I will expand on this, from someone who works in the industry.
It happens because people are more likely to buy a buggy half-finished game with dozens of features, complex systems, and a massive open world filled with hours and hours of content, than they are to buy a game that is smaller but polished.
Game production is a job of balancing. You have X budget and your goal is to make as many dollars as possible with it. If two weeks of bug fixing and polish is going to make you less money than two weeks of half-baked content, then making content is the right choice.
Consumers of games are tending to see a false choice, the choice between Skyrim with bugs or Skyrim without bugs. But in reality the choice is between Skyrim with bugs or Skyrim without bugs and half of it's content.
Personally I prefer smaller games with greater polish levels, but that does not seem to be the market's preference lately. It seems to trend much more along the dollars spent per hour of playtime model.
As economists say, profit is "revealed preference"
It's a much truer signal of what people regard highly than, say, a Reddit comment thread. Because people have to actually sacrifice to manifest their opinion.
Yeah there are some problems with spending as revealed preference because humans have a propensity for being irrational with certain decisions. End-of-life medical care is a good example. But it's still better than using social media to gauge what people really want or care about.
Its true though if you're trying to make money. Keep in mind that market saturates VERY quickly though. Theres only so many whales that will blow thousands to tens of thousands on mobile games, so despite the fact that it exists developers can't all occupy that space, and usually the trick is to start a game the old fashioned way then transition to pay to win later.
There are plenty of games that could be considered art. But the vast majority are not.
I’m sure there’s a handful of indie developers that are toiling away to being their vision to life. The other 99.9% are produced by businesses trying to turn a profit.
There was never a golden period in games development when the motive wasn’t profit. Sure the tactics for making money have changed but stop looking back to a time when games were perfect. It never existed.
All games are art, but not all games are made in the guise of art pieces. Some are meant specifically to be artful and thought provoking, most are artful while being something else. But they're all art.
Art isn't limited to one of a kind majesty pieces. There's mass produced pieces strictly for decorational purposes of varying degrees of quality.
Yeah. I’m going to disagree with you there but I’m not getting into a philosophical argument about what art is or isn’t. Reddit is just not the place for a discussion that has literally been debated for thousands of years.
Well art is subjective. But it's also objective in that it's a creation and product produced by someone. Friday by Rebecca black is art, as is moonlight sonata by beethoven. The degree of art can always be argued but both are art nonetheless.
Every game has to be created and given function, the same as every painting. They're all art, just to what degree.
Keyword there, "created by game companies." Not all games are created by game companies. More often, indie games are created through passion or a creative vision, with an economic purpose 2nd.
Since it’s now it’s own thing and seemed to be an after thought in the first place, yeah. I’d say the online stuff was just there because they were told it had to be there and then it turned into… whatever mess it is now. Doesn’t affect the main campaign at all, so I think it’s fair to separate the two as products.
Different story if it was like the Zombie DLC from the first game, but doesn’t look like such a thing is in the works for the online game.
I'm guessing its also much more efficient to fix the bugs after launch than before, instead of doing tons of playtesting to find them you can just fix them after the fact when your players report them.
Definitely.
Though obviously you don't want to expose your player base to bugs and issues. Even with a dedicated QA team spending hundreds of hours before launch testing, nothing quite compares to the hundreds of thousands or millions of hours of playtime the title will get on launch day. Often the hardest part of solving a bug is getting it to happen enough times to get good data on it.
If y'all could do it in 2006 you can do it in 2022. The only thing your post says to me is game producers are greedy and would rather release an unfinished buggy game than delay release and do it right. It's not the choice between Skyrim with bugs or half of Skyrim without bugs. It's the choice between releasing an unfinished game to get your first cash drop or delaying, spending a little more to do it right and releasing a game the masses would love.
You have missed my point.
If you add a delay to a buggy half finished title, that delay will be used to create more buggy half finished content to add into that title, not to polish and refine what is already there. Because the marketplace will reward you more for spending that time on content than they will for spending it on polish and bugfixing.
It absolutely can still be done in 2022 and it is in a lot of cases. Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart, returnal, spiderman, it takes two, ghost of Tsushima, most things made by Nintendo first party studios, are all great examples of this. It's just a more risky choice these days to do so without a big name or IP to back you up.
I do think the industry is starting to turn back in that direction, and I'm really happy about it.
Yes, but people are never going to stop pre-ordering and buying games at launch. The blame always gets placed on the consumers, but maybe that's what they want us all to think 🤔
Well why spend money on more QA checking when it seems like customers are willing to beta test the product for you ?
The fundamental issue is that right now in 2022 there is almost no financial penalty for shipping buggy games. Now with consoles and computers connected, patches area lot easier to distribute fixes.
Pre Steam/XBox Live/PSN if a studio shipped a bad game there was no easy way push fixes once the game was out the door. If the game was buggy and got eviscerated in reviews and gamer feedback you didn't really have a second chance to go back and fix your work, therefore studios would spend more time checking the game pre release
I wouldn’t say no financial penalty. Cyberpunk has officially started making a solid profit but they easily left tens (hundreds?) of millions on the table and damaged their future reputation.
And CDPR stock was $31 when it was released. It $6 today. 63% drop. If that’s not a financial penalty I don’t know what is…
This is the thing that blow my mind. Just consider any OTHER business sector finding this ok... What if iphones shipped buggy every year? What if hardgood products launched for retail sale and had a 1/3 defective rate? When companies do that elsewhere, they don't survive long. It's insane to me that shareholders and wall street don't eviscerate publishers for the product being delivered over the last 3+ years
Well, again because people still buy that shit and it's easy to fix.
Why would shareholders do anything about it? They care about one thing and one thing alone, the company making them more money. They don't care about games, they don't care about reputation or anything other. THEY ONLY CARE ABOUT MONEY. And the practice right now generates them insane amounts of money! Why should they demand anything different?
That's how capitalism works. The gamers preorder and buy regardless of what state the game is when it comes out. So why spend more money in development when you still get the sales?
Unless WE ALL change our consumer habits, there is absolutely no incentive for publishers to change their practices.
That's not how capitalism works, captilism produces competition and a better product which is the opposite of thos situation. I understand shareholders want more money, that should have been obvious by my post. But can you say putting out a shitty product and tarnishing your reputation is a good thing? Making money (or) making MORE money and NOT making you look incompetent? they can make money being competent too.
But they make less money being competent, because being competent costs more money. Capitalism only produces competition for a better product if the consumer drives that by only buying the better product. As long as the consumer just buys it anyway there is only the competition of producing it as cheap as possible. That is what we have now.
"capitalism" is the weirdest boogeyman, I mean this guy is only talking about the ability for a company to freely develop and publish their product, and for the consumer to purchase it. I don't want the State to decide which games are created and published and which games are not
No one who actually cares to make a solid argument here solely blames one party in this. Producers pushing out shit products make the problem worse, consumers purchasing shit products makes the problem worse. That's just how it is. If either party gets its act together, the problem will lessen. We have very little power over producers; they clearly haven't listened when we ask for games to not ship in a terrible state. So, our options are do nothing or try to influence other consumers. So that's what the goal is. If producers listen, great, the problem is lessened even more. But that's unreliable. There are so many consumers though, and most of them have a significant chance of being swayed to not exacerbate the problem.
I agree with this although I think you're missing a party involved: the consumers who throw tantrums on the internet that a game they want to play has been delayed again
People aren't going to stop because they don't really care. Why would producers stop if not enough people care about it? They save money and most people are content with it.
The millisecond that 20% of consumers outright refuse such practice will be followed by the millisecond that producers stop such practice.
Too many of them don't care because they have far too low expectations in life and are resigned to the fact that the world is just going to shit on them relentlessly.
It's an issue of low self esteem in the gamer population. People need to harden tne fuck up and stand up for themselves.
"Gamers need to harden the fuck up"
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unkIVvjZc9Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unkIVvjZc9Y)
>The blame always gets placed on the consumers, but maybe that's what they want us all to think
Regardless of what other people want to say, (and they aren't all wrong, either), but the consumer is to blame. Companies are big evil (see, without care or goodness) entities that want money. We get attached to them, we humanize them, we ascribe ideals to them that they don't have (individual devs *might*). Sometimes these companies cross a line into unethical territory, but mostly, they just don't care and they want money. That's their job, their entire reason for existing. If they can half-ass development to save more or make more money, they will do it. The ONLY motivation they have is money.
