How far back from the actual release date does production usually wrap in the game industry? Does it vary a lot?

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I was wondering about this in relation to CP but the question itself is more general kinda. For me, the release date seems ages away. But from a developer perspective I'm guessing it is actually scary quick until then. Just wondering when the development / production part actually wraps up compared to the release date. Like... are we talking months? Weeks? Days? Or does this vary a lot from company to company? I used to believe that when it's done it's just "Ok pack it up boys, get it out there". No idea what other factors play into it. What makes it take so much time if the reality of it is more like 2-8 weeks or so?

Been a gamer all my life but never really got curious about this until now.
 
For physical distribution they have to have a "Gold" version of the game a while before release so the disks can be made and sent out. i would guess at least 3 months, that how ever is, in the last 10 -15 years anyway, not the end of development.

Is why we have a lot of day 1 patches.
 
Been a gamer all my life but never really got curious about this until now.
For physical distribution they have to have a "Gold" version of the game a while before release so the disks can be made and sent out. i would guess at least 3 months, that how ever is, in the last 10 -15 years anyway, not the end of development.

Is why we have a lot of day 1 patches.
The Witcher 3 went gold April 16, 2015 ... which was 1 month and 3 days prior to release. But development doesn't really stop there. Patches, tech support, DLCs, expansions, etc.
 
Lilayah stated in the Q&A with TheNeonArcade that work on Cyberpunk 2077 will pretty much continue onto the last minute before launch, with day 0 patches being likely.
That means they'll continue work in between shipping the "gold" version of the physical copies for consoles, and console players actually getting their hands on it. No such thing as a physical copy will even exist for PC - just a constantly morphing digital version that will continue to evolve for as long as CDPR is unhappy with it.

Expect development to wrap up several weeks AFTER release, even for a company like CDPR.

Compare that to titles like Anthem or Fallout 76, whose development never even technically ends. That's the hook with live-services. These publishers will ship the game when they think they've put in the minimal amount of effort and promise to work on it afterwards. The publisher will refuse to say at what date development is "done", but they will just drop all support and development when they think it's no longer worth it, since the game and its in-game purchases no longer sell.
 
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Gold (= mastering blu rays and shipping them around the world) starts 1 month before release pretty much for every company, but devs keep working on the game for the day 1 patch (so until few days before release) and 99% of the time after that for the other patches (TW3 got to patch 1.62 on PS4).
Hopefully CP won't come out as bugged as TW3 at release. I'm fine (NOT) with some glitches and crashes, but having to restart the game because one of the main missions (king's gambit, but a couple of smaller side quests as well) is bugged for 4 months after release is unacceptable. In particular if the CEO says they're aiming for a level of polishing compared to RDR2.
 

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The concept of "wrapping up" changed across the last 2 decades. It's not 90's or early 2000's where you simply HAD to deliver a functioning product on disk or else it was simply a brick or bad/buggy game.

Nowadays stuff sent as gold masters is usually nowhere near functional and sometimes even deliberately not functional knowing that game can be simply finished in day0/1 patch.

There's usually no such thing as old-school "wrap up" since it can even persist past day0 patch if the game really needed it.
In this day and age you can deliver content and fixes at will.


Theoretically i doubt there was any universal standard, in the old times i imagine having stable build that got solid Q/A for over a month time before being submitted as gold would've been ideal situation but i really doubt the industry has seen many cases of that.
 
It's a creative venture, so like most creative ventures, there will probably be people running around, fixing things, polishing other things, and coming up with exciting new ideas for years after the game is released.

As for when a game goes "gold"...it's kind of arbitrary. From everything I've ever seen or heard of, there will be devs still trying to frantically write things into the game while some project director is on a com somewhere saying:

"...seven...six...five...four...three...!"

:p
 
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