Yearly releases are becoming common place for many franchises. But what is too much?
The original yearly releases.
If it’s not new, is it really a bad thing?
I think the answer is pretty simple; not as long as the product being released is high quality. If the game developer is ensuring that the game being released is entertaining, pretty to look at, and has high production value, than in the end the real winners are the consumers. We get more options for what we can spend our money on. This allows us to choose what we want to play and support the developers of new ideas with our money directly. The result “should” be more of our money going directly to the projects that will continue to push the envelope in quality.
In reality, the problem occurs with the fact that games that are released on an annual basis do not differ that much from year to year. This makes sense when you think about. Despite having separate teams working on each of the iterations, development is usually so far along that one is not able to learn from all of the mistakes of the other. Sure, there will be some opportunities for improvement, but not nearly enough to make the experience feel fresh. So you get into a cycle of issues that never ends. The game never feels quite good enough; the feedback is always late being addressed. And that’s when the iterations really start feeling stale, when the experience starts to feel the same.