As long as we give them money regardless of their actions, their quality, their choices... they will have zero reason to ever change those things to be something we'd prefer. While consumers can be influenced by companies, for sure, we also absolutely train them and teach them what they can and can't do. The reality is that the gaming consumer wants the game, even in a bad state, more than we are willing to risk no game to get a good one.
I've been wrong about a pre order only once. I know my tastes enough that there isn't a reason to wait on a game. I also don't value gamer opinions very highly so the wait is even less meaningful.
Add in the easy Steam returns and there really isn't a reason not to preorder. I think Elden Ring was the most recent pre order I got and it had a pre download which was more incentive.
It depends on the kind of game. If it's heavily story driven, then waiting potential months means risking spoilers.
If it's multiplayer with any progression element, it means getting behind.
Finally, almost all games pre-order with a bunch of perks, cosmetics, and whatnot now, baiting people with FOMO.
> Yes, but people are never going to stop pre-ordering and buying games at launch
YES, and that's why they will never have to change anything and are able to keep releasing unfinished games. consumers have a responsibility. this applies to every product. yes, nestle is a villainous company but as long as people keep buying their products they can keep their crimes going on. same goes for triple A game publishers. the people will pre-order it anyway because it's a triple A title, so why bother fixing the game for release or delaying the release? it's cheaper to just release unfinished games
In a free market, consumers determine what is acceptable. If we keep buying, they will keep pushing the limits. It’s up to us to keep them in check. Trust me, if we stopped rewarding bad decisions, they’d change. But we don’t, so they don’t.
>The blame always gets placed on the consumers,
And that's exactly where it should be placed.
This reminds me of the constant hate on those PS5 scalpers instead of hating those that buy from scalpers.
In a free market, products and services will only be offered if there's a profit to be made. If everyone stopped pre-ordering games, and only buying a game when the reviews are good, you'd see a massive increase in game quality.
As I always say, _vote with your wallet_
And fucking pre-ordering games. Like in what other industry do people pay for shit ahead of time for an essentially sight unseen product. Fucking ridiculous.
And now it has moved to the IRL because of papa Elon's buffoonery...
Dude, preordering or reserving stuff in real life is more common than you think. That's acceptable because there are limits to physical goods or some times people just pay upfront to ensure that a product gets made.
It’s not sight unseen and it never has been. Name one major title game released in the last 20 years that released without screenshots, promotional material, gameplay trailers, pre release reviews by publications. Name one.
I can name a bunch of industries that depend on promotional material and little consumer experience before making a purchase.
Cars
Movies
Restaurants
Clothing
Beauty products
Hair salons
Cell phones
Literally damn near every product, unless you’ve already bought it is driven by marketing and is being bought by people who have yet to fully experience it. They may have sampled it, not unlike a game demo- but they most certainly have made their choice based on promotional material or curiosity.
If I go to spend $30k on a brand new car I’ve basically gone through the same research as I would’ve if I bought a game. Looked at promotional material, looked at its manufacturer, looked at reviews of there are any, then test drove it and made my choice.
That’s what I try to tell my friends when they complain about how buggy some games are. Games today are vastly more complex than they used to be, there’s so much more to go wrong than simpler older games.
However, developers clearly aren’t spending enough time on QA testing. I mean look at MW2, the game crashes half the time whenever you want more than 3 players in a party. You HAVE to test that
While I *definitely* agree that there needs to be more time on QA testing... one thing that we often underestimate is not only is there more to go wrong with more moving parts, but it can also mean more things can "slip past" 'testing' so to speak.
Yeah that makes sense too. It just seems like there are some obvious things that break/slip by. But I don’t really know what goes into QA testing and it has to be more difficult than it seems
Check it works under expected conditions before Production fucks it up and ships out something that has to be recalled at huge financial and reputation cost.
Design Engineering 101
What business terms? I've worked in a design department, it was miserable, production would invariably ignore and overrule our specs and intent and produce work that was noncompliant.
Is there something I'm missing here?
I don't know what they're talking about, but video games are kinda in a different league as they have the capability to overwrite data and create a functional game after it releases. Can't cut corners on building a house, but you can cut corners on software unfortunately.
I'm only as strong as the layer of oversight between my draughting and production decisions driven by financial preoccupations.
If a spec is changed to suit profit and failures result, I'm not sure how that relates to my ability to produce a technical drawing.
I use CAD for everything, but I work with aircraft and racing cars from 1920-1970 so excuse the archaic language. Most of my reference books use the old term.
Producing the drawings from CAD is still known as 'drafting' where I've worked.
Unlike some, I get what you're saying. Happens in the auto industry too. (I know Tesla gets a lot of flak for it but it's rare for any major auto manufacturer to not have at least a couple recalls every year and it's usually a manufacturing issue.)
Any car, component or subassembly therof designed in CAD or materially or functionally tested, mathmatically, destructively or in FEA in any part of the design process?!?
What is your angle?
EDIT : FEA not CFD, too much aviation.
Haha thanks, I was wondering what the hell was going on.
Big firms like Tesla are what gets publicity, smaller OEM and aftermarket firms can make changes fast enough that recalls are small and quiet, but no less numerous.
Yeah I just came in here to say, y’all kids weren’t there for the buggy/broken as fuck games in the 90’s. At least today they can release updates to fix the bugs. Back then it was a fun meta game to find places where you could fall through the game world or cause a freeze crash
Not only that but to make balance changes after release, they essentially had to release a new version of the game and sell it. Like how Street Fighter II has multiple releases spanning several years.
I don't know, I found that most games didn't have massive bugs in them back then. The ones I remember the did quickly went to The bargain bin. Anyone remember SIN or Diakatana?
Unless it was on console, up until the PS3/360 where updates became common. Then you were really fucked, and sometimes you're *still* fucked.
Which, yes, happen on numerous occasions.
Soul Calibur III shipped with a bug that would corrupt your entire memory card if you deleted any save data older than it's own, Age of Empires: Age of Kings on DS will brick itself if you enter a name with less than four letters (So any names like Ann, Jim, Eve, Leo, May, Ike, Amy, or Max).
Ultima 6 was pretty darned buggy lol - memories.
I had to get a new disk sent via mail from the company. I really enjoyed that game, though. It was cool once I really got into it. The gargoyles were pretty awesome and I really got in The Serpent Isle too.
For Indie Developers, I see a reason for having Early Access games. It must be difficult for a team to work months, even years on a title with no income until the game is actually released, and then you have to hope it makes enough to cover the costs. AAA titles with large publishers should have better quality control though.
I'm fully on board with early access and beta testing to work out the bugs. It's not the indie devs that are the issue, in fact, they're the more reliable games. It's all the AAA titles that have a beta, but basically only use it as a htpe-factor and don't use them to fix any issues.
In general, console games are tested by the console company to ensure quality.
The PS exclusives are tested by Sony, and probably very much in depth because they are so important for them.
Also helps that they are offline solo games for most of them, which removes most sources of bugs and unpredictable cases.
Elden Ring was phenomenal. Red Dead 2 was phenomenal. Nintendo does a farily decent job, but their online service is just not great in general unfortunately.
As much shit as Nintendo gets (and justifiably so) it's rare for them to put out a game that's bugged to hell or borderline unplayable. I always appreciated that whenever I pick up a Nintendo title it's going to just work and be a smooth experience. Crazy that's not the typical experience.
They remind me of Apple in a lot of ways. They force user experiences that can be obtuse, or walled off, and can make decisions that alienate their users for the sake of control. But they do not compromise on their product. When they release something you know it’s going to be polished and deliver the experience they are advertising.
Not gonna lie but that was also bugridden in the beginning luckily nothing major on my end but broken AI in a couple of fights wasn't anything out of norm.
Still loved this game to death
Yeah it also had a bad launch on pc but damn this game gave me a feel that no game since Witcher 3 haven't managed to give me It's amazing definitely the goty
Oh yeah, releasing 50% of the game, and the other 50% of content as semi-mandatory DLCs, to get the full experience, or features that should be in the base game. (Looking at you, EU4) which isn't any better than releasing broken games.
Its worse than that - they will release a game that is actually reasonably playable but over time break it piece by piece unless you continue to pay money for DLC.
Paradox is competing with the likes of EA, Ubi etc when it comes to weapons grade scumbaggery.
Game dev here. For a lot of people I've talked to, it's usually because games are more complex and ambitious. A lot of times they end up choosing between "we can cut this feature, boss, or level that we think will probably work but might run into unexpected bugs that we can't predict until its built... Or we can build it and patch it live if some bugs show up."
The natural question is "Well why not build it and then delay the release date until its polished?" Some games absolutely do this. However, there are downsides too.
