Benson Russell, the experienced game designer who’s worked on Uncharted, The Last of Us, Call of Duty, and more, joined us to discuss the reasons behind recent game flops, the concept of player fantasy, and the influence of AI on development.
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Introduction
80.lv: We talked almost 10 years ago, but a lot has changed over those years. Could you give us a little intro on what you do now, and what you did prior to your current job?
Oh my goodness, yes, it was a while ago! I had shipped Uncharted 3, and I was giving a talk at the 2012 GDC about how Naughty Dog polishes its games called “The Last 10”, and we met up for an interview afterward!
Well, I went on to ship The Last of Us and its expansion Left Behind, while also being involved in Uncharted 4 and the pre-production on The Last of Us 2. Eventually, when I moved on from Naughty Dog, I wanted to experience working on different kinds of projects that stretched my knowledge.
I shipped Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare with Infinity Ward, and I shipped a Westworld VR title with Survios. I also joined a few startups that, sadly, didn’t survive. I also joined Blind Squirrel Games and got to experience being in a support studio (i.e., BSG provides teams of developers to contract with publishers in a support capacity).
Here, I got to experience working on many different projects for different publishers, getting to experience a variety of team structures and processes, seeing what did and did not work.
It was on these later projects that I began to realize where our industry was heading. Having been involved in the industry for over 30 years and having had the experience of working with all kinds of projects and teams, I’ve come to see how dysfunctional we are at making video games! It’s a problem space most unlike any other industry in that, in order to fully understand and know the end goal of what the project needs to become, it has to go through the actual process of being made!
This creates a very difficult set of obstacles that has led to a lot of dysfunction, a lot of which we’ve all had the chance to witness these past few decades. And as with any system that gets hyper-stressed beyond its limits, every flaw and crack in that system breaks, causing catastrophic damage. I liken it to an example of attempting to take the engine from a Prius and put it into an F1 car and expect it to run under those conditions… it would blow up spectacularly!
All of this has led me to start my own consulting company called Unhandled Exceptions, with a key focus on helping teams to solve these dysfunctions. I strongly believe we as an industry can make amazing products with smaller budgets and in less time while still delivering solid AAA experiences. It’s a matter of recognizing these dysfunctions and adjusting our process and mindset to correct them.
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Reasons Behind Game Failures
80.lv: What’s your take on the situation with high-level flops in the game market? Marathon, Concord, and many others. What would you say are the underlying problems, one or many, that influence this process? Why has this kept happening on this scale most recently?
It’s a good question that I’ve been analyzing myself for a while now. As an industry, we’ve unfortunately dug this giant pit we now find ourselves at the bottom of, and we keep on digging deeper and deeper, never considering how we will be able to get out. I feel there are several key factors that have gotten us into this situation.
The first factor is that the cost of games and hardware has gotten too high. It’s simple economics in that the more expensive a product is, the market for that product gets smaller. Affordability is the obvious answer, but another reason that I think is highly overlooked is that the customer becomes more discerning!
A simple analogy: you’re purchasing a new car. If you buy a Chevrolet for the expected price of a Chevrolet, your quality expectations are going to be much more forgiving than if you buy a Porsche for the expected price of a Porsche! The problem arises when you pay Porsche money and get a Chevrolet! This is where we are as an industry at the moment in the AAA space. Customers are paying $70-$100 for an AAA game, and that game is NOT in a shippable state (many serious bugs, bad performance, missing features to be added in the future, etc). And the player fantasies being delivered just aren’t compelling (more on this in a bit).
The next factor is that video game development has always been an unsolved riddle that we truly haven’t figured out. As I mentioned in the previous question, by its very nature, there are a lot of difficult obstacles that create a lot of dysfunction that to this day we still don’t understand how to address!
We don’t know how to structure the development process to make it both effective and efficient, which increases the costs and time of development. We spend a lot of time wandering, trying ideas, and then having to figure out how to make a game around those ideas. While these long-used processes served us for the past few decades (barely), with requirements and consumer expectations being as high as they are now, these processes are fracturing from being hyper-stressed beyond their limits (the afore-mentioned Prius engine being run at 12,000 RPMs non-stop).
This leads to the biggest factor: we ignore the player fantasy! We over-prioritize starting a game by iterating on great gameplay and mechanics, and while those are a must, they mean nothing if they do not deliver a compelling player fantasy! It is the most important factor in determining the success or failure of a game.
It is the journey we take the player on, what we make the player feel, how we make the player feel it, that when the player steps back from the game, they linger on what they’ve experienced and feel satiated (hopefully wanting more). An itch that the player didn’t know they had has been scratched in the most satisfying way. Because we don’t define the desired player fantasy first, we have no North Star to guide us throughout development, which results in a lot of time and effort wasted.
So, to put these into perspective to answer the question: Consumers have much higher expectations, and are more discerning about spending Porsche money on AAA games. They want a game to provide a compelling player fantasy that speaks to them, that they can invest in, knowing they will be rewarded for their investment.
Yet, as developers, we don’t focus enough on the player fantasy; we stick to putting together collections of ideas and wandering around until we find something fun, then duct-tape and glue it all together. All of this has led to increasing development costs and much longer development times. Our only answer has been to keep on the same path while increasing the costs to the consumer, which results in fewer AAA games being sold, which means less revenue being generated, which means increasing the costs to the consumer… It’s a horrible Mobius Loop with no end in sight.
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You mentioned Concord and the Marathon alpha; we can dive into how these factors apply, as both games have similar issues. Both games spent a long time in development, with Concord being 8 years (possibly 10) and Marathon going on its 7th year (according to Google).
For these kinds of games, this is a long time to be in development, which increases the cost of development (Concord was between $200 million-$400 million all in with marketing, Marathon is estimated to be around $100 million just for development at this point). This forces a premium pricing structure as an attempt to recoup costs.
Concord was a hero shooter that sold for $40, a very premium price considering its competition is free to play. Marathon is an extraction shooter using what is considered a premium pricing model in that space $40 for the base version, and $60 for a deluxe edition when it launches officially in 2026.
Both games have player fantasies that are not compelling (especially when considering their competition). Concord was going up against Overwatch and Marvel Rivals, each providing rich and established universes and characters that are the epitome of a hero fantasy. Marathon has a rich history to draw from, and while the high-level backstory presented is intriguing, the execution has created a universe that isn’t alluring (I’m also not convinced that the newly announced changes truly address this problem either).
Both games have been praised for excellent controls and well-tuned mechanics and gameplay, yet clearly, this was not enough to attract players to live in their worlds. All of this, plus a marketplace with competition that is cheaper and provides more desirable player fantasies, it’s pretty clear to see why both failed (we will have to wait and see if the newest changes to Marathon will make a difference, but it has a steep uphill battle ahead).
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Jeffrey Katzenberg wrote a memo warning about the state of the movie industry heading towards what he phrased as the “blockbuster mentality.” It’s the same unhealthy situation our industry is facing, with the mentality of pouring more and more money into a project in an attempt to guarantee its success. The mentality that projects created this way will have a guaranteed revenue floor due to big names and marketing budgets, how this has resulted in projects having to be blockbusters to see any success, how this has required consumer prices to increase, shrinking the audience. How projects have become bloated, superficial, formula-driven copycats, rather than a good story well executed.
It is a very insightful message from a smart man of the business… written in 1991 when he still worked for Disney! The introduction section alone speaks volumes, but the whole 28 pages are worth it!
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