Total War Devs Think Most Games Aren’t Good Enough

Strong words from the people over at Creative Assembly. Develop reports that Renaud Charpentier has some real talk about the industry. He says:

When you look at the market, probably 20 to 30 per cent of the games are confident, and maybe 60 to 70 per cent are not good enough. Usually, they run. Most of them don't crash – most are competent technically. Most of them look okay or even good, but they play like shit. We can't keep releasing games that anyone can tell are not interesting to play after 30 minutes when 20 or 30 people spent two years working on them. It doesn't make any sense.

While I wholeheartedly agree with his accesment, I think it'll be unlikely to have anyone listen to it. Of course, it's easy to be pessimistic–one need only look at the burgeoning indie scene to see ample evidence of an industry that is anything but "not good enough." When you look past the infinite number of puzzle platformers or atmospheric 'art' games, anyway. So maybe he's full of shit, who knows!

I wonder–does Renaud think that Total War falls into the elite 30% of games that are confident? He's on the money about development time versus how interesting or engaging games turn out to be. Plus, at the upper echelons, games cost a fortune to make….but that's exactly why they tend to be so safe, too.

So what's the answer here? Game companies default to making safe games because its expensive not to, but one could argue that that cost means one would be remiss not to do something good and new. After all, you're spending all that money: why release something that's not confident and uncompromising?