Game Developers Should Focus On Quality Over Quantity

Today, many video game companies publish the same game with a slight reskin every year. It’s like they’ve made it a goal for themselves to publish a game, even if it offers nothing new except for a few changes in the story. It is about time game developers realized that they should focus on quality over quantity.

Game developers should take their time to create a game with an amazing story and mechanics that offer something truly unique from the previous installment. These new additions to the already popular franchises every other year turn out to be rather dull.

Look at Elden Ring for an example. The game took years to develop, but it offers a unique and more enjoyable experience than the previous games by FromSoftware.

And it isn’t only Elden Ring. Many other games like Red Dead Redemption 2, GTA V, and even the recently released God of War Ragnarok took a few years in the development phase but offered something truly unique and interesting.

Even Cyberpunk 2077 could fit into this category if it took a few more years in development. Instead, we got an unfinished game that took years of patches for content that should’ve been fixed at launch.

It is the same case for many other games as well. The devs are sometimes pressured into releasing the game early, and then the unfinished game goes out in the market only to fail.

Most of the time, the developers aren’t the ones at fault. They’re just doing their job, after all. It’s the publishers and the marketing department that force early releases of games.

On the other hand, we have franchises like Assassin’s Creed, Call of Duty, FIFA, Resident Evil, etc. These franchises release a new installment almost every other year. But these newest additions are mostly just a reskinned version of the previous games.

Ubisoft‘s Assassin’s Creed franchise has been around since 2007. And, as of now, we’ve seen 12 installments in the main series, with the 13th set to release in 2023. The company had been releasing a new AC game every year since then till 2015.

They took an extra year and released Assassin’s Creed Origins in 2017. The game, which many people might hate for not being a true AC game, brought something unique to the franchise. And in 2018, we saw AC Odyssey, which was basically the same game as Origins except that it was set in ancient Greece.

It’s true that Assassin’s Creed changed its ways since Origins and took on a more RPG route than being a stealth game. However, with the announcement of Assassin’s Creed Mirage, it’s likely that we’ll see the franchise going back to the stealth route.

For once, those game developers should set aside their goal of coming up with a game in 12 months and sit down to think about what they can offer that will make this upcoming game any different than the previous one.

It can take two years, or maybe more than that. But at least fans will not be getting the same game with a different name as they’ve been getting for all these years.

One reason I can think of is that maybe these companies think everyone who was going to buy their game has bought it. And now, the only way to make more money is to sell the same game again to the same people but with a different name.

Activision‘s Call of Duty is another example in the gaming industry. Every year there’s a new CoD game that follows the same mechanics with a slightly different touch. I get that there’s not much the game devs could add to make an FPS game more unique. However, they can at least improve upon and fix the mistakes they’ve been making in the previous games.

Now, it’s not necessarily true that if the game takes longer in development, then it’s going to be a good game. Some games take years in development only to fall face-first into the dirt, like No Man’s Sky.

The game has seen some changes in the last few years and is a decent game now. However, that wasn’t the case right after its launch.

It is also a possibility that fans might not like the new uniqueness and improvements the game devs have added to the game by taking more time to develop.

But if the fans don’t like the newly added features, they can just go back to the previous game. That’s the only perk of all the games in the franchise having more or less the same overused gameplay mechanics.