Let’s Delay All the Games—But Only if Game Companies Do This Too

Ubisoft delayed Assassin’s Creed: Shadows again today. Originally scheduled for last November, its release date was changed to Feb. 14 last fall, and then pushed back again today to March 20. That’s good. Every game should be delayed. Next week’s Dynasty Warriors: Origins? Push that back to March, too. All of February’s big games, like Monster Hunter Wilds and Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii? It’s cool if we can’t get to ‘em until the summer. Hollow Knight: Silksong? Why ruin a beloved gag by ever actually releasing that one at all?

Let’s delay all the games. Every one of them. They could all use more work before getting released. But this should only happen if the games industry does something else at the same time: eliminate crunch entirely.

Delays are common in the games industry, and although they used to be frequently mocked and seen as a warning sign of a bad game by players, the public has become more tolerant of them over the years. There’s a popular quote, generally (and probably erroneously) credited to Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto, that “a delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad.” (Whoever did first say this was obviously speaking before the internet made it easy to patch games after release.) It can’t really be argued that more time allows for more fine-tuning and bug-fixing. Games can be completely reinvented after release now, but it’s still crucial to make a good first impression and release the best possible version of a game from the start. So take all the time you need.

But only if it’s done responsibly. Only if the health, well-being, and work-life balance of the people who make those games are always paramount. Only if crunch can be totally stamped out, along with the poor management that leads to it. Only if reasonable, regular work hours can be defined and enforced throughout the entire project, with workers allowed—encouraged—to take whatever sick days and PTO they’re entitled to. (They should all be entitled to both, of course; let’s scrap the exploitative abuse of contractor while we’re at it.) 

The system as it currently exists and has existed for decades—a system where workers are expected to toil away for far more than 40 hours a week for months, if not years, on end—needs to change. Like almost every major publisher, Ubisoft itself has a history of crunch, of course, and earlier this week People Make Games exposed allegations of abuse against a now-defunct Indonesian studio that supported the development of Assassin’s Creed: Shadows. Obviously this is wrong, and extending crunch via delays only makes it worse.

Game delays should be a pressure valve for situations in which crunch might start to seem necessary—if a game is at risk of missing its release date, delaying it is obviously a far better alternative to forcing designers to work overtime in hopes of making the original date. That’s not how game delays have traditionally worked, though. Game delays typically just prolong the crunch that designers have already been working under while trying to meet an unrealistic deadline forced upon them by executives focused exclusively on boosting shareholders’ value, extending—increasing, even—the stress and overwork that leads to burn out, harms employees’ health, and actually hurts productivity. When you see a game from a major corporation get delayed, it’s not a bad guess that it’s a sign of even worse management than usual for this industry—of employees getting worked to hell to drag a game into the endzone, only for the goal line to suddenly be pushed back another 50 yards, with crunch expected all the way.

This latest delay of Assassin’s Creed: Shadows isn’t necessarily a quality issue; it’s directly related to Ubisoft’s extreme financial struggles. One of the biggest game publishers in the world, Ubisoft owns a number of well-known franchises, but has a reputation for releasing formulaic, repetitive games. “Ubisoft” itself has become derogatory short-hand for a type of cookie cutter open-world game design that felt innovative 15 to 20 years ago but is now thoroughly exhausted. With the ever-expanding bloat and cost of making the kind of big budget AAA games Ubisoft is fixated on, and the company’s enthusiastic support of unpopular microtransactions, it’s no surprise that they’re currently over $2 billion in debt, with a stock price that has dropped over 80% in the last four years. Ubisoft revealed Shadows’ latest delay in a larger statement about plans to “reshape” the company, lending credence to recent reports that it will join the ranks of game publishers that have recently merged with or been bought by larger companies—almost always with employees subsequently getting screwed over through layoffs and studio closures. 

Ubisoft’s problems are directly connected to the same issues that have made crunch endemic to the industry—the kind of unchecked capitalism that makes everything worse for everybody except the increasingly smaller group of assholes at the very top. A long term “strategy” of shifting as much value as possible to executives and shareholders by increasingly “doing more with less” has driven Ubisoft to squeeze as much work as it possibly can out of an overtaxed, understaffed labor force too exhausted to perform at the best of their abilities, leading to uninspired, generic games that people don’t want to pay for. Bad ideas and bad treatment combine for bad games that sell badly. Delays don’t help that, but they could if they’re a result of treating employees humanely and giving them the time and support they need to make something worthwhile. Maybe Ubisoft wouldn’t be desperately trying to fob its debt off on even bigger suckers right now if it used smart, common sense management strategies that protected the long-term health of both the company and its employees all along? Yeah, we might not know a lot about managing a multibillion-dollar videogame company, but we also haven’t utterly failed at it like Ubisoft has.

Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, TV, travel, theme parks, wrestling, music, and more. You can also find him on Blue Sky.