I mean they were also pushing boundaries and inventing the open world genre back in the ps2 era and that didn't stop them from putting out a lot of other great content.
It's best for the people making the game as well. Steady income from a service is way more reliable and predictable than working on a game for years that may or not meet expectations.
Are you telling me they sold their souls to the Fevelo Devil?
A lot of publishers are living of this model right now. I have to hope there's a backlash against "funny money" at some point.
It's really a double edge sword, games keeping increasing in fidelity but it's costing so much more. Even in the first HD transition a bunch of studios had to close or move to mobile because of the costs/size of production of some games.
Each studio used to work on its own games, and now they all work on the same game a la Ubisoft.
Does Rockstar handle the majority of development in house a la Ubisoft, as opposed to outsourcing heavily like other AAA devs? Thanks.
This really isn't true. They could make more games if they hired competent project managers. One huge mistake a lot of people make is thinking that well made games take a long time to make. You can make any game in 2-3 years if you have a smooth development pipeline. That's how Ubisoft can begin development on AC: Odyssey in late 2015 and release a masterpiece of open world RPG design exactly 36 months later. There's this myth, for example, that Half-Life 2 took 6 years to make due to Valve's pursuit of perfection or some romantic nonsense like that. In reality it took six years to make because they spend 4 or so years or that flailing around like headless chickens, with a bunch of disconnected ideas in search of agame. Rockstar's development process is woefully inefficient. They have alarming scoping problems. And look at where it got them. Max Payne 3 is a cool game, but it's a disjointed mess glued together with prerendered cutscenes. GTA V was in development for five years (more if you count the enhanced PS4/XBO/PC version) and has an open world largely devoid of meaningful content, with simplistic GTA 3-style missions pasted on top of it, paired with a woefully janky MMO-lite GTA Online. Watch_Dogs 2 was released in 2016, and it trounced GTA V's world design. Where GTA V is an empty shell, WD2 is a living breathing world full of interesting content to experience. And it was made in 2-3 years. Because it was a well managed project. A game made by people who didn't spend their time pretending to work for hours on end in order to satisfy Rockstar's insane corporate culture.
