Good afternoon, everyone. So, I’m soo way far behind on this thread, I don’t think I can go back to where I’d last posted from and pick up from there. So I’m going to start from the most recent and work backwards instead. Apologies to anyone who gets skipped in this process… I’m genuinely not ignoring anyone’s posts. But logistically, I can’t go back 20 pages and get through everything, and I promised my wife I wouldn’t spend more than an hour doing this today, so here we go:
The investment required not to alienate the audience, to turn away swathes of gamers, spread bad word of mouth and to simply have a healthy playerbase is a small price to pay compared to the profits this would’ve brought.
The advantage of multiplatform development is you can sell to significantly more consumers for a marginal increase in budget. The disadvantage is that development gets significantly more complex as you’ve got multiple moving targets to hit (usually in the same amount of time), and the end result on all platforms can suffer by variable amounts, depending on the situation.
The cost/benefit analysis on which is better is what high level publishing guys get paid major money to think about, when they’re deciding how to spend their tens of millions of dollars on development.
Generally, developers do the best they can with what they get when those decisions are handed down from on high.
Not sure if I’m adding anything to the conversation here, other than stating the obvious. Maybe this “going backwards” thing isn’t so great after all 
I guess if I have one question it’s what is SD going to do different during the development of its next game?
I can’t tell you much right now, other than to say we definitely want to change the paradigm I just talked about above.
Point at Valve and show how they can make a game generate retail sales for years if it’s supported effectively and not murdered with paid DLC.
Yes, look at Valve games. TF2 was released in 2008 and has had over 200+ updates, all free. Not to mention they still update it!
Believe me, EVERYONE would like to work like Valve (and Blizzard), but no developers (and very few publishers) have the freedom to pour endless amounts of money into a project and keep working on it until it is truly and completely “done”, let alone continue to develop costly additional content without guaranteed revenue streams (indi’s would go out of business, and publicly held publishers would get ripped apart by their shareholders who always focus on the short game). It’s definitely a dream of most developers to work this way, though, us included…
And perhaps more opinion here, but, never compromise core gameplay principles over perceived player crack like Customisation, Ranks, Unlocks etc
For some players, these are core gameplay principles (look how many knocks Brink got in press reviews for not having enough grind. It’s one of the most common mainstream criticisms of Brink, in fact: “I can make level 10 in under 10 hours? WTF!? Where’s my 50 hour grind?!”).
So the question is, who’s principles do you compromise on? Who do you target if you want to guarantee sales success and not go out of business? And if you choose to target the smaller group, the niche, instead of the broad player base, can you manage costs and stay alive?
These are the sorts of things we’re talking about long and hard here at Splash. Hopefully before too long, I’ll be able to come back here and give you our answers, and hopefully you’ll be intrigued…
You know who created and sold that IP to Zenimax? Splash Damage. They were not some contract monkey developer in this deal. Sure they may have needed the financial support but it doesn’t mean they couldn’t negotiate say, control over mod tools, as part of a deal. Seems from the “it’s not up to us” response that the matter wasn’t ever even discussed as part of the contract.
I get the impression from this (and from some other posts in the past) that you guys think we were in a strong position to negotiate with publishers after the release of ETQW. Sure, it was a critical hit, and it sold decently for PC numbers (especially considering the month it launched), but releasing the SDK? The post launch fixes? That didn’t come cheap. I’m not sure why you’d think we were in a position of strength when it came time to sign a post ETQW deal…
both companies want to be successful, both want to make money and both want to deliver excellent products.
I think it’s fair to say that both companies have different goals and measures of success of a commercial product, based on the needs of their overall business strategies. But that’s perfectly normal and to be expected…
Counter strike as a whole is too competitive for me and my friends, Brink is what we will be sticking with so 
The problem I am having is going back to games without SMART just feels wrong
I’m ashamed(proud?) to say I put ~150 hours into Brink in the first 2 weeks. I didn’t get much work done that fortnigh
Thanks guys!
If that has class based objective modes alongside all the stuff Valve is known for SD is going to have a very tough time being relevant on any platform.
A lot of multiplayer FPSs are starting to do objective based modes. Me, I just look at that as more of an opportunity to play the kind of gaming that we think is so great.
SD’s decision to sign a contract, accept funds and develop a game for a publisher is theirs.
Yes, we could instead opt to not sign the contract, and then quickly go out of business when we can’t make monthly payroll, but not first without going through a long and painful layoff process, like the vast majority of independent studios out there…
Sorry for the unduly snarky answer, but honestly, those are the kinds of decisions you have to make when you’ve got a company with employees and families depending on you making the right choices to secure their futures. Of course, we make these decisions trying to produce the best game we can as well, because if we lose passion for making games, then believe me, there’s a lot more easy ways to make a paycheck. So as long as we still love making games, we’ll keep trying to balance the needs of business and the needs of gameplay.
