7 Worst Practices of Publishers and Developers
Modern games are big projects with big budgets. And whenever money is involved, it's not hard to find various pathological practices, aimed to maximize profit at the lowest possible cost. Here are seven common problems that the industry suffers from.
Table of Contents
- 7 Worst Practices of Publishers and Developers
- Microtransactions are testing our vigilance
- Releasing unfinished games as complete
- Game as a service
- "Early Access" forever
- Who cares about the PC?
- A listed company – that sounds proud...
A listed company – that sounds proud...
We shall end with a more peculiar issue of gamedev, tough it may be specific to some countries more than others. It is related to the stock exchange. Poland, for example, ranks first in the world in terms of the number of game development companies listed on the stock exchange. In 2020, there were as many as 58. Although many of them operate in the mobile market, it has also become common practice to flood Steam with announcements of PC games that will probably never be created.
There's a long list of games on Steam, which always have the words "coming soon" or "TBA" given instead of a release date. Some of these cases are undoubtedly schemes that use internal, stock-exchange-related communications to talk to investors, creating a false narrative of success that's solely based on Steam wishlist numbers, and in extreme cases, on the number of copies sold, without specifying that most of them were purchases on huge discounts during sales. Compared to some of the above-mentioned problems, this may not have such a negative impact on the players, but it's certainly not a positive phenomenon as far as the entire industry is concerned, not to mention gullible investors.
Polish gamedev on the stock exchange
Of these 50+ companies, the most popular and largest is of course CD Projekt, but right behind it is the much less known Ten Square Games. It publishes mobile and browser games with the number of downloads reaching 300 million. The third goes to PlayWay, known for various simulators. Publishing a wide range of genres enables this company to operate several dozen smaller studios. Such a number is kind of securing, because the possible failures of some productions can be balanced with the successes of others.
