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Why do developers never hit the deadline ?
Lumanil
Member Posts: 110
Its a mystery for me, why developers these days never manage it to hit the deadline they are announcing.
There are way to much games or patch releases, which are pushed back not even days, but weeks.
If i personally would have to tell a customer a release-date, i would do so with telling him a date thats about 2 weeks AFTER the actual deadline i'm trying to hit. So QA or whoever, would have enough time to fix things and make it on time.
No company today would have much problems filling this two weeks with work, if people yould actually make it on time. Developers could move on and start their next project or fix some minor bugs, which aren't important for releasing the game.
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Blizzard. Im sure the suits don't like hearing "Soon" too much and they have internal deadlines which they always fail to meet. Only when they are absolutely sure they are going to make a deadline do they announce one.
Since the first dev announced a release date, games in general have been missing them. It even happens to movies. MMO's are special though, as they take a lot more work and time, and have a much larger margin for error. A "small" mistake can cost a dev company months.
Maybe now. But WoW was delayed several times. If I remember correctly, Burning Crusade was as well. And god knows how long they have been working on Starcraft II....
Maybe MMO's should be a different story like any other games, but i wouldn't be a big problem to set their official deadlines even further. Small companies may have problems to "wait" one or two month before releasing a game after the internal deadline, but companies like Blizzard wouldn't have a problem with this.
I think the majority of customers wouldn't even have a problem, if a company would release their game faster than announced.
I would be pleased, if a company would release a game, i'm awaiting eagerly, a few days before they announced it.
Seems to be a strange race, wait to long and your engine, graphics, ideas become too dated, release too soon and you dont have enough content or balance or bugs squashed.
PR has to announce to get interest and investers interested, but delay to much and people move on or get sucked away by another release.
Simple fact: Even to gamedevelopers/gamecompany's this genre is very complex.
Now perhaps people might understand that regardless what our gaming wishes may be we need to understand how complex this genre is if even developers are not able to meet deadlines.
Also don't you think if you being honost that developers or gamecompany's will already have a form of 2 week before/after time but still due to the complexity of this genre it's hardly met.
This actualy should send a signal to gamers, instead we keep seeing that certain gamers still believe they know what is right, well if they truly know what was right I am sure plenty of new games would be developed by these players.
Of course I want games to be released on the orginal date they have set for it to release, but there is simply so much more to it that the common gamer hardly knows anything about. Esle he or she would indeed to it "right"
Because generally, developers don't make the deadlines. The investors or big wigs do. Even so, there is so much code in a game, ESPECIALLY a MMO, to cry about a 2-6month lapse in deadline is a bit childish. If it goes a year or more, then yeah.... that's kind of extreme.
But, you're crying about 2 weeks. Grow up. Just because games are common doesn't mean anything, they are one of the most sophisticated pieces of software computers run.
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Its pretty simple...Developers are unable to find the fabled Fortune Teller who can see every possible thing that can happen right down to a bug that comes up unexpectedly, a mass illness, power outages, hurricanes, blizzards, security issues, the internet crashing, the mail man being late, people quitting due to X number of reasons, people being Fired for X amount of reasons, and the list goes on.
The deadline is set with reasonable cushion but sometimes..crap happens. There's just so many things that can go wrong..dev's can't account for every single one of those. But regrettably there are MANY many things that could of been better accounted for that lead up to missed deadlines or horrible quality..bad Project Managers who simply put off alot of things till the last min thus forcing the staff to over work and burn out can account for not only huge quality problems but delays. Whats worse is the fact that sometimes companies hire project managers that have no idea about what they're managing so things that get put aside for later can at times be more and important then other things.
So not only do they need a Fortune Teller they need better communication between the Big Wigs and the Project Managers to come up with reasonable timelines that won't have the employees frying themselves for huge stretches but also produce a product with in a timely fashion that better suits everyone. So companies have it down to a science...many do not. Many still have the old fashioned EA style attitude of workers are just cogs in the wheel..use them till they break then get fresh blood.
I guess the explinations could go on forever...though honestly..I can live with missed deadlines as long as the Product in the end is good.