Two-Year Development Cycle for FM?

[Golden Boot]

Now that SI have another game in their portfolio (East Side Hockey Manager) I would love to see FM move to a two-year development cycle. I think that would benefit the game enormously.

Video games are time consuming, expensive and difficult to develop for even the most talented and largest studios, so for SI to have to create a new version of an increasingly complex game every year is obviously going to have an effect on quality. It's inevitable really. One only has to look at some of the really poor bugs that have been shipped with the game on release over the last few iterations to appreciate that.

Take Naughty Dog as an example. They are just about the best game developers in the world. The Uncharted series and The Last of Us are testament to that. They have a large team of some of the best developers in the world, and yet it has taken them the best part of five years to create Uncharted 4.

""We don't want to compromise," Margenau said. "It is Nathan Drake's climactic chapter of Uncharted, so we don't want to have to compromise anything for this game. If that means pushing it out in a couple extra months to make sure it's going to be to the level that it needs to be for [uncharted 4] to be the best Uncharted — same thing with The Last of Us, a little extra time, just being aware of the extra time we need. The Last of Us, I think it turned out ok."

Could you imagine Naughty Dog being forced to make a new Uncharted game every year? It would be horrendous. Ubisoft are starting to go down that route with the Far Cry series, which is a major cause for concern.

I personally think SI should simply release a data update for the core game each year, with a brand new version of the game released every other year. I think that would go some way to eliminating some of the really poor bugs that have cropped up lately (yes FIFA rankings bug, I'm looking at you).

[Guest]

The industry model for the sports genre is an annual release cycle.

I'd also add that having previous worked on FM for 3 years the benefits that games in other genres see from a longer development cycle would not translate to FM because the real football world is ever evolving & an annual cycle is the best option.

[forameuss]

Short answer: Will never happen, and should never happen.

Longer Answer: You're comparing apples and oranges. An Uncharted game took five years to create. Great. But it doesn't have anything to do with how long an FM game takes to create. And like Barside says, they're in a completely different genre, one which translates very well to an annual release schedule. There's no reason why every game can't adapt to a yearly release schedule, but the reason so many of them go by the wayside when they go down that road is that they're story-based and that the developer doesn't do anything to set them apart. You're unlikely to craft a compelling story in such a short space of time, and there isn't much you can really change about the mechanics of an FPS where you're tasked with shooting people/animals/aliens/soldiers in the face over and over again.

FM is unique in the way that it doesn't have a story, with that being filled in by the user or by events in real life prior to release. It can also make a fairly small change to the match engine which completely changes the way playing the game feels for the better.

The main argument for this strategy always seems to be that the game isn't of good enough quality when it's released yearly, and that doing it every 2 years would make that better. It wouldn't. It would just stretch the window of development out, and the same amount of testing would be performed. You'd still have bugs, and then you'd get the same people coming on and scratching their heads wondering why their foolproof plan didn't produce alchemy.

And Naughty Dog "the best game developers in the world"? Even if that was quantifiable, ProjektRed have blown everyone out of the water bar none.

[Golden Boot]

And Naughty Dog "the best game developers in the world"? Even if that was quantifiable, ProjektRed have blown everyone out of the water bar none.

Yes The Witcher 3 is a great game(I own that too), but it's not The Last of Us. And anyway, When Uncharted 4 comes out everything else will pale into insignificance anyway.

I still think a two-year dev cycle would benefit the game and prevent bugs like that that flippin FIFA rankings bug. That basically prevented me from playing the game for the best part of six weeks, and I refuse to believe that bug would have survived an extra year of testing and development.

[forameuss]

Yes The Witcher 3 is a great game(I own that too), but it's not The Last of Us. And anyway, When Uncharted 4 comes out everything else will pale into insignificance anyway.

I was more meaning the entirety of being a developer, and the way ProjektRed have treated the game once its out has been a refreshing change from most developers. But that's away from the topic.

