Games That Never Made It: Spend the Night

Game development, particularly in recent years, is a costly and risky investment. While anyone can build low-end titles with a little time and effort, the type of game that sells enough copies to fund a studio of artists and programmers is an entirely different proposition. For a new studio, this challenge is magnified tenfold. Programmers and artists do need to eat and make house payments during the development of a new game, and that means the studio has to secure investment funding up front, while the game is little more than a concept. If a new studio loses the funding for their flagship title, it could well mean the end of the studio.

Such appears to be the fate of Republik Games, a Hollywood studio that all but shut down in 2006 when investors failed to appear. Their flagship title, Spend the Night, may have doomed itself before it ever had a chance.

At its core, Spend the Night appeared to be a cooperative multi-player dating game. The idea was that in-game avatars would find dates, and then play out those dates with another player controlled avatar. On the downside, this sounds sort of like an RPG without any character development. Alternatively, it could be seen as the logical extension of The Sims, albeit narrower in focus. Was there a market? Republik thought so.

In 2005, Glennis McClellan who left Buena Vista games to join Republik, said the primary audience for Spend the Night numbered about half the world's population. In her own words:

"There's a myth that women aren't interested in erotic content, which is totally untrue. Women are just as interested in sex as men are but there is little in the way of online content for this vast market. We plan to get women involved, put in features they care about, and make our game both entertaining and accessible."

A social game with potentially endless replay value and immense expansion and marketing potential targeted at a demographic that had largely been ignored by the gaming industry to that time... what's not to love? Done correctly, a title such as this could have been as big as, well, as The Sims. They could have been selling expansion that included digital version of real world popular date locations... restaurants, theaters, theme parks, sporting events, gaming trade shows, etc. This title could have been a gold mine.

So what went wrong? Hard to say, exactly. We do know that in 2006, Republik announced they could not secure funding and were halting development. Today, the Republik website still features Spend the Night, but there is little information, no updates, and not much reason to think this title will ever see the light of day.

As I mentioned earlier, I personally suspect that potential investors looked at the coverage portraying this game as little more than a sex simulator, imagined trying to get it past the ESRB with a rating other than Adult, and decided it was not worth the risk. For Spend the Night to succeed, it absolutely had to have a rating no higher than Mature, else stores such as Wal-Mart would never have displayed it and the target demographic would never have seen it. With much of the conversation on Spend the Night portraying it as something more suited to an adult book store than a standard department store, the game was doomed.

This is not an unusual sage. Games die before they are born more often than we think. Spend the Night, or something very similar, may yet make it to the shelves of your friendly neighborhood gaming store, but for now the idea lays forgotten on the trash heap of abandoned games.

Another One Bites the Dust

Matrix Online is shutting down. The real news in this story, of course, is that Matrix Online was even still running in the first place. Back in 2004 when this game went beta, all eyes were on the MMO universe. There were titanic titles just coming out or on the horizon in those days: World of Warcraft, Star Wars Galaxies, Matrix Online, and Guild Wars. And now, 5 years later, World of Warcraft is cultural behemoth rewriting the rules for community size and revenue stream while leaving all other in its sizeable shadow.

And yet the MMO field draws more competition every year. Matrix Online is not the first major title to be shut down, face serious contraction, or generally under perform expectations. It won't be the last. Still, studio after studio are foaming at the mouth to dive into the MMO space. Persistent, subscription based worlds are a dime a dozen these days, and no good businessman charges headlong into a packed and highly competitive marketplace. Unless that businessman runs a gaming company, of course. There are other ways to drive revenue, however. The Sims, for instance, gets plenty of mileage out of regular, lower priced micro-expansions. Thats a model that could work for RPGs too, I think. The Half Life Episodes already trend in that direction. Under such a model, the game could continue to live on for decades giving it the chance to become one of those landmark titles, such as Doom, Civilization, or Halo.

The MMO graveyard will continue to grow, at least for now I'm afraid. Perhaps one day sanity will return and interesting new franchises and worlds will be given a fair shot at success by not chucking them into the meat grinder of subscription gaming. Hopefully some smart developer will look for new ways to fund his studio, a way that doesn't include server shut-down dates and titles that just quit working. Like novels, games should never come with an expiration date.

Free the Duke!

Any children out there who dream of growing up and starting game development studios should keep the recent Take Two v. 3D Realms fracas away from their parents at all costs. I am not a lawyer. I am not going to attempt to discuss the legal end of this mess or try to figure out who is right and who is wrong. Instead, I'll just be hoping that this is simply another episode in the star-crossed saga that is Duke Nukem, and not a sign of deeper problems in the gaming industry.

But first of all, some background. If you haven't heard of or played Duke Nukem in the past, then run, don't walk, to Good Old Games and pick yourself up a copy. If you like bad jokes and blowing stuff up, this game is made for you.

Now, you no doubt notice that the most recent Duke title there is old no matter how you slice it. So... whats been happening in the meantime? Good question. In brief, Duke Nukem Forever. The Wikipedia article has a decent summary of the situation, certainly enough to start the investigation. And please, no need to get your eyes checked... that really does say Duke Nukem Forever has been in development since 1997. This game predates the euro, the professional career of Peyton Manning, and Jurassic Park 3.

Now recently, the story has taken another turn (for the worse). Lots of stuff has been written on this over the past few weeks, and I highly recommend you read some articles on the topic, including regarding the recent lawsuit. In brief, 3D Realms ran out of the funds needed to continue developing DNF and laid off the entire development team. The company apparently still exists and still holds the rights to develop the game, they just cannot afford to do so at this time. Take Two, the publisher, doesn't like that much and there is now a lawsuit between the parties on various issues pertaining to that dispute.

It is far too early to say how this will be resolved, if it will be resolved, or what the fate of the DNF project currently in development will be. In the meantime, this does serve as a bit of an eye opener into the interplay between developers and publishers. Developers understand that a game is a creative work on an epic scope. It is ready when it is ready and it really cannot be rushed. The best games tend to be the ones that were not forced out the door to meet deadlines, but the ones that were left to develop until the artists and programmers and creative folk who made the magic felt it was good enough to be released. Meanwhile, publishers need games on the store shelfs selling copies. The result is an industry where the publishers put increasing pressure on the developers to make it faster, make it cheaper, just get it to market and patch it later. We read of publishers forcing ridiculously short development times on their studios, of potentially good games failing in the market due to endless bugs, and of sad disasters like 3D Realms and the old Duke. Will it ever change? I hope so. For now, the best we can do is hope the Duke is soon freed and this episode is merely a case of misfortune and not a harbinger of things to come.