Kunos and Reiza are two studios who’d be happy to testify to it being more a matter of prioritization and not manpower.
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Well triple A studios are less effective, because of the chain of command is so freaking long. It’s not like in the early 2000’s anymore. Now the indie studios can fix stuff in a few hours and triple A need weeks/months/years for that. It’s the same problem in many triple A studios.
It’s the same with the government, the less government the more effective everything becomes. Just take a look at Javier Milei in Argentina, he takes out the trash and it works wonders for that country that once was the richest country in the world. The longer the chain of command, the more buerocracy etc. the less effective everything is. Bloated institutations etc. slows down processes and makes it uneffective.
If you only have a 10 man team you only have to communicate with these ppl, but if it’s a bloated mess everything takes a horrible long time.
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You’re right, you can’t. So you lay them off.
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That doesn’t solve the problem.
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I wasn’t implying that it does, just stating the reality of the situation. If there’s no more work to be done by (or no more money in the budget for) members of a particular department, those employees are shown the door. Which is exactly what Microsoft has been doing lately, increasingly so since the whole Blizzard/ Activision buyout. Gotta pay off that $75B somehow, it seems.
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No-one should be commended for taking 12 months to almost reach release date promises.
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I don’t think your government example works here. For one thing, governments are infinitely more complex and complicated to manage than a video game studio, and for another thing, even the biggest and bloated governments can align themselves enough to accomplish common goals.
It’s about prioritization, not studio size. If Kunos and Reiza had Microsoft/Rockstar money and nothing else changed, they’d have the sim-racing genre locked down for generations. Turn 10 has access to those resources, but they are on the path to bumbling their way out of the genre (or worse) depending on how the next several months go.
From the moment this game launched, Turn 10 had three priorities/objectives laid before them - fix what was broken, improve the gameplay experience, and polish the visual experience, in that order. Have they fixed what was broken? Personally, I’d say no, but for the sake of the conversation, let’s call that a yes. Have they improved the gameplay experience? ABSOLUTELY NOT. The career mode and multiplayer mode are exactly the same as they were in October 2023, shortcomings and all. There has been effectively less than zero movement on changing either of those modes for the better. What little has been done has been in the form of new content, frantic fixes to said new content (usually after being called out on live television), and half-hearted “fixes” and workarounds for existing content. So frankly, Objective #2 is still incomplete and does not show any signs of even being addressed in the near-future.
But they’ve already moved on to the third objective. They’ve shown far more interest in dealing with the third objective (improving the visual experience) than they have in addressing the first two. But even then, it seems Turn 10 only cares to address those who have killer PCs that are built with the best stuff on the market. If you’re running a console (like I am - Series X)…well, tough. No RTGI for us, and the overall game looks less polished than Forza Motorsport 6, which will soon be looking at the sunny side of being 10 years old.
If Turn 10 are actually serious about keeping this franchise alive, then the first thing they need to do is get their priorities straight. Going full Jerry Jones on this game is not going to win anyone back.
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At 13:59
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“Smothered in hubris” is surprisingly accurate when trying to succintly describe this game in layman’s terms, as is the assertion that the dev team really should go play the competition.
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It’s premature for me to feel any excitement about AC Evo.
If its prior 2 installments are any indicator, it still needs years of work.
Launching early access in January is just another case of getting customers to pay to be testers.
…but at least its creators are being honest about that.
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No bonus points for launching a mess and taking months/years to clean it up.
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I purposefully ignore anything about AC EVO. I don’t want to know anything about it. Some things do get put out there, but I am not actively looking for info. When it releases, I’ll pay attention, starting with the user reviews. I don’t want to hear any videogames journalist, youtuber or racing website’s take on the game. I want nothing but what players think about it.
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Of course, it makes sense that every organization has a division of labor across different specialties/departments.
…But no aspect of this game meets what anyone should reasonably expect from having a team of specialized professionals dedicated to it.
• Programming a digital car to drive itself around a digital race track among other digital cars is certainly no trivial task for an inexperienced layperson, but it also should not be a 20-year problem for an entire team of specialized professionals dedicated to it.
• Having a “BTS AMA” about car audio describing (again) the process of sourcing & recording car sounds does not explain or justify why this game’s car audio is so underwhelming after 20 years of supposedly having an entire team of specialized professionals dedicated to it.
…etc. - Going down the list of all the game’s different functional areas, the results delivered in each area make me wonder if each area truly does have a team of specialized professionals dedicated to it.
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Wow, FM needs another year to catch up to FM7’s track count
Wow, they still haven’t released drag mode.
Wow, it took a year for RTGI to be added.
Wow, 90% of career mode reward vehicles are recycled from older FM.
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I think in every company/studio/whatever there are times where they have dream teams and then there are the other times and it’s the opposite. It’s a combination of company intern issues, personal issues, some ppl also simply pass away or want to do other things etc. the good ppl leave the company and get replaced by not good ppl etc. the results are bad games/products/whatever.
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Kunos and Reiza both do great work with much smaller teams and there’s definitely better prioritization going on, but their way of dealing with employees compared to AAA studios also plays a big part imo. Motivated employees with institutional knowledge are extremely valuable to have, even more so when proprietary engines are used.
If all the talk about how contractors are used in MS studios is true, that alone would cause huge amount of issues.
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After reading threads like these, I wish I could just have a sitdown with Dan and ask:
What went wrong man? Where’s the passion? Do you not have control over things anymore?
FM 2-4 used to bring me such joy every time I fired up my X360. Even FM 5 and 6 kept me happy for a while. But since FM 7, they haven’t had that edge. Other developers are doing it better and continue to do so.
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Something better to learn from in terms of car customization and audio…
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All due respect, I still don’t understand the enthusiasm some players have for defending bad decisions that hurt their experience with the game. I don’t think it’s fair to talk down on devs like in some older threads in this forum - I’m sure they are hard at work. What 100% deserves criticism though is management decisons when it comes to prioritisation (as mentioned by others) and decisions regarding FOMO for example. Let’s be honest here, there’s just no explanation for some things. You don’t need an extra team of coders to add a drift lobby. Yet, T10 didn’t hesitate to pat themselves on the back for adding a “drift mode” without providing the platform for players to enjoy it. It just feels like T10 management lives on a different planet sometimes. And I want to remind you that Nordschleife released earlier in the times of peak criticism of the game. Was it a coincidence?
People have asked for a new Forza wing model for at least 7 years (I didn’t play FM before FM7) - and it’s nowhere to be found. Not because it’s a hard job, but because nobody rendered it necessary despite it ruining every car aesthetically. 
I don’t really enjoy discussing this, so I see no purpose in expanding on other examples but as I said, I just don’t understand why people make up excuses for that kind of business, in a way giving T10 a green light on continuing bad practices
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I don’t make up excuses for them or defend them, I just try to approach the topic with something called common sense. There are always reasons why things are the way they are, we don’t know what is going on behind the scenes there.
I don’t know if you watched that YouTube video of that guy that worked there, but it is interesting. You can probably find it if you enter “18-6 contracts Forza Motorsport” or something in a search engine.
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