I still think a two-year dev cycle would benefit the game and prevent bugs like that that flippin FIFA rankings bug. That basically prevented me from playing the game for the best part of six weeks, and I refuse to believe that bug would have survived an extra year of testing and development.

You think, but you don't know. Maybe that bug would've been caught and cleared up. Great. But how many other bugs came in because they now have another eight months of development time? Hundreds. Because that's how development works. Do you want them to have the same development time, and just spend the extra year testing? Good luck clearing that business plan.

[Smurf]

I'd love to see a development pack or something deployed.

Update the teams/players/squads/coaches etc. in FM16 as a development pack, let people play on FM16 with the newer database.

And also release a FM17 for those that want to play a newer game with more bells and whistles.

[grade]

Sure, 2 year cycle mean a more develop time, but unfornately that doesn't mean a more clean and free of games bugs. But It would mean a little more diference between versions.

[HUNT3R]

Buy it every 2 years.

[santy001]

I'd love to see a development pack or something deployed.

Update the teams/players/squads/coaches etc. in FM16 as a development pack, let people play on FM16 with the newer database.

And also release a FM17 for those that want to play a newer game with more bells and whistles.

That's all fine and good, but I personally wouldn't like to have to provide 2 sets of data following 2 different sets of guidelines so that one set of data is the new FM data with new features/aspects and guidelines researched while also having to provide another data update for the last game following the guidelines and aspects relevant to it. Every year since I've started the research there has been progression in how things are done, as SI ever refine and iterate on the game as you'd expect. Some huge changes in what we're doing as researchers or what we're working out is for stuff that you hardly realise when playing the game, but still has an impact upon playing the game.

[cris182]

I'd love to see a development pack or something deployed.

Update the teams/players/squads/coaches etc. in FM16 as a development pack, let people play on FM16 with the newer database.

And also release a FM17 for those that want to play a newer game with more bells and whistles.

What if there is a massive rule change and you are left playing an updated game that is missing something very important (Say the Premier League adding a playoff) you would not be happy if they didn't add an update for that, But then if they did do that people wouldn't buy the new game because why would they need too? And then it starts costing them sales so it isn't viable

[jayahr]

Reasons against that in a nutshell:

- We users are free to buy or not buy. Hence, if we want two-year cycles, we can easily have that by just buying every second edition. Users who are fine to buy every year, or just every third, are as much catered for. Therefore, everybody should be happy the way it is

- The feedback from a full version increases the development speed a lot. You should not believe that the progress of the game over two years would be the same without the feedback from the full version in the middle year.

- Releasing yearly makes SI more money. More money means also more money available to spend on game developers, i.e. more money = more work on the game = more improvements.

[amack1n]

Definitely this!

Buy it every 2 years.

I agree that spending around £30 on a game every yeah which doesn't change radically every 12 months may not be worth it. Especially when the previous version is still so playable!

However, doubling the development cycle would nearly half revenue the developers make considering that the majority of people will buy the game every year. Besides, even if you do buy it every year, you're still getting insane value for money considering the hours you can get out of the game

Now developing a way to carry a save from a previous game into the latest version (FM15 to FM16) would certainly be worth buying it every year!

[themadsheep2001]

Reasons against that in a nutshell:

- We users are free to buy or not buy. Hence, if we want two-year cycles, we can easily have that by just buying every second edition. Users who are fine to buy every year, or just every third, are as much catered for. Therefore, everybody should be happy the way it is

- The feedback from a full version increases the development speed a lot. You should not believe that the progress of the game over two years would be the same without the feedback from the full version in the middle year.

- Releasing yearly makes SI more money. More money means also more money available to spend on game developers, i.e. more money = more work on the game = more improvements.

This pretty much sums it up. It's not going to happen, it makes absolutely no sense for SI to take such a route, both for business and developmental reasons. Which is exactly why it hasn't happened already.