“There are people in all of these studios who are incredibly good at what they do,” Stuffed Wombat says. On one hand you have an overambitious publisher promising an impossible project to its audience while hiding the limitations and realities of said product from them on the other hand you have a sea of coddled consumers intent on harassing developers who worked crushing overtime hours to reach impossible publishing deadlines. The highly publicized launch of Cyberpunk 2077 feels like the inevitable result of the video game industry’s constant pursuit of growth reaching a breaking point. For developers who are tasked with always doing “more” on impossible deadlines, the conditions have been much more dire. “If you work a job or, like, have stuff to do in our life, the next one is going to come out before you’re fucking done,” says Stuffed Wombat.Īnd that’s just from a consumer perspective.
Popular franchises like Ubisoft’s Assassin's Creed or Activision’s Call of Duty have turned once singular properties into regular products stuffed with hours of unmemorable content. “You have 2,000 ideas, and you try them out, and then you remove 90 percent of them.”įor many gamers, keeping up with the latest AAA games-never mind finishing them-has become an exercise in tedium.
“It was a lot of cutting stuff,” he said.
