Make Bad Games
An early, less sweary version of this essay was posted on this site's direct predecessor on July 21st, 2025.
The July 2025 Xbox cuts have me severely despairing about the state of ‘triple-A’ game production, which is a concept that shouldn’t exist.
IP revivals (are a hallmark of the shambling reanimated games industry)
There’s a whole lot of depression in the cuts - including mass layoffs at several studios it owns, like Forza studio Turn 10 losing half of its staff - that have been covered in great detail by people with more knowledge of the situation and industry than I have at my disposal, so I’m going to focus on a couple of project cancellations specifically in order to raise a point about what I feel games should actually be like, to make developing them sustainable long-term.
Perfect Dark, a revival of a twenty-five-year-old game from developer supergroup The Initiative that spent seven years in development, is one casualty. If it’s not working out, fine - but for a revival of a twenty-five-year-old game to not work out is baffling. The blueprint is already there - Perfect Dark (2000) didn’t spend 7 years in development, in part because it looked like dirty shitty undies and was two hours long. Perfect Dark the revival one didn’t need to blow you away graphically, or be a 20+ hour boring slog - these trappings of modern game development. It was Perfect Dark.
Xbox’s (and the industry at large’s) problem is that two decades of ‘the smallest level in [latest game in series] is two times bigger than the biggest level in [previous game in series]’ (a quote from Gamespot’s E3 2000 coverage that I was watching recently for the pure time capsule experience) has heightened the expectations of amoebas that every game has to be BIGGER and BETTER in some or every way than whatever has come before, even as technological improvements have slowed to a crawl. The state of this, plus the dark hole where basic human empathy is currently hiding, means that if Perfect Dark had been developed and released with the same design philosophy and limits in scope as Perfect Dark (2000), Phil Spencer would have been stabbed in the street. The fate of Perfect Dark shows Xbox up as a failure - in praying at the altar of capitalism, which requires bigger and better results on a perpetual cycle, the company has repeatedly shown that it's forgotten how to make a video game. It literally can’t.
Reboot(ing game development) is a failure of management
Xbox isn’t alone in completely failing at revisiting older titles by fucking into them a dreary BIGGER AND BETTER philosophy - Ubisoft rebooted the development of its Prince of Persia, The: Sands of Time remake from scratch because amoebas sounded off to a trailer and deemed it not good enough. What does this mean? Does the original - which spent two years in development from 2001 to 2003 - no longer have any value at all because it’s seen as ugly or basic compared to games that can take many more years to come out now - even though release times are clearly also an issue in the eyes of consumers and company executives? These original titles were made at a time where the games industry could strike the perfect balance between the capabilities of available technology and project scope - and now everyone wants to have and eat their cake at the same time. If reboots and remakes (because they are different things) looked graphically similar to the original - would it really matter? Or would it instead show up that remakes that focus on shoring fidelity up to amoebic expectations are unnecessary - and unsustainable to make? Would it suggest that remakes should really just be about quality of life improvements - accessibility options, UI adjustments, supporting more input methods - and that, in this way, remasters, when done well, are sufficient? Yes.
THE SYSTEM is making studios forget how to make games
Development hell being the new norm as a result of chasing fidelity. and/or complete failures of management, also extends to new, original projects. Despite claiming in an XboxEra interview in February 2025 that he’d recently been at Rare to see its action-adventure game Everwild (announced in 2019 and reportedly rebooted in 2021) and been excited by its progress and for it to come out, it was shitcanned 5 months later. I don’t know if Spencer is just a lying bastard or a bastard made to lie, having sold his soul in exchange for the $SEVENTY FIVE POINT FOUR BILLION Activision Blizzard King acquisition, by Microsoft CEO and boring artificial intelligence-shilling cunt Satya Nadella, but this is awful, and something’s not right. Microsoft and/or Xbox has committed to the BIGGER AND BETTER game development pipeline (full of anaemic dogshit), but isn’t willing to trust the process, or trust that the companies it owns will get there in the broken game development pipeline (full of anaemic dogshit) that it’s absolutely wedded to.
