T w e n t y S i d e d
This post is a follow up to “Unrest: An Honest Postmortem of a Kickstarter Success.”
I really don't know how it is for your big studio-renting, T-shirt-printing, San Francisc-ing game development studios when their magnum opus wraps. I imagine many of them do schedule a few months to tear through feedback, patch, run tech support, and wrangle the convention circuit. But barring an ongoing investment, like an MMO or MOBA, that's all sideline stuff. You can bet in ninety-nine out of a hundred cases the development leads get together right away, stick another figurative sheet of paper in the typewriter, and start on the next project.
Part of this is a matter of principle. You're only as good as your last good title, and dwelling on success or failure doesn’t help your studio. But there's a much more far-reaching practical side to it than that, and it's one you don't appreciate until you try to survive as a developer: it’s the fact that every month not working on a game is a catastrophic and potentially fatal waste of your precious resources.
You can embrace it or hate it, but the formula is simple: games are profit, profit is time, time is games. Having a smash hit release isn't an “and then they lived happily ever after” success story. It's the equivalent of winning extra time by executing a flawless lap in a beat-the-clock racing game. You've won a buffer–a grace period to work on your next project. And that's if your game's successful. If it isn’t, then you’ve really got to hustle.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “A Pyrodactyl Postmortem Postmortem”