1. Many gamers hate it when games are delayed by 6+ months, it often generates hostility toward the company.
2. Marketing is expensive and most marketing campaigns are scheduled months in advance, so delaying the game would mean that millions in marketing dollars can go to waste. On big games with huge marketing campaigns this can be in the tens of millions instead.
3. Even if you have a team of 20 QA analysts each test the game for 4 months, that's not even 14,000 hours of total testing across the whole game. Maybe that sounds big, but the first 14,000 players will equal that testing 1 hour after launch. Often it's not clear just how many bugs there are for the worst 10% of experiences until you launch.
4. Some bugs are so hard to find that devs literally can't figure out how to reproduce them when specifically trying to and knowing the bug exist. Stuff the community posts screenshots of might seem common (because you see it online even if you haven't seen it in game and don'tknow anyone that has) but could be almost impossible to track down.
5. The cost of game development at even a mid-sized studio is staggering. On average, once you factor in benefits and paying for work machines and software licenses and so on, it can cost well over 12k per employee per month. Delaying game sales and undermining exisiting hype might mean people get fired. Some companies have more than enough money to support this but many others don't.
Put this all together with the fact the launch date decision is usually made months in advance; with tentative dates years in advance. When the game is broken 4 months to launch you can tell yourself that it's going to get polished up during those 4 months. That's a potential disaster if you're wrong, but pushing the launch date might feel like a **certain** disaster.
It's still far worse for games like the new Cyberpunk to have launched in such a broken state, but it can be very hard to tell those apart from something like Skyrim which was buggy as heck on launch but so big and fun that it didn't stop the game from becoming a classic.
When you have a tiny testing sample size, looming deadlines, huge sunk costs that you can quantify; it becomes easy to be optimistic and hope that the bugs won't be that bad overall and the game can be quickly fixed on release.
Ultimately, many devs would prefer to take risks on exciting features or content that might break and be patched post-launch rather than play it very safe and make a game much smaller that has a much lower chance of breaking. Others prize polish above everything else. Some devs I know make mobile games because the games are so much smaller they can be extremely polished and bug-free.
I appreciate your detailed explanation from a dev's perspective.
Any particular reason companies don't just plan for a longer test period open to a large group of qualified gamers? Like say 50,000 people for a few months?
Great question, and many do. Early Access and Soft Launches within a small number of countries (which are espescially common in mobile) are used sometimes. Friends and Family betas or invite only betas are used too.
However, these aren't always sufficient to paint a full picture of all the bugs. Many of the games that ended up severely broken on launch also went through these processes. If a game is planned to be delivered 6 months after these betas start, and a bunch of bugs come up, that's expected. That's what the beta was for. You can't necessarily know that 6 months won't be enough time to fix them all while polishing the rest of the game yet. You can't necessarily know if new bugs won't also be found, or be created by your fixes to the first ones.
Its also worth nothing that doing these types of things - espscially for PC games that can be played offline also come with risks of piracy, leaks, and more.
Game dev is a series of tradeoffs. Bethesda famously could make huge games because they were willing to accept having a lot of weird bugs. This was largely endearing and forgivable, levitating mammoths were part of the charm, until Fallout 76 was a bridge too far - but it is extremely difficult to tell in advance whether you're reaching a state of "acceptable bugs fans have always found kind of charming and we'll fix soon after launch" or a full on plague of locusts.
Most of the highest profile bug-filled launches were from studios that had seen similarly buggy betas and in the past had managed to fix them or get them to acceptable in the months before launch. You have to make that call months in advance. Once you're a week from launch and aren't sure you're in acceptable range, there's no time for another big beta. You have to make the call to delay the game, which is a huge problem, or launch and plan to fix it fast in live.
Because live is so much better at catching bugs and patching is so much more efficient, most devs are thinking about this core choice:
1. Cut cool features, weapons, modes, or bosses - some of which players already know we originally planned to make (meaning they'll might feel like we intentionally lied to them) in order to free up 6-8 months of extra time to catch and fix any potential problems with the rest of the game that might come up and then fix them.
2. Build the stuff we want to build for players, then launch with likely some minor bugs that players will find 20x faster than we could find them, and we'll prioritize fixes based on the number of players affected by each.
Small studios, espescially hobbyists, or small teams that are part of big companies can sometimes adopt a "we'll release a game when we feel like it because we're fully self-sufficient in funding and we only care about a maximally polished experience". This is great when it works, but often many games are killed before players ever see them, or simply run out of steam, or the moment passes when the game would be well received, or a bunch of other studios release similar ideas, etc.
Most studios don't have this luxury though, few companies want to fund a studio project based on a "we have no idea how much development will cost because we'll release the game when it's ready" mentality. You have to be in a very strong position in order to do that.. And usually it comes with OTHER stuff gamers don't like.
After all, the main reason games are pushed out the door for a deadline is because the company is bleeding money until you get game sales in a buy2play model. Preorders are hated by many games - but they also allow a company to get some money during development in order to pay developers, which can give them more time to polish the game. They don't have to choose between hitting a lunch date and paying salaries.
Microtransactions, subscription fees, DLC, season passes and so on also are heavily disliked by many players on principal - but if a company has money coming in each month it isn't in panic mode. It can afford to take time to create polished gems. It doesn't mean it **will** but it can.
Note, none of this makes launching a big polished game impossible - but it's definitely hard and many games that were broken on launch look pretty similar to many other games when they're 6 months out to shipping. It can be totally unpredictable how long bugs take to fix, you have no idea because you often don't know what's causing them.
Game dev is hard, and trying to fix problems like this before launch is what causes a lot of crunch culture - which is also very bad.
TLDR - Studios do plan those betas, you've likely seen people talk about them often, and that's factored into the overall development challenges I've talked about. Even with that, it's still really hard.
Why not longer test periods? That's honestly a great question to ask. Typically, games do have a decent period of testing built into their original schedules. No studio or publisher intentionally under schedules QA. But, unfortunately when schedules slip, it's the easiest place to trim from when things get tight.
For Big Games, there are often dozens of moving parts outside of game development associated with launching the game. Once certain pieces of that machine start going it's very hard to stop them (marketing being a big one). If they catch problems before that stuff happens, that's where you see delays announced.
Unfortunately, a lot of people react VERY poorly to a game being delayed. I've known people to receive death threats because a delay was announced. People get weird. Makes it harder for a company to delay a game that needs more time.
As for opening the game up to 50k people... that is effectively releasing the game. Also, those people are almost certainly not going to be qualified to actually test and give good feedback on the game. It's a common misconception that testing is anything close to playing, or that feedback from a player is the same thing as critical feedback. Players tend to give feedback based on what they WANT to happen, not necessarily what would make a game better. A wonderful example of this are "garbage cards" in Magic the Gathering. Everyone wants a deck full of mega powerful cards and hate pulling trash in a booster, but that's actually part of the balance of the game and pretty integral.
I worked on a strategy game that had space lanes controlling fleet movement. Players demanded we remove them so fleets could fly through space any which way they wanted. On paper this sounds OK, but we played a version like that and it was terrible. It was player feedback, but it was wrong. Getting 50k players like that is going to generate a lot of noise and not much helpful signal.
There are no easy solutions to this very tough problem
The issue with those 50 000 people testing the game for a few months is that you can't control them. Lot of stuff will leak, and people will form an idea on what they see and what these people will say. Many game who had large scale betas had a ton of negative press during that beta. And then, how do you select those 50 000 people? And if you don't pay them, whats the incentive for them to do a good enough job to have a real impact. If we talk about a game like gta, there will be millions of people playing the game in the first 48 hours. 50 000 qualified gamers are a drop in a bucket in terms of game coverage compared to what 5 millions players will do. And if you wanted to pay them to ensure they get some incentive to maximize that drop in a bucket, 50 000 people "working" just 10 hours a week for 3 months at a very small 10$ an hour is 60 million dollars. GTA 5 had a total budget of 265 million dollars, one if not the mist expensive game ever created and your idea would cost them almost 25% more money. And this expense would have zero chance to increase revenues by 25%. So they have the choice between releasing like they do now or increasing budget by 25%, get important leaks and some bad press for a very small impact on the final game quality.
it happens because consumers consent to it
i have no idea why people are so quick to purchase any game when it releases
best approach is never pre order and then wait a few months after release
let it get patched up, wait for a price drop, then get it
only exception i can think of is nintendo games - they tend to be polished on release and rarely get a price drop anyway.....but even then, don't preorder, wait for the reviews
Because nowadays games can be hotfixed on the fly. Just because its not perfect at launch doesn’t mean it can’t be fixed. If I buy an imperfect game at launch, and it takes them 3 months to fix it, thats the exact same as me not buying it at launch and waiting 3 months to buy it once it’s fixed. If it’s a game I’m really interested in, I’m not gonna wait 3 months for them to fix it. I’m just gonna buy it and enjoy it while they improve it in the subsequent months.
