What Would Matt Do

(originally seen on ShackNews)

You’d think the last company making public statements about how to make games would be Lucas Arts. I mean come on. Their in-house development is a joke and the development houses they hire are never on time (Except Obsidian, but we’ll talk about that in a moment).

But, instead, we have the President of Lucas Arts making comments like this:

“There’s an attitude in this industry that says in order to make a great game, it takes whatever time it takes and it takes whatever money it takes, and that that’s okay,” he claimed. “Well it’s not okay – it’s wrong. It’s not okay in other entertainment businesses. In other businesses it’s big trouble.”

“When you have EA failing to bring Superman out with the movie, that’s inexcusable. Moving games like Medal of Honor and Godfather out of the fourth quarter -– that’s the old way of thinking and you can’t do that any more.”

While that’s great in principle (it is and it’s something the game industry has a big problem with), lets examine a few games that Lucas Arts has released that have been hits… Oh wait, they don’t release games are that are hits. Well, how about games they publish:

• Knights of the Old Republic 1: Shipped more than 6 months late, but went on to be a HUGE success. Developed by Bioware.
• Knights of the Old Republic 2: Shipped on time, but had so many bugs and time issues, the ending didn’t make sense and most of it was cut along with some storylines. Don’t me wrong, I LOVED the game for what Obsidian did with it, but Obsidian had to ship early and the game suffered a LOT because of it.
• Star Wars: Empire at War: This was only about 3 or 4 months late. Not too bad. Except, it wasn’t developed in house and if it had shipped earlier, it would have been full of bugs, much like Armed and Dangerous (shipped on time with a mess of bugs and problems). Developed by Petroglyph.

Basically, Lucas Arts has no room to talk and it’s completely silly to say the MOST important thing is shipping on time. Jim Ward isn’t all wrong, but to call out other companies from his VERY BIG glass house is pretty funny.