Off The Grid: Why game developers ignore best practices
Especially when it comes to new technology
Off the Grid, a new battle royale shooter that launched last month, has had about as auspicious an entrance onto the market as a web3-enhanced game can hope for. It debuted on mainstream platforms like Playstation, Xbox, and the Epic Game Store (with, it should be said, no baked-in web3 components); it was streamed by major content creators like Ninja and Tim the Tat Man (though, it should be said, with plenty of money behind those campaigns); and it garnered a healthy cohort of players in a very short period of time. All in all, that’s pretty great. No egregious backlash against web3 technology, no door-in-the-face from the consoles.
At the same time, the game—whose audience has reportedly fallen precipitously since coming out—made a few cardinal errors that are predictable and avoidable. Releasing a game with early and sustained success is hard in the best of times, but the mistakes seem to rack up when studios are leveraging new technology. There’s something about existing “outside the box” that makes some studios ignore tried and true rules about game development and go-to-market. Sometimes, taking risks work out in their favor, and sometimes not.
Launch timing gone awry
Looking at Off the Grid specifically: the game launched about 2.5 weeks before Call of Duty Black Ops 6, the largest debut in the 20-year-old CoD franchise history. Typically, game developers know to avoid the October shooter crunch like the plague, especially if their game veers at all into that audience’s territory. Competing with a title as massive as CoD is something that even big-budget traditional AAA shooters try to avoid. It’s really a perfect storm for failure:
Marketing awareness shifts entirely to CoD which will be played by streamers even without influencer spend
Players will spend $70 on CoD and want to get their money’s worth, so they will shift their play time to that
Players what to play where their friends are, which is in CoD
Even games in other genres try to steer clear of the CoD vortex, but as another shooter, you can bet that OTG is vying for the same players who just plunked down $70 to play CoD with their friends. Sunk costs and social pressure don’t make for a great opportunity for an underdog newcomer.
When to launch games is more of a science than an art. The games market follows very predictable annual cycles, and because it’s a largely hits-driven business, there will only be a handful of games that create the waves in any genre, device category, and season. And many of those, like CoD, have annual releases or known live-ops update schedules. For new studios and IP, that means the optimal launch window for the most users and the least headwinds and competition is knowable.
For example, the summer tends to be a bad time to launch games. People are on vacation, at camp, outdoors, not inside nerding out on gaming. There is a natural contraction in revenue and MAU during the summer. The fall tends to be extremely busy for core games, as major releases come out and parents buy the latest games for their kids ahead of the holidays. For a title like Off the Grid and others that should avoid this season, February and March start to look great: people have new PCs or consoles from the holidays, they’ve got gift card cash burning holes in their pockets, and they’re just at the point of getting bored with CoD and other pre-holiday releases.
Why didn’t OTG launch during this time? We’ll discuss that later.
By the way, this phenomenon is not unique to games using web3. Unfinished Swan, which leveraged some new motion controls and visual storytelling also screwed itself with an October launch. Kinect Sports Rivals ironically launched too late—in April, 2010—well after people had already gotten over the novelty of Xbox’s failed motion capture tech, Kinect.
Wasting marketing powder too soon
Getting the top streamers to play your game normally costs a lot of money, and OTG spent handsomely to get several big names to do so. This is a great tactic when games are ready to receive and keep that influx of attention. OTG is not. The game is in early access, and there are the usual performance and play issues that come with that label. For a free to play game, that can be the kiss of death: throw a bunch of players into a game that isn’t as polished as it should be and give them no financial stake to keep them around and you’re going to find a now-cacophonous ecochamber of disgruntled and disloyal players. Even Ninja can’t save that. This isn’t to say that the game is unplayable—I enjoyed my time in it (though I haven’t returned)—but any issues combined with the competitive landscape mentioned above, and any moment where the player isn’t having the most fun is a mark against OTG when better alternatives are present.
There’s nothing wrong with generating early hype (and of course getting major streamers to play a game can be transformative, taking indie games into super success territory) but the games also need to be in a place of stability.
Often, games using new technology or mechanisms falsely believe that their innovations will be enough to overshadow hiccups in gameplay, and they tend to launch with this hubris, overlooking the fact that they’re not ready for primetime. No Man’s Sky is a perfect example of failure of best practice: the game hit the mainstream consciousness long before its debut with press tours and articles written about its infinite, procedurally generated world. The game was hastily rushed to market by Sony, with hilarious results. The number of Steam refunds for the title was near historic. All of those New Yorker et al. features were a waste, marketing fodder without meat behind them. Games can recover from this state (interesting, No Man’s Sky actually did), but it will never be to the level that matches what can be accomplished when the pre-launch media blitz and realized expectations jive.
Of course, plenty of AAA games from major studios without significant innovations also launch too soon. It’s well known that Hogwarts Legacy jumped the gun, and while it’s a good game its open world definitely shows signs of being a bit of a wasteland that could have used extra time for more content. That said, games looking to bring the new-new tend to do this as a rule, and without the benefit of massive teams who can fast-follow with patches and updates to close the gap.