Once more, there’s sunk costs and ‘things not working out’, but what is Xbox actually doing to mismanage projects in this way? What were the circumstances behind Everwild’s reboot - who pushed for it? If management and its unrealistic expectations are clogging up the pipeline, are they just being impatient, and demanding results now, now, NOW because that’s what capitalism requires, despite it being completely at odds with those expectations? Though I know admittedly very little at all about it - the games industry seems to be eating itself. Creatives in the ‘Triple-A’ woodchipper seem unable to make decisions without oversight from managers - who have, thanks to the Peter Principle (‘every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence’), completely forgotten what it’s like to be in the development mine. Every decision has to be focus-grouped and unanimously agreed upon, even though no-one can agree on anything, and the pursuit of the art is at odds with this system in which the art is made. This sounds utterly painful, exhausting, and destroying - does it bear any relation to reality? If you’re in a position to talk about the reality of triple-A game development, please do write in. You can tell me if I’m full of shit, honestly.
It’s weird watching development studios that have previously gotten the balance between sustainable detail and scope during development absolutely spot on fall away from that into whatever the [redacted] the game development pipeline is now. Bully (2006) and its ‘Scholarship Edition’ 2008 remaster - already discussed on this site's predecessor at length - is a really good example of games being content with being ‘small’, but also being crammed full of ideas in that ‘an inch wide but a mile deep’ way. The map isn’t big at all, but Rockstar put in a whole lot of things to do in it, and created a believable student body, so I felt properly immersed in it. I think Bully (2006) is kind of puerile now, but on scope terms, it may be the apex video game.
Rockstar is also the company that once brought out five mainline Grand Theft Auto games in seven years (top-top set maths, that would be the first five, 1997-2004), and yet it’ll have been 13 years between Grand Theft Auto V (2013) and Grand Theft Auto VI (2026), so it’s weird for them to have become caught in the vortex as well. Less so, maybe, because there was 2018’s Red Dead Redemption 2 in between - though Rockstar staff did crunch on it in its latter development stages, and all crunch seems like to me is development studio managers trying and failing to hold back the tidal wave of the reality that games at a near-photoreal level of fidelity take an insurmountable amount time and effort that’s not really worth it for any video game of any kind.
Rockstar also have Grand Theft Auto Online, and it’s no coincidence that the birth of the tedium of the live service video game coincides with the traditional video game pipeline being [redacted] with excrement - it’s easier to maintain one long-term project on an ancient codebase than to embark on something finite that’s in and out of THE AMOEBANIC INTEREST CYCLE (think - how every game is a “dead game”) in no time. They’re still persisting with a proper single-player game with Grand Theft Auto VI, but 12 years suggests that the drive for photorealism really has gotten too big for its boots if Grand Theft Auto Online has really been a more efficient use of everyone at Rockstar’s time.
A solution
So, ‘triple-A’ gaming is fucked beyond belief - what now? Games shouldn’t look photoreal or be as long as they are. They should look and be shit. I’m being hyperbolic, and what I really mean is that games should be allowed to not be AMAZING - they can just be FUN, and if the developers involved can achieve that, without announcing a thing a decade in advance, spending aeons scuffing it out with management and achieving nothing, before a reboot and a cancellation, because it’s just a modest little fun application on the doohickeymabob - then they’re successful.
Vote with your wallet and buy smaller games - independent games, games developed at zero-crunch studios (which do, ironically, lead to long times between announcement and release, but that’s more an issue of announcing games too early, usually for baying shareholders - Chucklefish’s Witchbrook being slated for Winter 2025, but announced in 2016, springs to mind), and games that that won’t make the coils of your device scream for death. Buy games that are an inch wide but miles deep - maybe not looking like they’ll blow you away with photorealism, or by having an in-game map the size of the Moon, but trading that in for things like committing to an aesthetic, and robust feature-sets that have thought and depth behind them. Games that focus on being evocative, that stay with you, that excite you, rather than just being the NEW, BIGGER, BETTER installment in [franchise] that’ll never make every surface in its open world destructible or every interior explorable, so get over it.
I feel like advocating for this. I haven’t really voiced a strong opinion publicly on games, but increasingly, I feel like wanting to publish a worldview - reviewing games that are affordable (the Mario Kart World review I did was an utter betrayal in this regard, though I did I find it useful to document my time with a Nintendo Switch 2), and small in scope. I want to highlight and interview talent who are producing games that are just games, really - fun experiences - rather than franchise mulch as ritual sacrifice to shareholders. I want to produce some kind of publication that, just like the games I want to cover, that are setting out to be enjoyable and coherent art, is about the joy and evocation of games (with some industry [redacted] sprinkled in). I wonder if I can make something like this successful by working at it being engaging to read instead of casting pentagrams for Google search rankings and still losing out to Reddit.
