Journey Developer Jenova Chen Calls Live Service The Healthiest Way To Make Games
Journey developer Jenova Chen has worked on plenty of traditional titles over the years, but in his opinion, live-service games are the best option, at least in terms of maintaining a healthy work-life balance. This comes after nearly three years of providing consistent updates and support for his most recent game, Sky: Children of the Light.
The news comes from a recent interview by GameSpot. While creating content for a game over the course of numerous years might sound like a daunting prospect, Chen apparently prefers the live-service model to such a degree that he currently has no plans to make any further traditional titles.
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“It took me a long time to convert from console where you develop something and polish, polish, polish over several iterations, release it, take a two to three month break, and then go right into another one,” Chen remarked. “The live-service game, I think, now having gone through both premium cycles and live-service cycles, the live-service cycle is much better for work-life balance.”
Chen described the traditional development cycle in terms of nearly constant crunch. “With premium titles, if you need to launch on Christmas, you have to be crunching a year before that. You're going to crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch to get the game out before Christmas for maximum sales,” the developer pointed out. “Almost all premium titles work like that, but with a live-service game, you have an update every month. You have major releases every three months.”
When it comes to the process of production, live service apparently cuts down on conflict. “It reduces a lot of the fights we have, when we work on premium games,” Chen said. “We fight a lot near the end. It's like
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