The article in question comes from British GQ and is primarily focused on Netflix’s award-winning series Stranger Things in the wake of season 4’s critical success and the Duffer Brothers using selective editing to address plot holes in earlier seasons. An example the Duffer Brothers provided in a separate interview was editing an in-episode date from season 2 to match up with another character’s birthday in season 4. Matt Duffer described these choices as a “George Lucas’d” episode, comparing it to re-edits Lucas did on the original Star Wars trilogy from the mid-90s onward.
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GQ was straight to the point with its comparison to video game development and post-release patches, touching on the subject at the start of the article. The article says the launch of the Xbox 360 opened the door to a new age of digital development where studios could address things like weapon balancing in multiplayer or random bugs following a game’s release, effectively extending the game’s lifecycle. GQ goes on to say, though, that “innovation is often fuelled by laziness” and how studios can now be “negligent” in the development process since issues can be fixed with patches starting with a day-1 update, a notion GQ double-down on via Twitter.
The article quickly went viral and drew the ire of both players and many people within the video game industry on Twitter. One such person was Catherine Litvaitis, a member of the marketing team at Armor Game Studio, who questioned whether the author could actually name a developer and pointed out how out of touch GQ’s stance is.
Others were also quick to point out how the article, itself, was corrected shortly after it was published.
Despite GQ’s stance on patches being “lazy,” most players and developers can argue recent history proves otherwise as many more stories of crunch-time development have come out. Crunch has been an unfortunate aspect of game development for many years, with stories coming out about Bioware and “Bioware magic” in the wake of Anthem’s much-maligned 2019 release, with the “magic” referring to the studio completing development days before the game’s release. Subsequent stories came out from studios such as Netherrealm Studios and Bethesda about toxic crunch culture, something which many studios have been working to address in different manners, whether it be expanding development teams or delaying titles.
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Source: GQ
