At several places I’ve worked, I developed a reputation as a “fun farmer.” I was the guy who’d play almost any game, regardless of the review scores, and try to find the nuggets of goodness in them. I could usually find something that made the effort worthwhile – a single feature, a great cinematic moment, or a clever bit of interface design.
Developers that only play top-rated triple-A games are missing out. Innovative ideas can come from anywhere; many negative reviews are highly subjective. There’s at least one game with a 70 Metacritic score that has been rightly criticized as janky and unpolished, but I’d still rank it among my top ten game experiences of all time.
That said, there’s no chance I will spend my gaming dollars, much less my time, on Skull Island: Rise of Kong. I’ve seen enough from the videos and trailers to know it’s not worth playing. Reviews for the game are beyond scathing; customer response has been even worse.
a rubber snake than with anything in Skull Island: Rise of Kong.
What Even Is This?
A casual peruser of the Steam store who didn’t know any better might get briefly excited stumbling across Skull Island. Playing as a destructive monster is a great idea; games as far back as the arcade classic Rampage farmed this fertile territory. The core vision of stomping around as a giant monkey fighting dinosaurs screams fun.
Further, until a customer digs a little, it would be easy to assume the title has the official license of the recent MonsterVerse movie franchise – King Kong and Godzilla’s most recent American outings at the box office.
I’ll admit to being an unabashed fan of the goofy MonsterVerse movies; there’s a lot of old-fashioned fun in their silly spectacle (provided you turn your brain off while the movie’s running). But Skull Island: Rise of Kong isn’t connected to the MonsterVerse; rather, it’s pulling from a separate and more obscure Kong-related novel and comic book license.
The intent seems clear – much like a low-budget horror movie might be rushed out the door in a blatant attempt to steal free press from a similarly-titled movie due out the following year, the publishers of Skull Island: Rise of Kong appear to be banking on a muddled license to sell a few extra copies.
What Happened?
Gamers rightly wonder how a game this genuinely bad ever gets released. The developers of the game, IguanaBee, are not novices – they’ve been in business for twelve years and have worked on several games.
The answer isn’t complicated. The game was built in a year. While it’s certainly possible to make a game in a year – say, a small well-scoped mobile title or a minor iteration of an annual sports franchise like Madden – creating a new game from scratch takes time, even for an experienced team.
Great developers make mistakes too, and it’s not always clear that a project is in trouble. An idea might look solid on paper; an early playable prototype might test well. But at some point, in the thick of production, unforeseen problems crop up – pipelines aren’t as efficient as expected, the vision doesn’t come together, or a team gets derailed to work on an unplanned trade show demo, costing the project time.
This is why the best studios build extra space into their schedules, especially for new games. Creative work needs time to breathe; developers need time to iterate on their initial ideas and polish content.
Who Gets the Blame?
It’s easy to point fingers at the publisher, who has a checkered history of releasing mediocre licensed titles on short timeframes. But arguably, that’s a bottom-line business gamble that has paid off for them in the past.
Gamers may not like the idea, but from a purely business perspective, releasing cheap, mediocre titles on a budget can be profitable – for a while. At some point, if a publisher’s reputation sinks far enough, the strategy no longer works.
These are not the kind of peak concurrency numbers
you want to see a week after shipping a game.
On the developer side, with a timeline of only a year and a relatively small team, it’s doubtful IguanaBee could allocate resources for significant iteration or polish. Indeed, it’s a minor miracle they shipped functional anything at all.
Here’s the thing: developers usually know when they’re working on a bad game. I’ve been fortunate enough to avoid shipping any total stinkers, but some of the games I’ve worked on have been better than others – and there are a couple on my list that I wouldn’t recommend. Still, it was my job to show up every day and try to make a bad game as good as it could possibly be with the resources we had.
Reports say the IguanaBee team suffered through a lengthy crunch on a title that’s rapidly turning into an industry joke. That’s the worst feeling imaginable – to pour your blood, sweat, and tears into a game, only to have it released in an unfinished, unpolished state.
So there’s only so much blame I’d place on the developers – other than to question why they agreed to build the game on that timeline in the first place. Though I’m sympathetic, I can’t let the developers entirely off the hook. They – or at least their management team – signed a deal for a project that was headed for disaster from Day One.
I don’t know what IguanaBee’s financial situation was when they signed the deal. How desperate were they? Was this a last gamble, a dice roll to save the studio from shutting down?
I’ve seen first-hand how decisions like that get made – how teams do what they have to do to keep the lights on. Unless they’re lucky enough to work on well-funded first-party triple-A games, most developers are always living closer to the edge than most people realize.
Because of the industry’s prevailing business model, many studios are operating month-to-month with just enough funding to get to the next milestone. One mistake – and one underperforming game – can lead to ruin.
In the end, I hope that IguanaBee survives and its developers go on to do great things. It’s clear that, at least in collaboration with other studios, there is talent there. Even the best developers get locked into bad deals with impossible timelines.
So let’s all enjoy a hearty laugh at the goofiness of Skull Island: Rise of Kong – it’s a chuckle-inducing release to be sure. But spare a moment of sympathy for the team that spent half a year crunching on it.
Someday – if they learn from this experience – they’ll go on to make something great.
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