Why the game will take as long as it will

[kriller509 13]

This is just copied and paste text from a conversation I had with my friend about the game over Discord. My goal is not to offend anyone, but my hope is that maybe the developers will see some of this and be able to take away something that may help them. Many people will likely see this as an attack, but it's being posted with the hope of being constructive & helpful, not deconstructive and rude. Again, this was a private conversation so there are references you may not understand, but for a borderline background understanding, I'm a game developer. That's about all you need to know:

 

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The problem is that people develop these small parts of the game, shooting here, food system here, and they get this idea that it's a lot easier than it is. Then they get to the hard production of actually making the features work with each other, making it work over the network, fixing bugs and that's where people generally find out how hard it actually is, and in a lot of cases regardless of difficulty, just how time-consuming it is. Basically, they got more money than they knew what to do with, and no amount of money in the world can make up for their lack of game dev experience. So they hired on a bunch of randoms and are now slowly beginning to learn what it means to do real game dev.

Quite frankly the acknowledgment that they were over their heads came when I saw they bought a studio for their employees. Bad financial decision, they got it downtown in an expensive city so they're gonna lose that money fast on top of the employees they are now paying daily.

On top of that this is their first game and they thought that the best decision was to blow their money on office space, very bad idea until you're established enough to have the income to keep the office space, they're basically going off savings of the kickstarter campaign. And living off savings can be very stressful (lowering productivity), as well as all the other problems that come with it (Primarily that's it finite, especially due to hype and for the most part, those interested in the game have gotten it, I don't see them as getting a ton more income than they already have).

So overall the campaign is just plagued with decisions of people unfamiliar with running a business and unfamiliar with game dev. That's why it's taking them so long is because they're learning things the hardest way possible.

I've seen it happen with a lot of other indie devs who have a cool idea, get a good Kickstarter campaign, and then realize just how over their head they are a month later but are then stuck in it. It happened with a game I waited 3 years for release (Survive The Nights), again, first-time game devs, successful campaign, said it'd release in 1 year but took 3. Bad quality on release/buggy.
 

The reason these Kickstarter campaigns are generally successful is that they promise a million features that no other game is offering like STN which offered the largest survival map, or these guys who an MMO so large that every job is filled by a player. The problem is after they get the money and get to work, they realize the reason people haven't done this stuff before generally isn't because people haven't tried or people have been too lazy, but because there are technical limitations they didn't know, so they almost never are able to fulfill their full promise without it being full of bugs & lag that no amount of optimization could fix because they aimed higher than current technology is capable (with the exception of if you maybe had extremely experienced devs working on it)

And that's also a problem with a lack of game development experience, if you build the foundation of your game on laggy code then your game becomes dependent and tangled into that code. It's very hard to change the fundamentals of a game without having to redo everything dependent on those fundamentals. So maybe they learned better ways to program as they went on but now they're stuck with the old code that's laggy and can't change unless they redo everything. That's something that happens in projects I work on too where I realize a better method of doing things but it becomes too late and I have to press forward (It was why Deep Space crashed so often on release, because I didn't realize everything that went into polished net code, learned it, but then it was too late and so I had to create bootleg fixes to stop the crashing)

To summarize,
Lack of game dev experience,
Lack of business experience,
Too much money
 

That's why the game will take as long as it will. I give it 2 years at the minimum.

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I won't be replying to any comments, feel free to discuss.

[LuckyDuck 1,444]

3 hours ago, kriller509 said:

That's why the game will take as long as it will. I give it 2 years at the minimum.

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I won't be replying to any comments, feel free to discuss.

 

Here you go, the time line for this game, given on the steam store page. 

Quote

Approximately how long will this game be in Early Access?

“We currently expect one year of development between each module release, as well as the full Identity release. This time will be greatly affected by our resources; as more people purchase Identity our team grows and development will hasten. Help us spread the word!

With our current pace, we estimate that the SWAT module will be complete in late 2019, the racing module in 2020 and the feature-complete Identity beta will begin in 2021. These are not to be taken as release dates but as our current best estimates.”

You don't look like you have read thiese estimates because you say Minimum 2 years, while true but The devs estimate module 2 this year, module 3 next year and that is 2 years basically and then Beta a year after module 3. This says minimum 3 - 4 years. I know you wont reply but maybe this will make you aware of some of the points you made are a bit behind. However I think some to be in my opinion true but some false.