Rush Product

Spoiler Alert: This Essay Is Not a Rush Product

“A delayed game is eventually good. A bad game is bad forever.”
—Shigeru Miyamoto

Today’s Shelf Life is going to be a rush product. I am going to rush it out the door so I can do other stuff with the rest of my day. That is an aspiration and should not be taken as a promise or a guarantee.

The experience of writing Shelf Life articles is weird because I struggle a bit getting started and then I hit 700 or 800 words and I think, “okay if you knock out another 700 or 800 words you can call it a day” so I keep typing but then everything goes fuzzy and indistinct for a while and the next thing I know I have 3,000 words and I need to cut text. This phenomenon does not extend to any other writing project. Every other writing project is a struggle from start to end. Figuring out why it’s like this is the major challenge of my life.

Today in Shelf Life we’re going to talk about video games. This is a largely untapped topic in Shelf Life, which is wild given how much I enjoy video games as the first medium of meaningfully interactive storytelling to achieve wide market uptake. All the Choose Your Own Adventure books put together sold 250 million units from 1979 to 1998, which is very respectable. Minecraft (a video game) has sold almost 250 million units over the last ten years. The video game industry had total revenue around $179.7 billion in 2020 with around $42 billion of it attributed to the United States. Meanwhile the net revenue of the U.S. book publishing industry in 2020 was about $26 billion and the U.S. movie industry revenue for the same year was about $36 billion (down about 11 percent from 2019 for obvious reasons).

All this to say: First of all, dismiss or reject video games as a major player in the world’s consumption of storytelling at your peril. Second of all, the video game industry has lessons for those of us who do our storytelling in other formats, if we know where to look for them.

One of those lessons is, sometimes even a product made from the most valuable IP imaginable is so crappy it winds up in a landfill. You know what they say:

1. Never invade Russia in winter.

2. Never get in a land war in Asia.

3. Never set your clock by Duke Nukem Forever.

Duke Nukem Forever is a great example of a product that was not rushed. It was announced in 1997, a year during which I attended high school and frequently snuck out of bed in the middle of the night to dial directly into my girlfriend’s modem via TCP/IP and play its predecessor, Duke Nukem 3D, with her. Duke Nukem Forever was not released until 2011, a year during which I took my dog and moved to Los Angeles for a job and divorced my spouse 

I hope that gives you as visceral a sense of how long we were waiting on Duke Nukem Forever to come out as it does me.

In spite of the many years it spent in production, the game was still terrible when it came out. A critical and financial failure. This example shows that sometimes, no matter how long you devote to trying to make something work, sometimes it’s best to let go and cancel instead of pushing forward out of misguided obligation. (I am here referencing both Duke Nukem Forever and the spouse.)

An interesting thing thing happened between then and now, both in the book industry and in the video game industry. Before I go into what that is, a word or four hundred about Shigeru Miyamoto.

Miyamoto has worked for Nintendo since 1977. This guy created several of the bestselling and best-known game franchises of all time, including Donkey Kong, Super Mario, and The Legend of Zelda. 

The Nintendo 64 was originally slated for release in time for Christmas 1995 but ultimately did not launch in Japan till June 1996 and then to the U.S. in September 1996. This put the North American launch a full year behind the other major release of the fifth home video game console generation, the PlayStation (now known as the PS1) in September 1995 (as well as the Sega Saturn in May 1995 but nobody cares about that). 

This cost Nintendo in terms of installed base over the life of the platform: In the fourth console generation, Nintendo’s SNES crushed their closest competitor (the Sega Genesis/Megadrive), selling 49 million units worldwide versus Sega’s 30 million. But in Gen5, the PS1 outsold the N64 by almost four times (102 million versus 32 million worldwide lifetime units). 

It’s anybody’s guess how those numbers would be different if the N64 had launched on time, and there definitely were other factors (the PS1 used disc-based media while the N64 stubbornly stuck with the cartridge; we can talk about the lateral thinking with withered technology philosophy another day). But what was behind the significant delay of the company’s flagship product?