Flouting security and safety standards
Security and safety issues can happen to any product (especially digital) at any time, and of course games are no different. Gaming has a long history of hacks, exploits, and unfortunate or even downright dangerous real-life situations. In more fun instances, modders can turn digital vulnerabilities issues toward interesting opportunities. But more often, game exploits result in gamers losing their accounts, their assets, or their status.
Every technical innovation in games has opened new wounds: digital accounts in early multiplayer games were easily exploited; Pokemon Go’s unique AR and location-based mechanics creating some potentially life-endangering scenarios for players; the Wii’s motion capture remotes wound up destroying many TVs and injuring some humans.
Off the Grid has to contend with the fact that web3 is a comprehensive new technology that spans accounts, payments, asset storage, and even game logic and server hosting. While the blockchain makes many things more inherently safe and transparent than private servers and walled gardens can, it’s also a new concept to most developers without well-recognized standards for safety and a fragmented infrastructure landscape. Lagging developer education and early standard confusion is something that plagues all new technology until the cutting edge researchers in the industry identify the best practices. The standards have been put in place in web3, but developers are still behind and many middleware providers are failing their developers and their users. Off the Grid, for example, makes use of wallet technology that is already known to be unsafe compared to a few gold standard offerings, like Sequence’s, that consider safety as a first order requirement. OTG’s accounts haven’t been compromised yet, but this is an example of only-a-matter-of-time that requires fast changes.
New shiny objects in the industry, like Telegram-based games, are also causing developers to throw out all notions of what’s correct and leading to hasty launches that, for example, ignore the significant security and custodial implications of using Telegram’s native auth.
Why do games do this?
There are a lot of reasons that games with new-fangled innovations rush out the door at the wrong time of year and with unpolished or even unsafe versions. The most common is funding—as the studio’s finances run dry the decision is between getting something out to start (hopefully) making money or to show traction for a new raise vs. costly improvements. And often the fact that new tech or mechanics underpin the game means that more time and money is spent understanding and integrating which eats into the runway more than a vanilla copy/paste title might see.
Another reason is that developers are keen to see what they perceive as white space or a fleeting moment to seize the hype cycle of new technology or fads. If there’s a flash in the pan moment that feels like a developer can be on the scene before anyone else, studios will race to take it in an effort to capitalize on less crowded discoverability. We’ve seen this with esports, where games wanted to grab the opportunity around competitive play picking up steam; with VR, in which studios tried to be first to market on new devices in the hopes of being discovered in a less noisy environment; with web3, where the first “games” were little more than gambling with jpegs; and most recently with AI, where bad games are made worse with bad art, bad narratives, and bad gameplay.
The extra burden of web3
Web3 is a particular beast with added external pressures to what I mentioned above. Off the Grid is a web3-enhanced game, a technology that unfortunately still suffers from influences that have nothing to do with launching and maintaining a successful game. One is this nebulous idea of seizing the “bull run.” Crypto prices aren’t really tied to anything based on reality; they don’t move relative to the adoption or fundamental value of web3 technology, nor do they follow seasonal flows. This means that developers are often trying to optimize for an unpredictable market (rather than, say, avoiding CoD) and a super small but—they hope— rich degen audience flush with bull market crypto to buy and trade their wares. This heavily complicates launches and impacts how developers think about when their games are ready and when the time of year is right. If you want to seize the bull run, you’ve got to do whatever the crypto gods tell you to, business sense or not.
To make matters worse, many games are looking to launch their own tokens. Far from being best practice, these tokens are verifiably, currently, the worst practice. As I wrote in the piece I link to above, no gaming token has ever reflected the positive performance of the game (in fact, often the inverse). Tokens are products unto themselves, requiring entire teams dedicated to their design and marketing. Their launch timing and marketing cycles are separate from the game, and divorced from the natural order of the gaming market, but some games will time the go-live of the title to predate an arbitrary launch of a token.
For many of these games, the token is seen as alternative fundraising, something to mitigate the aforementioned runway crisis that leads some games to publish prematurely. Ironically, the very thing web3 developers hope to use to increase their runway ends up having the most negative influence on the actual potential of the game itself.
I’m not saying that this is what OTG did, but let’s not be surprised if a token is launched imminently, and the game’s poor choice of debut month may have something to do with foreseeing the skyrocketing crypto prices we’re experiencing now rather than a window of white space in shooter players’ time and spend.
What to do better
Ultimately, developers will do what they have to do to survive, and sometimes that means making choices that are a bit self-sabotaging. It’s unfortunate to see, but it’s not unusual for many hits-driven businesses where consumers will make snap judgements about what’s good and what isn’t. Many movies would love to do infinite reshoots and script changes, but they’ve got their own schedules and pressures to get out the door and their own best practices to ignore.
The biggest piece of advice, especially for newer studios, is to take the time to understand the lore of the industry in what can go wrong, diligence innovations deeply, and be aware of the world around you which has the data and insights to help you do better. When you’re heads down racing to the finish line inside an echo chamber innovation hype bubble, it can be very hard to remember where you came from and be receptive to what’s happening in the larger gaming ecosystem. If you look, the best practices will always reveal themselves.