Can It or Use It?

Most of us have heard of Blizzard's cancelling of Titan as well as the reveal of Overwatch by now. It's also no secret that Overwatch is most likely what Titan evolved into. Take the Overwatch trailer for example. The ending scene that "the world could use more heroes" just seem like an MMO recruitment speech.

When Titan was cancelled, many were surprised that Blizzard was willing to do so after the time and money spent into making the game, even more so when we learnt that no employees were fired after the announcement. If we just look at other companies in the industry, we'd see that most news of game cancellation would be followed by a studio closing down, even if it were no fault of the developers. But I suspect that more of these 'bad' games would still be published anyway just so they can minimise the losses. But from the looks of things, the developed assets aren't actually wasted, but put to use in 'another' game.

Still, Blizzard's willingness to can games is respectable. Developers get attached to their games, whether it be good or bad. After all, the time and effort that one puts into a game is not to be underestimated, especially 1 of Blizzard's scale and quality. Blizzard has the advantage of being able to reuse their assets in other games, however, a privilege that not all studios have. Most studios work on only a game at a time, and publishers tend not to be so forgiving of a 'bad' project. And does the publisher actually have the right to take the assets and give it to another studio working on another game?

I guess we really can't blame a developer for not being willing to cancel a game that's not going to be too good. At times, developers may be so attached to their baby that they can't see that it is bad. Publishers will also pressurise the developers to publish something that they can at least recoup their losses from. But given time and resources, perhaps change can be made to make it more serviceable? Buggy games though, are less forgivable. All in all, much as I like to say so, but we can't really expect bad games to be cancelled altogether. We just have to exercise better judgement and not jump into games based on hype and marketing. Another repeat of the same lesson... Re you getting sick of it yet?