Skull Island: Rise of Kong, is considered by many to be the worst game of 2023, and it makes sense when you see how long it took to make. The development team, IguanaBee, only had a year to churn this game out a game thanks to constraints put by GameMill Entertainment. The result is a game that looks like it was made for the Sony PS2.
The Verge spoke to an anonymous source about Skull Island: Rise of Kong following the backlash the game received. The game was released on October 17, 2023, and quickly garnered attention on social media. Unfortunately, the attention it received wasn’t for its groundbreaking gameplay or stunning visuals but rather for its dated graphics and less-than-engaging gameplay.
The anonymous source said that IguanaBee’s potential was stifled by a tight one-year deadline imposed by GameMill Entertainment, a Minnesota-based game company. Developers from IguanaBee, based in Santiago, Chile, disclosed that they were only given 12 months to create the game from scratch, leaving them with little room to explore their full creative potential. It’s not hard to see why even IGN had to report on the “worst game” claims.
The circumstances surrounding the new Skull Island: Rise of Kong game raise questions about the practices of GameMill Entertainment. According to the Verge, they have a history of contracting smaller developers for licensed games with tight schedules. This pattern leaves developers with limited time to work and, in some cases, limited information about the projects they’re working on. These challenging circumstances can lead to setbacks and negatively impact the final product’s quality.
In my opinion, this kind of publishing cycle is not done by companies that care about the quality of their games. I believe that keeping developers tied to only a year of development to make a game from scratch is the type of thing that the industry should be far away from.
The anonymous source said that “the crunch was really set in motion in February,” and by the end of that month, they were on “automatic pilot” due to the overwhelming pressure of meeting an unreasonable deadline. The source claimed that limited funding and resources provided by GameMill made it challenging to maintain an experienced team throughout the project.
Forced crunch when the timeline is obviously set unrealistically is the worst part of our industry. Many developers are trying to fight against that, and if true, the end product is a great allusion to what it’s like to work under these kinds of conditions.
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