Thatgamecomany's Jenova Chen Sees Live-Service Games As The Healthiest Way To Make Games

gamespot.com:

Jenova Chen is known predominantly for directing the 2012 video game, Journey. It may not have featured traditional multiplayer mechanics, but it was a traditional video game in that it had a beginning, a middle, and an end, and you paid for it once. Chen's latest game, Sky: Children of the Light is a live-service game that has been going strong for three years with consistent updates, the largest of which is available now.

You would think that creating and updating a game consistently for more than three years would create more work for a developer, but Chen has learned that he prefers it to the point where he doesn't even see himself returning to the world of premium, traditional game development. While speaking with Chen about the current state of Sky: Children of the Light, we also talked to him about his preference for creating live-service games.

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GameSpot: Do you prefer continuing to develop a game over the course of many years following release and issuing frequent updates? Or would you rather make something closer to Journey--a single project that is essentially complete once it is released?

Jenova Chen: I have been thinking about this. 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. The live-service game, I think--now having gone through both premium cycles and live-service