As such they should be ensuring such contracts work for their best interests beyond paying the bills. Simple things like being able to release a modkit
There’s nothing simple about that. It’s a SIGNIFICANT expenditure of funds for us to do this ourselves. We’d like to, but should we, for instance, lay some people off so their lack of salaries would cover the costs of SDK development? Is that what you’d suggest we do, for instance?
What an interesting place to jump into the conversation. Back to page 34 now
Things take time. It would be awesome if they would happen faster or if they had come at release. Unfortunately I think they’re probably working as hard and as fast as possible on everything, but maybe not in the order we all might like. Ex: Continue to tweak and fix weapons over DLC. Can’t say I don’t see the reasoning behind that.
Nephandy’s nailed it. Things are complex, it’s all a delicate balancing act, and we had to get the DLC done first and foremost because we had contractual obligations that we had to meet, for reasons that should be clear based on my points above.
But we are working on weapons tweaking right now. In fact, I believe Smooth has been talking to you guys about it a bit in another thread. Believe me, I would love nothing more than to just make some quick spread tweaks and blast it out to you guys as fast as possible, but that path will likely do more harm than good, because we would inevitably break something. For instance, in one of our internal playtests the other day, some fairly minor tweaks to one AR (the Rhett, i think) unexpectedly turned it into an instant death laser ray that destroyed everyone, but only in certain combinations with various things. If we had blithely rolled that out, it would only sow more confusion and discord. Believe me, as bad as you think it is now, it could be worse, so we have to tread carefully, measure twice, and cut once.
So we’re working on weapon tweaks as fast as we can, and will be getting you guys more involved with the direction of that shortly (hopefully some announcements on that next week, now that DLC is out of the pipe).
Also, for the record, the netvars are only a system that works on consoles, not PC, due to services that MS and PSN provide to developers (mini data clouds, basically). For tweaks and updates to PC, we have to basically release minor patches. Of course, patches on PC are much less painful (don’t have to go through an expensive vetting process by the platform holder), but they are unfortunately a bit more complex than just changing some numbers and hitting the upload button.
And the reason it took so long to get the spawn timers tweaked was because post shipping, we discovered that there were some bugs with the netvars system that had to be fixed in code. So those code updates had to get tested and tested and tested, which took time. We adjusted the timers as fast as we could, considering all the contractual work we had to get done first…
So it’ll probably just lie there, forgotten, until one day when i’m tidying up, it’ll be thrown into a garbage bag
Sorry to hear that, but in the meantime, we’ll still continue to do all we can to improve the game for those who want to stay with us. Sorry you won’t be one of them.
We could turn it around. Is there anything you would want to know from the community?
The main thing we’re focusing on right now, with DLC done, is weapon spread adjustments. It’s unfortunately a very small group of guys who are working on it, but they’re doing their best, and are trying to get the game closer to player expectations. So that’s our focus, and if it’s your guys too, that can only help.
Honestly, anyone who’s relatively close to London and has the technical knowhow, and wants to make a day of it, come down to our offices and volunteer some time to help us tweak numbers!
I want to know why they are doing weapon tweaks again. Unless they’re going to reduce the spread again so we can actually have skill baised firefights, I really don’t want another tweak.
That’s what we’re working on presently…
Page 33!
Rahdo if you could comment any further on changes to spread/dmg you guys are testing out while you’re on this weekend that would be awesome.
All I can say is 1) what I’ve already said above about this, an d2) I’m trying to get approval on a system in place where we can start engaging you guys in a MUCH more direct and frank discussion about this stuff (I’m talking about real numbers) than we’ve done in the past.
More as I know it…
Lots of us on this forum offered to help them test and create BRINK, we told them years before the game came out what the gunplay needed to feel like and what things they needed to do, yet they didn’t listen
All I can say is that we did listen, we just weren’t always in a position where we could do something about it, because of a host of issues and situations, some of which are still prevalent today. And we haven’t stopped listening yet, and we haven’t stopped trying to improve things, but the situation is complicated, there’s a lot of moving parts (both in the game and around the game), and we’re progressing as best we can under the circumstances.
how is your back?
Thanks for asking, good at the moment. I’m clearly (in the immortal words of Danny Glover) getting too old for this ****
Okay, time to take the beagles for a walk. First time it’s been sunny all week, gotta get out there before it starts raining again!