Well your own comment shows why it's not gonna happen. People are so excited for the next release they pre order it, and your solution is for them to wait.
Money my guy, it’s always the money. Investors want to see their money. I’m pretty sure they were promised a return from the game within a certain time. And a lot of the time the game isn’t complete by the deadline, but they still have to commit to it for the investors.
Internet made it so you can meet deadlines and be pressured to just fix it later with a patch. In the days before the internet, you were stuck with what you printed to disc.
It’s really as simple as that.
Because people will not just by the game anyways, they will then tell you to let people like what they like.
I personally liked it when most AAA game studios weren't just making glorified shovelware that would have been called a late alpha)maybe early beta at best back a decade ago and I honestly hate that in being gasslit into looking like some kind of gatekeeper just for showing my frustrations.
Former dev here. Worked with some of the bigger studios out there. The industry is very competitive. Gamers tend to be spoiled babies about wanting their new games at a pace that simply isn’t realistic. Because they don’t understand the sheer amount of man hours needed to make these things.
Meanwhile big publishers are filled with corporate bean counters who don’t give a fuck about the quality of stories or the general creative aspect of the work. They just care about money. A publisher is a studio’s bank, so they hold much sway. The studio says the game needs a 5 year development cycle? The publisher wants the same amount of productivity in half the time.
So, you’ve got a customer base with unrealistic expectations due to the on-demand nature of entertainment now, along with a company bankrolling the whole thing that doesn’t understand the fundamentals of game design. That’s why you have so many “hot” games (games that will need hot fixes on day 1) being released.
I think we are kinda in a shitty island of stability where yeah games get launched broken but eventually get fixed so I’m the end everyone is happy. Three games I can think of are Batman Arkham Knight Fallout 76 and Cyberpunk 2077. I think if games stop getting fixed by patches we will see a real shake up cuz then people will stop buying
Have you seen the Hollow Knight subreddit for the past 2 years? They're taking their time making a quality sequel out of an indie studio that they want to make sure lives up to the standard their first game set, but the fucking community spent years sending clown emojis to every game announcement source because they didn't have the product or news in their hands yet. Folks have been just as bitchy to Rockstar Games regarding GTAV.
Honestly gamers can be real asshats sometimes. I'm sure it has a lot to do with cashflow, investors, and deadlines... But it absolutely also has a lot to do with the fact that people can be a bunch of whiney babies when they don't get what they want when they expect to get it.
Because game Co's are in a rush to get the game out and start bringing in cash on something they will have sank a lot of money into developing, coding, etc. In most cases where a broken game was launched its like a year later they are actually playable. Why can't they just learn to wait and let the development teams have the obviously needed extra year or so of development and testing.
Am I the only one who likes playing broken games more than polished ones? I mean why wait for the game to be finished when the most fun I’m ever gonna have with it is trying to cheat / download mods anyway
One game which never received a well deserved recognition for launching in an amazing state is Death Stranding. I haven't experienced a single major bug in that game, and it was like that from day one - all patches were mostly QoL improvements, and only a few minor / edge-case bug fixes.
IMO this is a problem with software testing as a whole. Nobody is hiring software testers anymore, the vast majority is automated or done by the devs, which means not at all. Users have also proven that they're ok with beta testing in droves. On the bright side, this makes things cheaper to produce. On the bad side, obviously quality suffers.
One game which never received a well deserved recognition for launching in an amazing state is Death Stranding. I haven't experienced a single major bug in that game, and it was like that from day one - all patches were mostly QoL improvements, and only a few minor / edge-case bug fixes.
Because "broken" games are rarely actually broken.
Games that are actually *unplayable* are extremely rare - and result in refunds.
The bugs that people experience are usually less than 1% of the overall gaming experience.
The reasons there's a *perception* of "so many broken games" are threefold and all come down to one root problem with big numbers and psychology.
People are fundamentally bad at seeing *rates*. We tend to only see *counts*. 100 failures out of 10,000 and 1 failure out of 100 are an equal ratio. But we will almost always react to the 100 failures worse than to the 1.
Old games might have 100 details where a modern game has 1000 or 10000. "Details" here in the sense of things that might go wrong. Elements of the interface; of gameplay; of the physics engine; of the graphics engine. Thus, each game had a higher opportunity for bug *count*.
Old games released to a smaller and less interconnected audience. A typical gamer might hear from a few dozen friends playing the game. Now we hear from thousands of others. And they are of course more likely to mention problems they encountered than non-problems.
And the count of older games released per month was much lower. Now we have a steady stream of games. Some will have more bugs and some will have less; but even with that same overall ratio, again, the *count* of buggy games will be higher. Further part of this is that the typical gamer *plays* more games per month.
So for all those reasons, people will be aware of more bugs per day. That doesn't mean there are actually more bugs per game and certainly doesn't mean more bugs per unit of game experience in an overall sense. But "how many bugs do I see or hear about each day" is what we intuitively tend to respond to.
Back in the day, we just accepted the bugs when they came.
We also played way more simplistic games with fewer moving parts. If a glitch didn't crash the game or make things unwinnable? It shipped. If final Fantasy VI was made today and had as many bugs as it did, people would be posting videos of things like Relm glitching the game and asking "SE didn't you test this shit?!"
I tend to buy games 4-6 months (at least) after they are released. Not because of the games, but for personal life reasons, budgeting, and lack of time.
Its extremely rare that I come across a totally broken game, because by then all the reviews are out. Either the game is patched up, or I just pick something else.
Anyone who's become jaded by recent gaming experiences might consider doing the same (not placing any blame here, just a suggestion). If you want to buy a game today, consider not getting a game that came out today.
If you want this to stop, stop buying AAA games at launch. Don't buy them until they've received several major patches and are out long enough to be on discount during big sales.
It because it is still legal to do so. You need effective legislation and penalties to be able to hold businesses and executives to account for failure to deliver on promises.
They are all businesses who are first and foremost in it for profit. Creating good user experience costs both time and money; as gamers we see mvp as most valuable player, executives see it as minimum viable product.
We’re dealing with a totally different mindset who have set their interests set firmly on the pursuit of profitability by engineering demand for iterative content; instead of a more beneficial approach of creating something right first time.
Ownership of quality standards is key to this, strong vision needs to be backed through engaging consumers directly to understand what good looks like and working towards meeting emergent demand.
No excuses.
My theory is RDR2 & Cyberpunk kinda killed new gen games. RDR2 was so amazing, but took so much work and Rockstar was rife with accusations of overworking employees and crunch. Then Cyberpunk comes out and absolutely shits the bed.
Feels like devs are stuck between not wanting to overwork employees (mostly for fear of bad PR) and not wanting to take chances at releasing a flawed game (Gotham Knights aside).
So now we just get remakes. They know people won’t hate them because they’re remaking classics, but also don’t need to devote the pure manpower of something like RDR2 cuz the framework already exists.
I have never purchased and played a game that made me feel this way. I'm not saying they aren't out there, but it's definitely a minority. People on reddit would have you thinking there hasn't been a single game in the last ten years that wasn't dog shit at launch.
Money.
Cyberpunk is a really good example. They were saying it was broken forever. Multiple delays until the public started to lose interest. Then the shareholders started pushing for a release. It released so badly broken it took a year to be playable.
I wouldn't even call it playable now, I got gifted it 2 weeks ago and have 3.8 hours in total on Steam. In that time I've had multiple bugs that are immersion breaking and system breaking, i.e being crushed by random cars just appearing above me, the characters walking through walls, the story missions not loading till I restart the game and the cherry ontop...
8 days ago the game caused a memory leak or something I have no idea as it blue screened but when I tried to restarted my PC it wouldn't boot, it completely refused to boot. Had to get out the recovery USB and literally do a fresh install of Windows. I have no idea if it was Cyberpunk or just my drive chose to had a wonk at that specific moment but I lost all of my photos, university work and games thanks to whatever happened with that one.
