Let’s pretend that Bethesda is Ian Beale’s business.
No matter how passionate and fanatical we all are about wanting to play great games, and no matter how passionate Splash Damage may be about wanting to design and build great games, the bottom line of Beale’s business is to make as much money as quickly as possible.
Importantly, Beale controls Splash Damage’s end product because he pays all their wages and costs. So Beale is the Captain of the Splash Damage ship and its crew. His opinions matter more than all of the rest of his crew put together.
Splash Damage have undoubtedly put a lot of effort into the conception and design of Brink, probably long before Ian Beale saw it. However, the moment the game goes into production, Beale will butt in with his size 7 loafers and give lots of duff orders about where to cut costs, time, and money.
So the result is that Ian Beale wants to squeeze the production of the game until it bleeds, and the gradual erosion of a solid game begins. On one hand there is passion and desire from the developers; whereas on the other much larger and stronger hand is an objective money-orientated corporate slimeball.
It is clear money and time have been saved by insufficient testing of the game and the network code on a scale large enough to simulate Xbox Live. Moreover, it is beyond any doubt that the game has been released early with many features unusable.
Adding insult to injury Ian Beale then underpays spray-tanned Marketing personnel to over-hype the game and tell all manner of tall tales. This must be expected. Every business does it. For example, Listerine. I use it everyday but my breath still reeks of black-bean and burned rubber and my teeth look like small chunks of Caramac. Brink was never going to live up to its hype.
My conclusion is that Splash Damage has been coerced into taking a great initial game design and shaping it into a game that meets Ian Beale’s demands and doesn’t clash with his next power-lunch. We, the customers, listen faithfully to the marketing people and try hard to believe that this time they are telling the truth; using a poker analogy, we go ‘all-in’ and buy or pre-order the game without trying it first. Importantly, we cannot try it first. No demo.
CHA-CHING!! Nothing else matters, Ian’s money is made. He hit his targets. It is Splash Damage that now must fight for their reputation with their tail between their legs, do loads of extra work, and hope that some of their magic shines through Ian Beale’s greasy filter. Meanwhile, Ian goes for a spin in his brand new Carrera GT.
I cannot think of any other market like ours, the gaming market. No other industry has such blind faithful customers that are willing to endure such poor product standards. It really is analogous to drug addiction. We are the crackheads. The developers are the supertalented-innocent-but-wacky-bedroom-scientists trying to design a happy drug that gets us all as high as possible with no ill-side effects. But, most importantly of all, the Ian Beales are the elevated dealers high on their own money and power., who are cutting down the purity of the happy drug until we are left with a $68 dollar bum deal that doesn’t really get us high at all.
Music, games, movies. They are all an escape. We need them, badly. This world is mostly **** except for friends and family and home-life. But even they get boring and its time to escape. Are we trapped?
Who do we blame, ourselves, the developers, or Beale? Shall we revolt?
