Just on record, I don't think it will be bad. And by no means catastrophically bad. Too much money has been sunk in it by a company that, has so far, never really produced a bad game. Quite the contrary.
But this is a hypothetical discussion, so here goes:
For one thing, I don't think it would be big enough to significantly shake the foundations of the industry. It probably won't even hurt Rockstar all that much in the short term, since it seems the pre-order numbers alone are insane, probably more than enough to cover the development expenses, or at least significantly blunt the blow.
However, more importantly, I think they would lose a bunch of popularity and gamer good will. People have pre-ordered the game en-masse partly because of the massive marketing budget the game mush have had, but mostly because of Rockstar's and the franchise's reputation. Let's face it, all of the GTA games have been very good. Even GTA IV, flawed and weaker than it's predecessors as it was, was still a very good game.
This loss of popularity will probably be decisive in killing off a potential next super-high budget game from Rockstar. People just won't trust them enough to pre-order again in such numbers, and Rockstar probably won't be able to take the risk of another flop.
As for the industry overall, I think it would be detrimental. Oh, it won't cause a crash, or anything like that, but it will most likely discourage other big developers and publishers from investing massive sums. It probably won't have the positive effect of developers and publishers trying to realistically figure out WHY it failed, and work on avoiding such mistakes. They'll just say "oh noes, big budget no sale, big budget baaad"
And while it's true that a lot of games have over-blown budgets and that there needs to be a change, I still want to see a big, ridiculous budget game now and again, because a very large budget COULD produce an amazing game IF the game is well designed, if the money is well spent, IF there's no stupid interference from publishers, and so on. I really believe that the reason Tomb Raider, Hitman and other such games were big sellers but financial flops is due to the fact that the budget was poorly spent, not because it was too large.
But this is a hypothetical discussion, so here goes:
For one thing, I don't think it would be big enough to significantly shake the foundations of the industry. It probably won't even hurt Rockstar all that much in the short term, since it seems the pre-order numbers alone are insane, probably more than enough to cover the development expenses, or at least significantly blunt the blow.
However, more importantly, I think they would lose a bunch of popularity and gamer good will. People have pre-ordered the game en-masse partly because of the massive marketing budget the game mush have had, but mostly because of Rockstar's and the franchise's reputation. Let's face it, all of the GTA games have been very good. Even GTA IV, flawed and weaker than it's predecessors as it was, was still a very good game.
This loss of popularity will probably be decisive in killing off a potential next super-high budget game from Rockstar. People just won't trust them enough to pre-order again in such numbers, and Rockstar probably won't be able to take the risk of another flop.
As for the industry overall, I think it would be detrimental. Oh, it won't cause a crash, or anything like that, but it will most likely discourage other big developers and publishers from investing massive sums. It probably won't have the positive effect of developers and publishers trying to realistically figure out WHY it failed, and work on avoiding such mistakes. They'll just say "oh noes, big budget no sale, big budget baaad"
And while it's true that a lot of games have over-blown budgets and that there needs to be a change, I still want to see a big, ridiculous budget game now and again, because a very large budget COULD produce an amazing game IF the game is well designed, if the money is well spent, IF there's no stupid interference from publishers, and so on. I really believe that the reason Tomb Raider, Hitman and other such games were big sellers but financial flops is due to the fact that the budget was poorly spent, not because it was too large.
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