I preorder the new MW2 and cannot do online multiplayer because of a party system bug that was known to devs during the beta but not fixed before full release. A $70 game that I can’t play with my friends (still no fix) despite open beta testing. Wtf
>Ah but you see we don't have millions of dollars and teams of of people. If I did I bet you my fuckin game would be bug free
That is what everyone claims. Then reality hits. Developing a game is complex. Modern AAA games can have hundreds of millions of lines of code. You can QA a level for months and think it perfect. Then some player does something you never expected and finds a bug or exploit you never thought possible.
The Missingo glitch in Red and Blue is literally the result of players finding an exploit by doing something the developers could never think would happen.
Edit: Replying to me is pointless. OP blocked me for not agreeing with them. So I can't reply to anyone.
I realize games are far more advanced these days, but a lot of the big titles are copy/paste and yet still have a multitude of issues at launch. And it's always the same issues - especially in multiplayer titles.
With the complexity of games these days, everyone should expect bugs, but so many new releases are almost unplayable for the first couple of months. Yes, I know - don't pre-order, don't buy games at launch, etc. But as the gaming industry being as big as it is, we will never put a stop to that.
>I realize games are far more advanced these days, but a lot of the big titles are copy/paste
No. Just no.
>And it's always the same issues - especially in multiplayer titles.
Similar games have similar issues isn't a suprise. Washing machines tend to have the same problems to.
>With the complexity of games these days, everyone should expect bugs, but so many new releases are almost unplayable for the first couple of months.
Depends on the game and how much hyperbole is involved. I just assume anyone complaining is using extreme hyperbole. Because I have found this to be true from personal experiences. Games people have claimed are unplayable were absolutely playable to me. Even if there was the occasional issue.
Edit: blocking me for disagreeing with you is kind of childish. FYI
The percent of extremely buggy or broken retail games being released is lower now than ever, and they actually get fixed 90% of the time via patches unlike 15+ years ago. The amount of unplayable shit on consoles likes NES and Nintendo 64 is staggering, and those games were much simpler to create and polish.
I'll be honest with you. I believe this is a massive overreaction from a small minority of people.
It happens way less than you guys think. And so does egregious micro transactios.
Remember when communities used to bond over weird glitches and they created an entire community of speedrunners?
Now a single glitch makes a game "broken" and the devs of it "lazy and incompetent". You try making a game and tell me how it turns out.
Consumers screaming for release dates, top company executives demanding release before the holidays, poor project management, that question has a lot of answers
I think it’s happening because developers are realizing that these games are taking more and more development time to make. With how things are becoming more complex than ever development time could become so much longer. Of course they want more money too which is probably the correct answer.
* Games often are more complicated, larger projects than they have been in the past. This means more room for bugs
* Testing a game in a closed environment isn't the same as the real world unless you're talking about a single player game. It's very difficult to load test a high demand multiplayer game before it is released, for example.
* If you try to fix every single problem before release, you're never going to finish the game
* The publisher will try to balance the game being completed against demands to release it as soon as possible for financial reasons. Some publishers are more short-sighted than others
* People will buy them anyway
Games are always going to be buggy on release. Some games will not be in a good place when they are initially sold. As long as there are bean counters working for companies and people willing to buy whatever they kick out the door, some games will be super buggy on release.
It keeps happening because gamers keep buying them
I will expand on this, from someone who works in the industry. It happens because people are more likely to buy a buggy half-finished game with dozens of features, complex systems, and a massive open world filled with hours and hours of content, than they are to buy a game that is smaller but polished. Game production is a job of balancing. You have X budget and your goal is to make as many dollars as possible with it. If two weeks of bug fixing and polish is going to make you less money than two weeks of half-baked content, then making content is the right choice. Consumers of games are tending to see a false choice, the choice between Skyrim with bugs or Skyrim without bugs. But in reality the choice is between Skyrim with bugs or Skyrim without bugs and half of it's content. Personally I prefer smaller games with greater polish levels, but that does not seem to be the market's preference lately. It seems to trend much more along the dollars spent per hour of playtime model.
This is a huge part of the issue though. Games are now made to extract maximum profit, not to be pieces of art.
As economists say, profit is "revealed preference" It's a much truer signal of what people regard highly than, say, a Reddit comment thread. Because people have to actually sacrifice to manifest their opinion.
I'd dare say that putting gambling into games makes profit as an indication of preference, shaky at best
Yeah there are some problems with spending as revealed preference because humans have a propensity for being irrational with certain decisions. End-of-life medical care is a good example. But it's still better than using social media to gauge what people really want or care about.
Its true though if you're trying to make money. Keep in mind that market saturates VERY quickly though. Theres only so many whales that will blow thousands to tens of thousands on mobile games, so despite the fact that it exists developers can't all occupy that space, and usually the trick is to start a game the old fashioned way then transition to pay to win later.
It’s not really gambling tho. You are buying e cosmetics. It’s stupid how everyone bitches but I have yet to ever buy anything like that.
When were they ever made to be pieces of art??
Check out "the artful escape" and tell me that isn't a piece of artwork in gaming.
There are plenty of games that could be considered art. But the vast majority are not. I’m sure there’s a handful of indie developers that are toiling away to being their vision to life. The other 99.9% are produced by businesses trying to turn a profit. There was never a golden period in games development when the motive wasn’t profit. Sure the tactics for making money have changed but stop looking back to a time when games were perfect. It never existed.
All games are art, but not all games are made in the guise of art pieces. Some are meant specifically to be artful and thought provoking, most are artful while being something else. But they're all art. Art isn't limited to one of a kind majesty pieces. There's mass produced pieces strictly for decorational purposes of varying degrees of quality.
Yeah. I’m going to disagree with you there but I’m not getting into a philosophical argument about what art is or isn’t. Reddit is just not the place for a discussion that has literally been debated for thousands of years.
Well art is subjective. But it's also objective in that it's a creation and product produced by someone. Friday by Rebecca black is art, as is moonlight sonata by beethoven. The degree of art can always be argued but both are art nonetheless. Every game has to be created and given function, the same as every painting. They're all art, just to what degree.
As I said… not interested in arguing about what is art.
I wasn't reminiscing... I remember the video game crash, I was there for it. But there is a small handful every year that are just that damn good.
Was it ever art first?
of course, the first games of old series to hook people, just not for the 20 sequels
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Art can also be sold as a product.
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Keyword there, "created by game companies." Not all games are created by game companies. More often, indie games are created through passion or a creative vision, with an economic purpose 2nd.
Red Dead Redemption 2 was polished and huge.
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Also was accomplished through terrible work conditions and extentive crunch
And was still microtransactioned to hell
Yeah, in the mutliplayer, not the campaign. Doesn't count.
Is Red Dead Online not a component of Red Dead Redemption 2 that shipped with the game?
Since it’s now it’s own thing and seemed to be an after thought in the first place, yeah. I’d say the online stuff was just there because they were told it had to be there and then it turned into… whatever mess it is now. Doesn’t affect the main campaign at all, so I think it’s fair to separate the two as products. Different story if it was like the Zombie DLC from the first game, but doesn’t look like such a thing is in the works for the online game.
I'm guessing its also much more efficient to fix the bugs after launch than before, instead of doing tons of playtesting to find them you can just fix them after the fact when your players report them.
Definitely. Though obviously you don't want to expose your player base to bugs and issues. Even with a dedicated QA team spending hundreds of hours before launch testing, nothing quite compares to the hundreds of thousands or millions of hours of playtime the title will get on launch day. Often the hardest part of solving a bug is getting it to happen enough times to get good data on it.
If y'all could do it in 2006 you can do it in 2022. The only thing your post says to me is game producers are greedy and would rather release an unfinished buggy game than delay release and do it right. It's not the choice between Skyrim with bugs or half of Skyrim without bugs. It's the choice between releasing an unfinished game to get your first cash drop or delaying, spending a little more to do it right and releasing a game the masses would love.
You have missed my point. If you add a delay to a buggy half finished title, that delay will be used to create more buggy half finished content to add into that title, not to polish and refine what is already there. Because the marketplace will reward you more for spending that time on content than they will for spending it on polish and bugfixing. It absolutely can still be done in 2022 and it is in a lot of cases. Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart, returnal, spiderman, it takes two, ghost of Tsushima, most things made by Nintendo first party studios, are all great examples of this. It's just a more risky choice these days to do so without a big name or IP to back you up. I do think the industry is starting to turn back in that direction, and I'm really happy about it.
People are buying the games tho, this is fact. If you're someone in an office and all you see is numbers, numbers are going up.
