„Games made in 2 years are more exciting than games made in 8 years.” According to indie game dev, the belief that time defines the project's quality is wrong
Strange Scaffold studio head Xalavier Nelson Jr. believes that, paradoxically, games developed over two years are „more exciting” than those that have taken much longer to make.
Xalavier Nelson Jr., the founder and head of the indie studio Strange Scaffold (El Paso, Elsewhere, I Am Your Beast, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown), shared an interesting opinion about how the length of the development process affects the quality of a game.
In a chat with GamesRadar+, the dev who has worked on over 100 games in the last 9 years admitted that he believes it's a misconception that longer development time means higher quality in the final game.
Nelson didn't want to give specific cases, but he emphasized that "we have plenty of examples of games that were developed for a decade, if not more, and did not hit."
Continuing on, he admitted that the industry has seen many stories where "people were trying to figure out what game they were trying to make for three or four years, even, and then had a year left to pull together that thing."
Next, Nelson explained why, in his opinion, a game created in a much shorter time is a much more exciting project than one that has been developed for a very long time:
Now, when I see a game was made in two years, it makes me usually more excited about the two-year game, because it suggests that someone somewhere knew what they were doing and focused on making that with the team - admitted the developer.
Nelson noticed that in the case of games with an 8-year production cycle, it often turns out that "six years of that was people wandering in a no man's land while some guy would come in and radically change the game because he played something really cool."
Nelson's observations might be a bit bold for some, but it's hard to deny that he's got a point. The global game development industry is increasingly witnessing situations where inconspicuous projects gain popularity, while long-standing mega-games with inflated budgets can only dream of.
What's more, the founder of Strange Scaffold studio's words align with reports about publishers blindly following trends and, as a result, changing the game concept halfway through the development process. The industry was criticized for this by, among others, the publisher of Manor Lords and the creative director of Helldivers 2, who encouraged devs to take risks (he was certainly not the only one).
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