Miyamoto wasn’t done working on the launch titles yet. When the system finally launched, it did so with Super Mario 64, which went on to become the best-selling title of the generation (beating out Gran Turismo for the PS1 and whatever sold well for the Saturn, I have no idea and nobody cares). Miyamoto, and Nintendo, felt it was in their best interest not to rush the system out before their first-party launch title was ready and the third-party developers had a chance to produce quality products too.

They launched in 1996 with Super Mario 64 and then, to keep interest in the system high, announced The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, to arrive in time for holiday season 1997 but you’ll never guess what happened next. Did you guess Ocarina of Time ended up delayed till holiday season 1998? Then you were correct. The important thing is, it came out eventually and became the first game to receive a perfect 40-point score from Famitsu. Today it’s widely considered one of the best games of all time. You would be hard-pressed to find a best-video-games-of-all-time list that doesn’t have Ocarina of Time on it.

As I mentioned earlier, something interesting happened for both video games and books between 1998 and now that has changed the way a lot of content creators think about rush product: Electronic delivery of video games and books became a reality.

In 1998, if you wanted a video game or a book you had to buy it from a brick-and-mortar store or online from someplace like Amazon. You had to take possession of a physical object before you could consume the content. This is no longer true.

Electronic delivery of content directly to the device you will use to consume it means two important things:

1. The cost of putting out a video game or a book has gone way, way down.

2. The cost of putting out a video game or a book has gone way, way down.

Meaning, first, the dollar cost associated with producing a book or a video game has decreased because you no longer need to pay for physical copies to be created, either on a print-on-demand basis or up front in a single production run. Second, the reputation cost associated with putting out a book or a video game full of glaring errors has decreased because you are no longer committed to supporting your product in the state it went out the door. You can patch it.

You can patch a book? Yes, you can—in essence—patch a book. I hear self-published authors talking about this from time to time. Put your book out on Kindle. A reader points out a typo? Fix the typo and replace the file. Another typo? Fix it and replace the file again. Replace the file as many times as you want. Still revising your manuscript? Who cares? Publish it anyway! You don’t have thousands of books piled up in a warehouse somewhere that have to be sold off or disposed of before you can fix whatever’s wrong with your text and print again.

Games, too, are often released on schedule whether they’ve been fully finished or not. At the best of times, games that are rushed out the door before they’re finished launch with glitches or without all the content players have been promised; at worst they have game-breaking bugs. This is where I think we, writers, have something to learn from the mistakes of our fellow content creators in the video game industry.

Let’s talk about Cyberpunk 2077. This launched in 2020 and was made by the same company that released The Witcher 3 in 2015, based on a Polish fantasy IP basically unknown outside of Central and Eastern Europe. Everybody loved The Witcher 3. I even played it and I play like one video game every five years.

Everybody was super stoked for Cyberpunk 2077 to come out. It was a Duke Nukem Forever situation: People had been waiting a very long time for it (it was originally announced in 2012). This game had everything going for it. The internet’s boyfriend Keanu Reeves is even in it as one of the main characters.

Even before the game launched, people knew something wasn’t going right. There was an inflexible embargo on reviews for the game and reviewers had to sign an NDA before receiving a review copy. That’s weird, right? Usually you send out review copies (of any media) because you want to get reviews out there before your product launches—so consumers can make the decision to buy ahead of time. That’s the whole purpose.

When the game launched it was obvious why mum had been the word. The game was a catastrophe. It ran okay on PC, but the PS4 and Xbox One versions were a mess of bugs and performance issues. The game was so bad that the publisher publicly apologized and offered refunds to dissatisfied customers. Sony removed the game from the PlayStation Store and offered refunds to anyone who had purchased through them. Microsoft put a warning on the game in their store indicating that it had major performance issues.

The story was good. The graphics were beautiful. The worldbuilding was well done. But the game was so riddled with bugs and performance issues that the bad outweighed the good and the game didn’t do nearly as well as it should have in the market. Sales dropped off sharply as word of the technical issues got out, and market analysts adjusted year-one sales projections down by 14 percent.

