Why Red Dead Redemption 2's Delay Is a Good Thing

"A delayed game is eventually good, a bad game is bad forever."

By Alanah Pearce

Last week, Rockstar Games announced that Red Dead Redemption 2 has been delayed, and people are mad about it.

It was originally supposed to come out on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in Fall this year, but has been pushed to Spring 2018, with Rockstar stating, "some extra time is necessary to ensure that we can deliver the best experience possible for our fans. We are very sorry for any disappointment this delay causes, but we are firm believers in delivering a game only when it is ready.”

Never finished, just shipped.

Negative responses to delays always really confuse me, but especially in this case, where Rockstar's statement reads as an assurance of care and quality. We’re being told a studio who is almost guaranteed to make an enormous amount of sales doesn’t want to rush something. Grand Theft Auto V broke six world records, including the highest revenue generated by an entertainment product in 24 hours, and Red Dead Redemption 2 has already been predicted to sell at least 15 million copies. Rockstar could easily release Red Dead 2 this year and still make a sizeable profit, even if it’s riddled with bugs, but they aren’t. This is good. There’s a famous quote from Miyamoto, the man who created Mario, that says, “A delayed game is eventually good, a bad game is bad forever.”

Some of Rockstar’s success as a studio has to be attributed to the fact that they take their time producing high-quality, usually very highly rated games, too, and I'd prefer they hold true to that standard than play Red Dead 2 this year. They’re not new to delays either, and I completely understand the criticism that if a publisher isn’t sure about a release date, they shouldn’t announce one. The problem with that is that game development is really unpredictable, to the extent that it’s difficult to be entirely sure when a game will be ‘finished’.

Naughty Dog’s co-director, Bruce Straley, said, "The reality is, left to our own devices, we as developers would never ship a game because there’s always something else to iterate on, or new idea, or more polish to make the game better. It’s always going to be never finished, just shipped.” Diablo 3’s delayed launch seems to have been influenced by that, where Blizzard’s philosophy was that the release date shouldn’t determine the quality of the game — the quality of the game should determine the release date. It’s a noble idea, but because of that, Diablo 3 took 10 years to make, and still had issues on launch.

A release date that’s announced a year off is always a guided estimate, and something one designer thinks might take one month to make might turn out taking three. Important new code that updates one thing can break three others, and things have to be revised. From start to finish, making a game isn’t an exact science, and pulling a release date out of that mess can’t be easy. Regardless of the difficulty, marketing and sales departments need those dates to do their jobs, and publishers need them to have an understanding of their financial situation for a year.

Release dates help guide a game, and announcing them publicly helps marketing teams and sales teams, but delaying that release date can help all of us, in the end. It means the game we get to play is better. I think I’d be far more disappointed if Red Dead Redemption 2 is bad, than I am by not getting to play it this year.

Alanah Pearce is a Producer at IGN. You can find her on Twitter @Charalanahzard.

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