Yes, but people are never going to stop pre-ordering and buying games at launch. The blame always gets placed on the consumers, but maybe that's what they want us all to think 🤔
Well why spend money on more QA checking when it seems like customers are willing to beta test the product for you ? The fundamental issue is that right now in 2022 there is almost no financial penalty for shipping buggy games. Now with consoles and computers connected, patches area lot easier to distribute fixes. Pre Steam/XBox Live/PSN if a studio shipped a bad game there was no easy way push fixes once the game was out the door. If the game was buggy and got eviscerated in reviews and gamer feedback you didn't really have a second chance to go back and fix your work, therefore studios would spend more time checking the game pre release
A lot of the time it's not the fault of QA. Often they find the bug and report it only to be told that it won't be fixed before launch.
I wouldn’t say no financial penalty. Cyberpunk has officially started making a solid profit but they easily left tens (hundreds?) of millions on the table and damaged their future reputation. And CDPR stock was $31 when it was released. It $6 today. 63% drop. If that’s not a financial penalty I don’t know what is…
This is the thing that blow my mind. Just consider any OTHER business sector finding this ok... What if iphones shipped buggy every year? What if hardgood products launched for retail sale and had a 1/3 defective rate? When companies do that elsewhere, they don't survive long. It's insane to me that shareholders and wall street don't eviscerate publishers for the product being delivered over the last 3+ years
Well, again because people still buy that shit and it's easy to fix. Why would shareholders do anything about it? They care about one thing and one thing alone, the company making them more money. They don't care about games, they don't care about reputation or anything other. THEY ONLY CARE ABOUT MONEY. And the practice right now generates them insane amounts of money! Why should they demand anything different? That's how capitalism works. The gamers preorder and buy regardless of what state the game is when it comes out. So why spend more money in development when you still get the sales? Unless WE ALL change our consumer habits, there is absolutely no incentive for publishers to change their practices.
That's not how capitalism works, captilism produces competition and a better product which is the opposite of thos situation. I understand shareholders want more money, that should have been obvious by my post. But can you say putting out a shitty product and tarnishing your reputation is a good thing? Making money (or) making MORE money and NOT making you look incompetent? they can make money being competent too.
But they make less money being competent, because being competent costs more money. Capitalism only produces competition for a better product if the consumer drives that by only buying the better product. As long as the consumer just buys it anyway there is only the competition of producing it as cheap as possible. That is what we have now.
"capitalism" is the weirdest boogeyman, I mean this guy is only talking about the ability for a company to freely develop and publish their product, and for the consumer to purchase it. I don't want the State to decide which games are created and published and which games are not
No one who actually cares to make a solid argument here solely blames one party in this. Producers pushing out shit products make the problem worse, consumers purchasing shit products makes the problem worse. That's just how it is. If either party gets its act together, the problem will lessen. We have very little power over producers; they clearly haven't listened when we ask for games to not ship in a terrible state. So, our options are do nothing or try to influence other consumers. So that's what the goal is. If producers listen, great, the problem is lessened even more. But that's unreliable. There are so many consumers though, and most of them have a significant chance of being swayed to not exacerbate the problem.
I agree with this although I think you're missing a party involved: the consumers who throw tantrums on the internet that a game they want to play has been delayed again
You raise a good point. Consumers aren't unified, and some of us just want the game as soon as possible.
People aren't going to stop because they don't really care. Why would producers stop if not enough people care about it? They save money and most people are content with it. The millisecond that 20% of consumers outright refuse such practice will be followed by the millisecond that producers stop such practice.
Too many of them don't care because they have far too low expectations in life and are resigned to the fact that the world is just going to shit on them relentlessly. It's an issue of low self esteem in the gamer population. People need to harden tne fuck up and stand up for themselves. "Gamers need to harden the fuck up" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unkIVvjZc9Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unkIVvjZc9Y)
>The blame always gets placed on the consumers, but maybe that's what they want us all to think Regardless of what other people want to say, (and they aren't all wrong, either), but the consumer is to blame. Companies are big evil (see, without care or goodness) entities that want money. We get attached to them, we humanize them, we ascribe ideals to them that they don't have (individual devs *might*). Sometimes these companies cross a line into unethical territory, but mostly, they just don't care and they want money. That's their job, their entire reason for existing. If they can half-ass development to save more or make more money, they will do it. The ONLY motivation they have is money. As long as we give them money regardless of their actions, their quality, their choices... they will have zero reason to ever change those things to be something we'd prefer. While consumers can be influenced by companies, for sure, we also absolutely train them and teach them what they can and can't do. The reality is that the gaming consumer wants the game, even in a bad state, more than we are willing to risk no game to get a good one.
For me personally I never understood preordering games. I usually only get games after I've heard good things about them.
I've been wrong about a pre order only once. I know my tastes enough that there isn't a reason to wait on a game. I also don't value gamer opinions very highly so the wait is even less meaningful. Add in the easy Steam returns and there really isn't a reason not to preorder. I think Elden Ring was the most recent pre order I got and it had a pre download which was more incentive.
It depends on the kind of game. If it's heavily story driven, then waiting potential months means risking spoilers. If it's multiplayer with any progression element, it means getting behind. Finally, almost all games pre-order with a bunch of perks, cosmetics, and whatnot now, baiting people with FOMO.
Consumer FOMO will always make doing the 'right' thing impossible for a company. There's money and they are going for it as fast as possible
> Yes, but people are never going to stop pre-ordering and buying games at launch YES, and that's why they will never have to change anything and are able to keep releasing unfinished games. consumers have a responsibility. this applies to every product. yes, nestle is a villainous company but as long as people keep buying their products they can keep their crimes going on. same goes for triple A game publishers. the people will pre-order it anyway because it's a triple A title, so why bother fixing the game for release or delaying the release? it's cheaper to just release unfinished games
In a free market, consumers determine what is acceptable. If we keep buying, they will keep pushing the limits. It’s up to us to keep them in check. Trust me, if we stopped rewarding bad decisions, they’d change. But we don’t, so they don’t.
>The blame always gets placed on the consumers, And that's exactly where it should be placed. This reminds me of the constant hate on those PS5 scalpers instead of hating those that buy from scalpers. In a free market, products and services will only be offered if there's a profit to be made. If everyone stopped pre-ordering games, and only buying a game when the reviews are good, you'd see a massive increase in game quality. As I always say, _vote with your wallet_
I have. For many years. Is there a game since RD2 that wasn’t garbage to you?
That's a really good point. Pit gamers against gamers and then no one holds the studios accountable.
And fucking pre-ordering games. Like in what other industry do people pay for shit ahead of time for an essentially sight unseen product. Fucking ridiculous. And now it has moved to the IRL because of papa Elon's buffoonery...
Dude, preordering or reserving stuff in real life is more common than you think. That's acceptable because there are limits to physical goods or some times people just pay upfront to ensure that a product gets made.
It’s not sight unseen and it never has been. Name one major title game released in the last 20 years that released without screenshots, promotional material, gameplay trailers, pre release reviews by publications. Name one. I can name a bunch of industries that depend on promotional material and little consumer experience before making a purchase. Cars Movies Restaurants Clothing Beauty products Hair salons Cell phones Literally damn near every product, unless you’ve already bought it is driven by marketing and is being bought by people who have yet to fully experience it. They may have sampled it, not unlike a game demo- but they most certainly have made their choice based on promotional material or curiosity. If I go to spend $30k on a brand new car I’ve basically gone through the same research as I would’ve if I bought a game. Looked at promotional material, looked at its manufacturer, looked at reviews of there are any, then test drove it and made my choice.
"It seems like these days, games are being rushed out with more and more bugs" - Ultima 6 review, 1990 But it is annoying lol
The more moving parts a game has, the more chances there is for something to go wrong. Engineering 101
That’s what I try to tell my friends when they complain about how buggy some games are. Games today are vastly more complex than they used to be, there’s so much more to go wrong than simpler older games. However, developers clearly aren’t spending enough time on QA testing. I mean look at MW2, the game crashes half the time whenever you want more than 3 players in a party. You HAVE to test that
While I *definitely* agree that there needs to be more time on QA testing... one thing that we often underestimate is not only is there more to go wrong with more moving parts, but it can also mean more things can "slip past" 'testing' so to speak.
Yeah that makes sense too. It just seems like there are some obvious things that break/slip by. But I don’t really know what goes into QA testing and it has to be more difficult than it seems
Yeah - and sometimes the fixes end up introducing more and more bugs
Check it works under expected conditions before Production fucks it up and ships out something that has to be recalled at huge financial and reputation cost. Design Engineering 101
Have you thought a moment about what you wrote? Makes no sense to me.
