Adventures in the screens trade.
William Goldman wrote some brilliant books and some brilliant movies, and some brilliant books about movies.
And in his first book about movies, he casually defined a central rule of Hollywood.
Three maddening words: nobody knows anything.
These three words will probably outlast all of us.
Because really, nobody knows anything.
This is bigger than Hollywood, of course.
To rephrase Goldman’s thought, you might say: all art is a gamble.
Art galleries are filled with gambles that really paid off.
The gamble of art is the best gamble of all, I reckon.
I would like to get this out of the way first: this is a shame.
(Someone also pointed out that delaying a game is sometimes just delaying crunch, obv.)
That’s another angle I heard.
I like a lot of this stuff!
But look at the language from the publisher’s perspective.
Games cost a lot and have a lot riding on them.
Even if they’re relatively sure things - the language of gambling again - they can have catastrophic bugs.
They can alienate people with micro-transactions.
They can miss crucial financial quarters.
They can get delayed.
To put it differently: what doesStarfield’s - and Redfall’s - delay mean for Game Pass?
I don’t know, honestly.
Game Pass exists in part to make that a little less painful.
The chance - even minimised - that you release the game and find out that people have moved on.
That’s a gamble.
Less of a gamble, I think.
More of a sure thing.
What’s coming to Game Pass next?
But I suspect Game Pass wants to be similarly hard to break up with.