What happened with Cyberpunk 2077? First, the publisher didn’t give it enough time. They based their expectation of how long the game would take to develop on how long it took them to develop The Witcher 3. They didn’t leave enough time to port the game from PC to consoles. The game was fine on PC, but the PS4 and Xbox One were at the end of their lifespans and did not have the same capacity to run games as a state-of-the-art PC at the time. 

The developers knew the game wasn’t ready, but management insisted it had to launch anyway after it had been delayed a couple of times already. The game was running well on PC, and they knew it would be fine on the PS5 and Xbox Series S/X that were launching in 2021, so they let it out the door with major issues on the Gen 8 consoles assuming they could limp by till the Gen 9 consoles were out. This gamble didn’t pay off for them.

They lost sales. They still made enough money on preorders—the ones that didn’t get returned, anyway—to recoup their operating and marketing costs, but they didn’t see the unit sales and revenue that the game would have realized if it didn’t launch as a dumpster fire.

They lost awards and critical acclaim. Cyberpunk 2077 was the most anticipated game of 2020 and should have been game of the year material. The New York Times called it a disaster. IGN gave it a 4/10 for consoles. Those reviews, those articles, are never going away no matter how much the game is improved post-launch.

Most important, they lost credibility. CD Projekt Red was a beloved, pro-customer studio with a lot of built-up goodwill in the gaming community. The whole Cyberpunk 2077 situation destroyed their corporate image. They had promised the game wouldn’t launch till it was ready, then launched it in a disastrous state. They took measures to prevent early reviews from warning customers about the known issues because they wanted to avoid preorder cancelations. They apologized and offered refunds but then didn’t deliver on the refunds (Sony eventually took over offering refunds to their player base). 

No matter how many times Cyberpunk 2077 gets patched, CD Projekt Red will never get back their reputation as a gamer-friendly studio. They’ll have an uphill battle to generate the level of hype they had for Cyberpunk 2077 for any project, ever again. It’s a long road back to the strong position they held before Cyberpunk 2077 launched—if they ever get back to where they were.

A new author hitting the market with their first novel is a very different story than an established publisher who has already put out one successful and universally beloved video game. You’re starting out with a blank reputation slate. Nobody knows you, and nobody knows your writing—yet. The product you put out there will start generating all the information that will fill your reputation slate: Do they write well? Is the book good? Can they tell a story? Are their interactions with fans and readers professional or argumentative?

The reader who points out a typo in your book isn’t going to download a new version to read after you fix it. The next reader who comes along won’t see the typo; that’s great. But the first reader’s first impression can never be made again. Are you going to get crucified for a typo? No, probably not. But if the problems with your manuscript are bigger or worse than typographical mistakes, you’re asking for a critical pummeling. Bad reviews don’t go away. 

When we finish a major undertaking, it’s normal to want to move on and put the product we have created out into the world to find the people it was made for and hopefully make us some money or garner acclaim. The trick is understanding what it means for a product to be done. In many areas of modern life, done doesn’t look like it used to. A writer may think their job is done when they finish their first draft—but that’s where most writers’ work begins.

Many people have a perception of books historically being the creative work of one person. They think that only recently, in modern times, have we built an industry around book writing with beta readers and critique partners and agents and editors. In reality, the opposite is true: Writers have always sought and received feedback and editing on their work prior to publication. It’s not doing that and going directly to market that’s new.

The first novel in the history of novels, the Genji Monogatari, was circulated to a closed circle of Lady Murasaki’s friends chapter by chapter as it was written, and only later published for wide readership. Shakespeare’s First Folio was edited extensively by his colleagues John Heminges and Henry Condell. It was not until the advent of modern-day, push-button self-publishing that books en masse began to be released directly by authors without first being shaped by peer critique, reader feedback, and editorial guidance.

This is all for you to keep in mind as you’re wrapping up your manuscript and tapping out The End and making the decision about whether to begin revising, or seek feedback, or hire an editor, or upload to KDP. A manuscript that you hang onto while you put in the work to polish and perfect it publishes eventually; but a bad book, once read, remains bad in the reader’s memory forever.

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