Cinematics are mostly for storytelling purposes, but they also hid a very real secondary purpose - we would do a lot of game setup during cinematics, like streaming data off of a physical disc while the cinematic is playing so that we can load what comes next. If we need to load a bunch of assets, it's much better to hide that in a cinematic than pop up a loading screen or force a decompression area like a tight locked corridor to hide the new environment popping in. This kind of thing is less important now that we can install the full game to the hard drive and most gaming devices are now ru ..read more

There are certain things that studios and companies can ask us not to do but have a real hard time preventing, especially if the company is going through a death spiral process. Keeping a personal copy of stuff I worked on, especially in an age of remote work, is one of those really hard-to-prevent things. If the company or studio is going under, almost everyone is losing their jobs and the motivation to maintain operational security is very low. Nobody in security cares when their main priority suddenly shifts to finding a new job. In these situations, leaked stuff happens a lot more often si ..read more

There's a whole field called Marketing Analytics that is dedicated to quantifying the results and context of marketing efforts. It is rare for companies to spend a large amount of money (e.g. on marketing budgets) without some means of measuring what they get from spending it. This measurement generally includes things like impressions, click-through rates, time spent engaging with the content, google searches for the marketed material, visits to the websites, view counts, average and median watch time, and so on. There are a lot of key performance indicators that analysts will track in order ..read more

You're talking about downtime. Whenever I have downtime I try to be productive if I can, but the type of downtime determines what I can do. There's two main types of downtime - when my workstation is still usable and when it isn't. If my workstation is still usable (e.g. the build is broken but I can still look at code/script/assets/etc.) then I notify my team that I've got some bandwidth and downtime to help out as a second set of eyes on any tasks my team might need help with. I can do code, design, or asset reviews for teammates and I can look over the various Slack discussions on other in ..read more

It has certainly happened in the past, though not necessarily specifically the narrative part of the game. Many games are pushed to launch without development being as far as they want it to be due to reasons like hitting their budgetary limit and needing to recoup some of the investment. Our estimates are only estimates after all, sometimes we run into unforeseen problems and things take longer than expected. We can't stop paying the developers when we hit snags like that, so certain features end up more costly than others, which eats into the budget that was earmarked for other stuff instead ..read more

The cost of making changes entirely depends on how expensive the individual changes are to make. That is generally dependent on how many people are needed to do the work to make those changes. Once upon a time, back when all cutscenes were pre-rendered FMV, it was tremendously expensive to make changes because making any small change required re-rendering the entire video which was enormously expensive. Today, for an in-game cinematic, a lot of the things are done in real time so we can swap things out as needed. For the specific assets used in the cinematic, it depends on what it costs to ma ..read more

I've actually worked on and shipped more than one annual sports title over my career and I want say for the record that the idea that annual sports titles are "mostly minor tweaks and roster changes" is absolutely and categorically false. Annual sports titles absolutely do not have the same scope as AAA games with multi-year dev cycles, but they do absolutely have significant breadth and depth of scope each year beyond "minor tweaks and roster changes". The majority changes that occur each year are spread out because they must be - there simply isn't enough development time within the ~11ish ..read more

It's really hard to say because every project is different. The kind of games that have the least cut content are annual sports titles - they have the most stringent schedules and know exactly what they are committing to with each annual cycle, so they have significantly less wiggle room than a project with a longer schedule and bigger scope (e.g. GTA6). The games with the most cut content are often those that manage to make it out of development hell, the kind of games that are lucky to get released at all. The other thing is that cut content often comes in various degrees of completion. Som ..read more

The importance of the narrative depends primarily on how important the narrative is to the game. For a game like Overwatch, where the core gameplay is team pvp, the narrative is a lot less important and things like relationships are generally prioritized. It matters more that each character fills the specific gameplay needs of a team-based pvp shooter than it matters that these characters are brothers or that group has a rivalry with this one. In a situation like Overwatch, the narrative tends to be more like the glue that holds the bigger parts of the game together - it's decided on later onc ..read more

A good rule of thumb when answering questions like "Why don't companies do X anymore?" is to think about what X will cost them and what X will get them in return. The purpose of doing things is ostensibly to generate value - no one does X without a reason. There needs to be a method to determine whether the returns of a choice are worth the costs of that choice in order to make a decision. Let's consider the bigger costs of recording "Making Of" videos, and then consider the gains from releasing those "Making Of" videos. Producing behind-the-scenes "making of" video requires getting a film cr ..read more