ename144
Engaged Member
- Sep 20, 2018
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It's easy to say this, but I don't see a lot of support for that thesis. There are a number of popular games on this site with long development times, and no shortage of disregarded games with short development times. The only real example I can think of where a long development cycle crippled interest in a game required comically long pauses, and even that one's debatable since the game was also stuck in an endless series of remakes of old content - a phenomenon which I think has a much clearer impact on fan (dis)interest.But as Otto mentioned in his post, even quality games will suffer if you overdo the update intervall. H.H. Gossen and his law strike again in these cases. Diminishing returns.
And a year or more is too long even for quality games. The otakus might not care or think it just barely acceptable, but the playerbase beyond them does care for several reasons.
Anyway, I too look forward to play th new update when it comes out.
Obviously long development time is always going to be a negative when it comes to fan satisfaction. Still, if I had to rate it against other traits like dev/community interaction, transparency, story/character progression and general quality of the product, I'd put it at the bottom of the list every time. Interest in the game may hibernate during the long winter, but it will pop back good as new - as long as the eventual update delivers the goods. Granted, quality is very subjective, but then again it's not like we can calculate a specific development time that's "too long." It's all very nebulous when you start trying to assign cause and effect.
And personally, I don't even think it really matters. If TD & GIL think they'll deliver a better product by splitting the work up into smaller chunks, I'd say that's more than sufficient reason to support the split. Trying to turn short dev cycles into some sort of global truism is just muddying the water. IMHO, of course.
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