Announced Nearly Half a Decade Ago, Quantic Dream's Star Wars Game Reportedly Still 'Years Off'

Sounds to me like Quantic Dream’s days of being a studio are numbered if they’re banking on a F2P title, given that their fanbase isn’t really live service based at all. I really don’t understand how so many studios this generation have forgotten how to make games their base wants to play. I’d imagine people WOULD want to play Eclipse, but it sounds like the team isn’t producing results.

Like the KOTOR remake, I don’t see this game ever shipping. All these games that get announced 5 years or more in the past with no actual gameplay to show reach a point where they’d need to hit GTA levels of success to ever be profitable. Hell, think of the marketing budget alone, which at this point wouldn’t even be a factor! Publishers will want a return on all the dev time costs, and if we’re talking about a game taking nearly a decade to ship, who would continue investing in that?

They started this so long ago that people still liked Star Wars and this seemed like a good idea.

@TrollOfWar They could afford to make games like this before though and games were more niche in those times. Not every game needs to be a visual tour-de-force. Use cheaper actors that are still good actors but less established. Developers are failing because they don’t make the games people want to play. I don’t believe this “We need to make a live service game to support our single player games in the future” narrative. We were told this at the beginning of the generation and clearly that wasn’t true. What is true is that live service games could be more profitable but are also more risky and expensive to make, so that’s why there’s the pivot. To me, it sounds like the live service push has proven far less sustainable than lowering budgets and continuing to produce solid games. Look at the studios that produce solid games and didn’t fall down the live service rabbit hole and compare them to the ones that did and it’s sort of shocking to see with how much accuracy that has caused unsustainable development and failure.

@TrollOfWar Quantic Dream was the peak of their niche, so for them to basically implode their company with such a pivot is almost comical. The way I see it, Spellcasters Chronicles is one of the most tone deaf of the live service releases I’ve ever seen. It has all the cliches of the generic bright comic book mess style coming from a studio that known for bringing us decidedly muted-tone sad dad QT cinematic narrative games.

I mean, if you look at Nomad Soul or Heavy Rain and say this is a game by the same studio, it’s whiplash. They spent 8 years after the critically acclaimed, culturally prescient, and ahead-of-its-time Detroit: Become Human making THAT. How does it make sense?

Feedback in the live service community has also been that the game is about as meh as possible. These studios need to stop saying “Support our money fissure that we now understand no one wanted, so we can make the game you wanted us to make and that we advertised we were making half a decade ago when we were making this thing instead.” All these financial analysts out there have their heads in their hands wondering why people aren’t buying games as much anymore and the answer couldn’t be in any plainer sight.

It’s so obvious that the live service games take longer to make, require far more resources, and their success only leads to more similar games rather than the games we want. And their failure usually leads to massive layoffs and potential studio closure. I am not anti-live service games by any means either. I’d play a good one if I liked it. But Quantic Dream was doing original things and this is clearly chasing money instead of giving their base what they want or making games that they make well. When we talk about the business of game development not being sustainable, it’s the live service element that isn’t. It’s the Hollywood influence that isn’t. It’s the bloated 80 hour games that aren’t.

We’ve got so much data right now that goes to show that good games are far more sustainable than the narrative shows. When we look at the last calendar year, the truth is that plenty of games have done well. Silksong: profitable and sold at $15 a pop. Resident Evil Requiem: profitable. Clair Obscur: profitable and budget priced. Pokopia: profitable. Ghost of Yotei: profitable. Silent Hill F: profitable. I could go on and on, but if the industry makes games for their customers, it’s more likely there will be success. I think the industry doesn’t always realize there’s CoD/Fortnite gamers and then there is a totally separate version of gamers.

There’s essentially several industries in umbrella-ed in one industry. The TV industry doesn’t compare a sitcom’s success to a sporting event, you know? TV didn’t decide to put the cast of Friends on a basketball court because sports makes more money than sitcoms and Friends was extremely popular. Can you imagine? I feel like the games industry doesn’t realize they do this kind of thing.

Jeez, what a rant. Sorry about that. Lol. Hope it was good reading!