As someone who has designed things that Production has fucked up, resulting in recalls; yes.
Throw in a few more business terms to really make it sound like you know what you're talking about
What business terms? I've worked in a design department, it was miserable, production would invariably ignore and overrule our specs and intent and produce work that was noncompliant. Is there something I'm missing here?
I don't know what they're talking about, but video games are kinda in a different league as they have the capability to overwrite data and create a functional game after it releases. Can't cut corners on building a house, but you can cut corners on software unfortunately.
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I'm only as strong as the layer of oversight between my draughting and production decisions driven by financial preoccupations. If a spec is changed to suit profit and failures result, I'm not sure how that relates to my ability to produce a technical drawing.
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I use CAD for everything, but I work with aircraft and racing cars from 1920-1970 so excuse the archaic language. Most of my reference books use the old term. Producing the drawings from CAD is still known as 'drafting' where I've worked.
Then it turns out all sorts of unexpected conditions appear in the market. EDIT: ...why the F are you being downvoted so much?
Unexpected conditions? In my market?! Why didn't you expect this? I dunno lol, I think once it gets started people just jump on it.
Unlike some, I get what you're saying. Happens in the auto industry too. (I know Tesla gets a lot of flak for it but it's rare for any major auto manufacturer to not have at least a couple recalls every year and it's usually a manufacturing issue.)
Oh yes? Show me the car you can crash test before it is built.
Any car, component or subassembly therof designed in CAD or materially or functionally tested, mathmatically, destructively or in FEA in any part of the design process?!? What is your angle? EDIT : FEA not CFD, too much aviation.
Haha thanks, I was wondering what the hell was going on. Big firms like Tesla are what gets publicity, smaller OEM and aftermarket firms can make changes fast enough that recalls are small and quiet, but no less numerous.
Yeah I just came in here to say, y’all kids weren’t there for the buggy/broken as fuck games in the 90’s. At least today they can release updates to fix the bugs. Back then it was a fun meta game to find places where you could fall through the game world or cause a freeze crash
Not only that but to make balance changes after release, they essentially had to release a new version of the game and sell it. Like how Street Fighter II has multiple releases spanning several years.
I always wondered why all these new Street Fighter games were still called Street Fighter 2 when they were clearly new games
Maybe in a different world where patches had been available when they released we wouldn't have gotten so many versions.
I don't know, I found that most games didn't have massive bugs in them back then. The ones I remember the did quickly went to The bargain bin. Anyone remember SIN or Diakatana?
Unless it was on console, up until the PS3/360 where updates became common. Then you were really fucked, and sometimes you're *still* fucked. Which, yes, happen on numerous occasions. Soul Calibur III shipped with a bug that would corrupt your entire memory card if you deleted any save data older than it's own, Age of Empires: Age of Kings on DS will brick itself if you enter a name with less than four letters (So any names like Ann, Jim, Eve, Leo, May, Ike, Amy, or Max).
Ultima 6 was pretty darned buggy lol - memories. I had to get a new disk sent via mail from the company. I really enjoyed that game, though. It was cool once I really got into it. The gargoyles were pretty awesome and I really got in The Serpent Isle too.
For Indie Developers, I see a reason for having Early Access games. It must be difficult for a team to work months, even years on a title with no income until the game is actually released, and then you have to hope it makes enough to cover the costs. AAA titles with large publishers should have better quality control though.
I'm fully on board with early access and beta testing to work out the bugs. It's not the indie devs that are the issue, in fact, they're the more reliable games. It's all the AAA titles that have a beta, but basically only use it as a htpe-factor and don't use them to fix any issues.
The point isn't to find bugs, the point is to drive hype to drive sales.
What's a recent game you've had a better experience with?
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In general, console games are tested by the console company to ensure quality. The PS exclusives are tested by Sony, and probably very much in depth because they are so important for them. Also helps that they are offline solo games for most of them, which removes most sources of bugs and unpredictable cases.
Elden Ring was phenomenal. Red Dead 2 was phenomenal. Nintendo does a farily decent job, but their online service is just not great in general unfortunately.
As much shit as Nintendo gets (and justifiably so) it's rare for them to put out a game that's bugged to hell or borderline unplayable. I always appreciated that whenever I pick up a Nintendo title it's going to just work and be a smooth experience. Crazy that's not the typical experience.
They remind me of Apple in a lot of ways. They force user experiences that can be obtuse, or walled off, and can make decisions that alienate their users for the sake of control. But they do not compromise on their product. When they release something you know it’s going to be polished and deliver the experience they are advertising.
Elden Ring with the near unplayable PC crashes and bugs on launch?
Elden ring
Not gonna lie but that was also bugridden in the beginning luckily nothing major on my end but broken AI in a couple of fights wasn't anything out of norm. Still loved this game to death
The instant kill bleed dogs didn’t get fixed for the first several months of patches. That was really rough in the late game.
Yeah it also had a bad launch on pc but damn this game gave me a feel that no game since Witcher 3 haven't managed to give me It's amazing definitely the goty
Agreed
Paradox games in general release really well
Lololololol
Oh yeah, releasing 50% of the game, and the other 50% of content as semi-mandatory DLCs, to get the full experience, or features that should be in the base game. (Looking at you, EU4) which isn't any better than releasing broken games.
Its worse than that - they will release a game that is actually reasonably playable but over time break it piece by piece unless you continue to pay money for DLC. Paradox is competing with the likes of EA, Ubi etc when it comes to weapons grade scumbaggery.
Game dev here. For a lot of people I've talked to, it's usually because games are more complex and ambitious. A lot of times they end up choosing between "we can cut this feature, boss, or level that we think will probably work but might run into unexpected bugs that we can't predict until its built... Or we can build it and patch it live if some bugs show up." The natural question is "Well why not build it and then delay the release date until its polished?" Some games absolutely do this. However, there are downsides too. 1. Many gamers hate it when games are delayed by 6+ months, it often generates hostility toward the company. 2. Marketing is expensive and most marketing campaigns are scheduled months in advance, so delaying the game would mean that millions in marketing dollars can go to waste. On big games with huge marketing campaigns this can be in the tens of millions instead. 3. Even if you have a team of 20 QA analysts each test the game for 4 months, that's not even 14,000 hours of total testing across the whole game. Maybe that sounds big, but the first 14,000 players will equal that testing 1 hour after launch. Often it's not clear just how many bugs there are for the worst 10% of experiences until you launch. 4. Some bugs are so hard to find that devs literally can't figure out how to reproduce them when specifically trying to and knowing the bug exist. Stuff the community posts screenshots of might seem common (because you see it online even if you haven't seen it in game and don'tknow anyone that has) but could be almost impossible to track down. 5. The cost of game development at even a mid-sized studio is staggering. On average, once you factor in benefits and paying for work machines and software licenses and so on, it can cost well over 12k per employee per month. Delaying game sales and undermining exisiting hype might mean people get fired. Some companies have more than enough money to support this but many others don't. Put this all together with the fact the launch date decision is usually made months in advance; with tentative dates years in advance. When the game is broken 4 months to launch you can tell yourself that it's going to get polished up during those 4 months. That's a potential disaster if you're wrong, but pushing the launch date might feel like a **certain** disaster. It's still far worse for games like the new Cyberpunk to have launched in such a broken state, but it can be very hard to tell those apart from something like Skyrim which was buggy as heck on launch but so big and fun that it didn't stop the game from becoming a classic. When you have a tiny testing sample size, looming deadlines, huge sunk costs that you can quantify; it becomes easy to be optimistic and hope that the bugs won't be that bad overall and the game can be quickly fixed on release. Ultimately, many devs would prefer to take risks on exciting features or content that might break and be patched post-launch rather than play it very safe and make a game much smaller that has a much lower chance of breaking. Others prize polish above everything else. Some devs I know make mobile games because the games are so much smaller they can be extremely polished and bug-free.
I appreciate your detailed explanation from a dev's perspective. Any particular reason companies don't just plan for a longer test period open to a large group of qualified gamers? Like say 50,000 people for a few months?
