pitch
- "new" and "unique" are things that people tend to want, but by definition mean that you don't exactly know how to achieve them
- the scoping process doesn't happen with the entire 200+ strong production team's input, but a few people (albeit experienced) trying to estimate how these potential other team members might make the game and how long certain parts might take
- there's a huge factor between being able to prove something (a game mechanic, combat loop, tech etc.) with a prototype, and making it in a production of hundreds of people and that tends to leave a lot of variance in estimations even when they are based on a tangible prototype (and prototypes can easily leave an impression that the task isn't as complicated as it is when it goes through the hands of different people in different time zones and being blocked by other people etc.)
- the markets shift and ultimately you will have new ideas or requests that by no means could have been thought of when doing the initial plan/scope
- even somewhat accurate scoping is a process that takes a lot of time, and yet there's always a limited amount of time before the studio needs to be able to commit staff to a project, and on other hand you probably don't have enough seniors to do this for multiple projects at the same time, so that you are prepared for pitches failing
- there's no set way to define and assess a "realistic scope" for an entire project, especially since we know that games made through iteration, and scoping iteration is just guesswork in the end
- you will not be able to know exactly who you have in the company, who you can hire in what time (you for example need to plan in that hiring a senior programmer can take anything from 1 to 9 months and for each hire this variance means a different outcome for the project) and tons of other staffing related reasons
- the industry is filled with creative people, and we often want to make great games, and we've tend to have learned that making great games means having an ambitious aim and trying to get there (and understanding that we might not be there, but even getting to space would be a great game worth making and worth investing to)
