I know there are lots of reasons a big title can flop. We have all seen games that came out with a lot of hype and a lot of backing that were just awful. But in your opinion what is the most common pitfall that big developers suffer from. Poor programming? Lack of imagination? Too ambitions? What do you think trips up the big budget development teams the most?

Not enough polish, game feels rough and awkward.

Super gamer fans of the genre will love games anyway, even if they feel rough around the edges. When you want to sell 10 million copies though I think you have to prioritize smooth feeling gameplay with lots of testing and polish. Too often publishers do the opposite and rush a game out to meet deadlines.

Sometimes a very polished game can still flop though, like Max Payne 3. In the end the mainstream consumer is a fickle beast that is hard to predict, and not every game can capture an audience.

I think that it's a lack of vision. They know what the consumer wants and likes and tries to give it to them in some moderatly different way. There haven't been any major breakthroughs in AAA titles in a very long time. They mostly stick to the same old same old, new story, newish multiplayer (I'm looking at you COD) and slightly better graphics. This even goes for different genres, open world games need to have things to do everywhere, adventure games have to have quick-time events. I'd like to see something new out of the next generation of triple A games but I'm not very optimistic.

Too much compromise especially in the game mechanics department. They have to make something that is easy to learn, relatively short and linear so everyone can play.

Currently? Because of monstrous budgets. Take a look at the Tomb Raider reboot. Aside that, it would be a good idea to remind those companies that they are creating games and not an alternative to Hollywood.

You really have to look at it on a case-by-case basis. Sometimes the game was fine but marketing dropped the ball. Other time the game was an absolute disaster, and that can be from over-ambition, poor financial planning, rushed timelines, or just poor leadership and management.

With AAA, one of the biggest problems is that the production costs are so high that the threshold to be considered successful is also quite high. That means it doesn't take much to sink a title.

Easy to answer really:

- Lack of talent left in the big companies.

- All creativity gets killed in these environments (pretty much every interview has made this obvious) with bad pay, very long hours and not enough freedom for the devs

- Publishers don't understand games yet firmly control what devs are allowed to do. They focus on best selling games and want their devs to mimic those games thinking it will achieve the same success leading to by-the-number games


Everything added up: a lack of creative freedom combined with stifling work environments and a publisher who has no clue what makes a good game.

1) Appealing to the mainstream while not making the game too bland is incredibly hard

1a) If you can't somehow achieve the above, the costs to increase technical aspects of the game while retaining a similar gameplay yields smaller and smaller returns on investment.

2) A game with more complex underlying mechanics will result in more bugs, no matter how much manpower you throw at it. The manpower increase is linear. The bug increases don't tend to be.

3) In a tough economic time, convincing people to fork 40$+ for a game is harder and yet, their entire business model relies on that demographic.

4) A more adverse effect from market fragmentation as the technical needs of the AAA game often requires native development with low-level system calls which are not as interoperable between platforms.

5) Bigger teams developing the game introduce a lot of costs and risks:

- Bigger likelihood of internal feuds

- Greater engineering discipline required to coordinate the labor

- Greater likelihood of industrial spies and other parasites leaking internal trade secrets or sabotaging development

Edit:

6) Like Red_avatar wrote, the fact that developers in smaller Indy projects tend to have more freedom and greater economic incentives attracts more creative talent. The part that turned me off the most personally was the clause they tend to put in your contract that any intellectual property generated while working for them, on their time or yours, belong to them. Basically, they own your ass. You can forget any side project you would have liked to work on when at home.

For me it is the fact that most start off well but half way through the game you can start to tell that development is being rushed and you get some terrible end levels and crap ending as companies have spent too much time on the graphics engine and not enough on the game itself and then the game gets pushed out by the publishers.

Too many of them all pursue the same few niches. They're all sinking hundreds of millions of dollars into what they think will knock Call of Duty, World of Warcraft or Elder Scrolls of its perch and indeed would need to be just to break even. As it turns out, Call of Duty or Elder Scrolls fans are all playing Call of Duty or Elder Scrolls and largely couldn't care less about any clones. It never occurs to them to many go after a more under supplied market (such as strategy or adventure) and only spend on development what they can reasonably expect to make back.

But no, they all have to sink everything they have into a game that tries to appeal to everyone, simply because it has to appeal to everyone if it's going to make any sort of profit. Only problem is when you try to do everything, the game always turns out mediocre and bland.

This. When you emphasize profit over product, that's a recipe for disaster.

This combined with unrealistic sales expectations. Consider the Square Enix/Tomb Raider scenario, where the game shifted 3.4 million copies in four weeks, and yet still managed to miss targets.

Any market that can shift 3.4 million units in four weeks should consider itself lucky, but sadly the interactive entertainment sector is tainted by greed.

Not to mention that budgets are often inflated by inefficient management and ineffective company structures. The budgets often include payments to massively overpaid creative personnel (often voice actors), accommodate the need to pay the massively overpaid management board and shareholder dividends, and have astonishingly high administrative costs.

AAA status doesn't imply the game is good.

Everyone chasing the same audience with the same kinds of games.

If you are making an action game for young adult males, you're in for a lot of heavy competition. You'll need an insane budget to really be competetive in that market. Huge budgets with a lot of competition means very high risk.

All of those points are true but this is the biggest one

Publishers being complete dumbasses and chasing imaginary and non-existant "Audiences" is what always backfires

I think the biggest culprit of this, this generation is Capcom, take a look what has happened to some of their franchises as they tried to "Chase audiences"