Hold To Reset

Building a new game, a new studio and a new life from the ground up

Alex Hutchinson’s project embarks on a round of mock reviews

During the PS2-to-PS3 transition, EA commissioned a study about Metacritic and its relationship to profitability. Everyone at the various studios was hopeful that it would prove that quality mattered enough to sales that we could use it to push for more time, or better budgets, or any number of things the dev teams had been asking for. The results were more nuanced. The study found that receiving an average review score above 80 had a massive influence, while getting above 90 generally made little difference to the sales achieved at 80+. The cost of pushing quality to that line, however, was often immense.

The impact of this was that while every publisher would prefer all their games to receive perfect review scores, they realised that a really good game was going to do most of the job for their bottom line. It also meant they became desperate to make sure the games they were making were going to clear this magical ‘80’ as soon as possible. Aware that while developers were experts on their game, they were far too close to give a reasonable assessment of their own work, publishers decided an external opinion was required. And so we found ourselves presenting the game to journalists or ex-devs, who would then sit down to play an alpha build, then blur their eyes, imagine what you could fix, what was still to be added and how the market would receive it. They would then write you a ‘review’, provide an approximate score and a list of all the big pros and cons.

It’s a nice idea, and could occasionally buy you breathing room on a project from terrified management who had sunk X million dollars into your project already, but the reality is much more challenging. Even if you’ve shipped many games, understanding the relationship between time, the team, the state of the project and its probable end state is ridiculously difficult. If you’re used to seeing finished games, it’s almost impossible.

So unless your game was an unmitigated trash fire, or basically finished and obviously

high-quality, the process often collapsed into a familiar shape. More than once we’ve been told that ‘we predict an average review score on Metacritic of between 75 and 85, depending on whether or not the developer addresses the issues listed below’. Often the issues are useful, but publishing execs would only look at the numbers, which always appeared to have been carefully chosen. Why? Well, if you give a score below 75, an alarm will sound at the publisher’s head office and all hell will descend on the devs while massive pressure will be applied on the mock reviewer to justify their decisions. These will be fought tooth and nail by said devs, because to lose this debate is to lose your funding. Meanwhile, if a mock review says you’ll hit above 85 and it doesn’t happen, then the publisher will never hire them again, believing them to be unrealistic or uncritical.

On Savage Planet, we are up to our second of these reviews, and thankfully we have not inherited a scathing takedown which would likely have kicked us into a spiral of selffulfilling failure, nor a summary frothing with praise which would have encouraged 505 to publish us tomorrow when we are far from finished. Ours was a list of things we knew, a reminder of some we had been pretending we didn’t need to fix but now realise we must, and a few holes we hadn’t spotted.

Often there are suggestions attached in terms of what they would like to see, but I usually ask the producers to strip those out and just give us the problems: where did the reviewer get stuck, what didn’t resonate, what mechanics or ideas did the game bring up early and fail to pay off? We’ve added a lot of support for our backstory, for example, and commissioned a few more videos the player can discover to give context to previously unexplained corners of the planet.

But even with all the feedback in the world, it’s still a small sample size – and you can’t dodge the fact that making games is an inherently risky creative endeavour, filled with people desperately trying to figure out how to take the risk and creativity out of it so they can make it safe and predictable and profitable. I respect the idea, especially if I put myself in the shoes of the people with the money who don’t have a stake in the creative, but I can’t help thinking it’s a fool’s errand. A mock review might buy you a moment’s comfort, but it doesn’t change the fact that game development is part technology, part art and part voodoo. Better to see that as part of the magic than try to turn it into factory work.

Even with all the feedback in the world, making games is an inherently risky creative endeavour

Alex Hutchinson is co-founder of Montreal-based Typhoon Studios. He can be found on Twitter at @BangBangClick