According to the person who is currently developing Supervive, the old, traditional model (full-priced, boxed game) is not good for players. Really?

Joe Tung is the co-founder and CEO of Theorycraft Games, but his gaming career started with Halo 3. He was the executive producer of that game, and then went on to be the executive producer of Halo: Reach and Destiny at Bungie. In late 2012, he left to work on League of Legends at Riot Games, where he got his first taste of free-to-play live service games. He left the studio in 2020 to make a game with a similar model.

He’s now working on a MOBA-style battle royale game, Supervive, and in an interview with PCGamer, he also talked about having to make decisions during his time at Bungie that weren’t in the best interest of players, and that many of the E3 demos showed “bullsh_t vaporware,” non-existent games. The biggest problem, in his opinion, is still the boxed game model.

“I always felt that in the $60 boxed product model, I had to make decisions that were not in the best interest of the players. It was in the best interest of how do we sell as many copies as possible in the first 48 hours? One of the great strengths of the games as a service model is that you can be long-term, you can think long-term in terms of what is best for the player, and how does that intersect with what is best for the company? I think it allows you to make much, much, much better decisions overall.

I would bet that every developer who ever worked in the $60 box product model, up until the point where E3 was canceled, has a story about the E3 build. It’s like, let’s cram as much bullshit vaporware into the build as we can in the next three months because we have to have a huge show at E3 because it’s our only opportunity to talk to our audience before we launch the game. I would have to bet that a huge percentage of those E3 efforts ended up on the cutting room floor because they were half-baked and caused people to cringe and really have to make huge sacrifices to get it in. But I bet a lot of them never made it into the game because of the way you develop these things. So that’s my favorite example of hugely impactful decisions that weren’t about what’s best for the player,” Tung said.

With Supervive, Tung’s goal is to play it for 10,000 hours. Not sure if that’s feasible…

Source: PCGamer