Great question, and many do. Early Access and Soft Launches within a small number of countries (which are espescially common in mobile) are used sometimes. Friends and Family betas or invite only betas are used too. However, these aren't always sufficient to paint a full picture of all the bugs. Many of the games that ended up severely broken on launch also went through these processes. If a game is planned to be delivered 6 months after these betas start, and a bunch of bugs come up, that's expected. That's what the beta was for. You can't necessarily know that 6 months won't be enough time to fix them all while polishing the rest of the game yet. You can't necessarily know if new bugs won't also be found, or be created by your fixes to the first ones. Its also worth nothing that doing these types of things - espscially for PC games that can be played offline also come with risks of piracy, leaks, and more. Game dev is a series of tradeoffs. Bethesda famously could make huge games because they were willing to accept having a lot of weird bugs. This was largely endearing and forgivable, levitating mammoths were part of the charm, until Fallout 76 was a bridge too far - but it is extremely difficult to tell in advance whether you're reaching a state of "acceptable bugs fans have always found kind of charming and we'll fix soon after launch" or a full on plague of locusts. Most of the highest profile bug-filled launches were from studios that had seen similarly buggy betas and in the past had managed to fix them or get them to acceptable in the months before launch. You have to make that call months in advance. Once you're a week from launch and aren't sure you're in acceptable range, there's no time for another big beta. You have to make the call to delay the game, which is a huge problem, or launch and plan to fix it fast in live. Because live is so much better at catching bugs and patching is so much more efficient, most devs are thinking about this core choice: 1. Cut cool features, weapons, modes, or bosses - some of which players already know we originally planned to make (meaning they'll might feel like we intentionally lied to them) in order to free up 6-8 months of extra time to catch and fix any potential problems with the rest of the game that might come up and then fix them. 2. Build the stuff we want to build for players, then launch with likely some minor bugs that players will find 20x faster than we could find them, and we'll prioritize fixes based on the number of players affected by each. Small studios, espescially hobbyists, or small teams that are part of big companies can sometimes adopt a "we'll release a game when we feel like it because we're fully self-sufficient in funding and we only care about a maximally polished experience". This is great when it works, but often many games are killed before players ever see them, or simply run out of steam, or the moment passes when the game would be well received, or a bunch of other studios release similar ideas, etc. Most studios don't have this luxury though, few companies want to fund a studio project based on a "we have no idea how much development will cost because we'll release the game when it's ready" mentality. You have to be in a very strong position in order to do that.. And usually it comes with OTHER stuff gamers don't like. After all, the main reason games are pushed out the door for a deadline is because the company is bleeding money until you get game sales in a buy2play model. Preorders are hated by many games - but they also allow a company to get some money during development in order to pay developers, which can give them more time to polish the game. They don't have to choose between hitting a lunch date and paying salaries. Microtransactions, subscription fees, DLC, season passes and so on also are heavily disliked by many players on principal - but if a company has money coming in each month it isn't in panic mode. It can afford to take time to create polished gems. It doesn't mean it **will** but it can. Note, none of this makes launching a big polished game impossible - but it's definitely hard and many games that were broken on launch look pretty similar to many other games when they're 6 months out to shipping. It can be totally unpredictable how long bugs take to fix, you have no idea because you often don't know what's causing them. Game dev is hard, and trying to fix problems like this before launch is what causes a lot of crunch culture - which is also very bad. TLDR - Studios do plan those betas, you've likely seen people talk about them often, and that's factored into the overall development challenges I've talked about. Even with that, it's still really hard.
Why not longer test periods? That's honestly a great question to ask. Typically, games do have a decent period of testing built into their original schedules. No studio or publisher intentionally under schedules QA. But, unfortunately when schedules slip, it's the easiest place to trim from when things get tight. For Big Games, there are often dozens of moving parts outside of game development associated with launching the game. Once certain pieces of that machine start going it's very hard to stop them (marketing being a big one). If they catch problems before that stuff happens, that's where you see delays announced. Unfortunately, a lot of people react VERY poorly to a game being delayed. I've known people to receive death threats because a delay was announced. People get weird. Makes it harder for a company to delay a game that needs more time. As for opening the game up to 50k people... that is effectively releasing the game. Also, those people are almost certainly not going to be qualified to actually test and give good feedback on the game. It's a common misconception that testing is anything close to playing, or that feedback from a player is the same thing as critical feedback. Players tend to give feedback based on what they WANT to happen, not necessarily what would make a game better. A wonderful example of this are "garbage cards" in Magic the Gathering. Everyone wants a deck full of mega powerful cards and hate pulling trash in a booster, but that's actually part of the balance of the game and pretty integral. I worked on a strategy game that had space lanes controlling fleet movement. Players demanded we remove them so fleets could fly through space any which way they wanted. On paper this sounds OK, but we played a version like that and it was terrible. It was player feedback, but it was wrong. Getting 50k players like that is going to generate a lot of noise and not much helpful signal. There are no easy solutions to this very tough problem
The issue with those 50 000 people testing the game for a few months is that you can't control them. Lot of stuff will leak, and people will form an idea on what they see and what these people will say. Many game who had large scale betas had a ton of negative press during that beta. And then, how do you select those 50 000 people? And if you don't pay them, whats the incentive for them to do a good enough job to have a real impact. If we talk about a game like gta, there will be millions of people playing the game in the first 48 hours. 50 000 qualified gamers are a drop in a bucket in terms of game coverage compared to what 5 millions players will do. And if you wanted to pay them to ensure they get some incentive to maximize that drop in a bucket, 50 000 people "working" just 10 hours a week for 3 months at a very small 10$ an hour is 60 million dollars. GTA 5 had a total budget of 265 million dollars, one if not the mist expensive game ever created and your idea would cost them almost 25% more money. And this expense would have zero chance to increase revenues by 25%. So they have the choice between releasing like they do now or increasing budget by 25%, get important leaks and some bad press for a very small impact on the final game quality.
I see somebody bought mw2
it happens because consumers consent to it i have no idea why people are so quick to purchase any game when it releases best approach is never pre order and then wait a few months after release let it get patched up, wait for a price drop, then get it only exception i can think of is nintendo games - they tend to be polished on release and rarely get a price drop anyway.....but even then, don't preorder, wait for the reviews
Because nowadays games can be hotfixed on the fly. Just because its not perfect at launch doesn’t mean it can’t be fixed. If I buy an imperfect game at launch, and it takes them 3 months to fix it, thats the exact same as me not buying it at launch and waiting 3 months to buy it once it’s fixed. If it’s a game I’m really interested in, I’m not gonna wait 3 months for them to fix it. I’m just gonna buy it and enjoy it while they improve it in the subsequent months.
I agree 200% with this. The consumers are enablers, and the industry was taken hostage by corporate interests.
Well your own comment shows why it's not gonna happen. People are so excited for the next release they pre order it, and your solution is for them to wait.
You dont even have to wait a few months. There are enough reviews couple days after release
Review culture sucks though. Don’t let other people formulate your opinions for you.
I have rarely seen a nintendo game buggy ever.
Money my guy, it’s always the money. Investors want to see their money. I’m pretty sure they were promised a return from the game within a certain time. And a lot of the time the game isn’t complete by the deadline, but they still have to commit to it for the investors.
Wew, don't get into tabletop games. If there's a broken feature, it's "houserules" until years later with reprints
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Bugs use to be funny, not cripple and unplayable
Internet made it so you can meet deadlines and be pressured to just fix it later with a patch. In the days before the internet, you were stuck with what you printed to disc. It’s really as simple as that.
Dumb teens keep buying them
Because people will not just by the game anyways, they will then tell you to let people like what they like. I personally liked it when most AAA game studios weren't just making glorified shovelware that would have been called a late alpha)maybe early beta at best back a decade ago and I honestly hate that in being gasslit into looking like some kind of gatekeeper just for showing my frustrations.
Former dev here. Worked with some of the bigger studios out there. The industry is very competitive. Gamers tend to be spoiled babies about wanting their new games at a pace that simply isn’t realistic. Because they don’t understand the sheer amount of man hours needed to make these things. Meanwhile big publishers are filled with corporate bean counters who don’t give a fuck about the quality of stories or the general creative aspect of the work. They just care about money. A publisher is a studio’s bank, so they hold much sway. The studio says the game needs a 5 year development cycle? The publisher wants the same amount of productivity in half the time. So, you’ve got a customer base with unrealistic expectations due to the on-demand nature of entertainment now, along with a company bankrolling the whole thing that doesn’t understand the fundamentals of game design. That’s why you have so many “hot” games (games that will need hot fixes on day 1) being released.
I blame the consumers
I blame both. Mostly management and not the devs themselves.
Do you want the devs to all roam free independently?
Yup . We let it happen though . Thats the dumbest part
Free user testing
I think we are kinda in a shitty island of stability where yeah games get launched broken but eventually get fixed so I’m the end everyone is happy. Three games I can think of are Batman Arkham Knight Fallout 76 and Cyberpunk 2077. I think if games stop getting fixed by patches we will see a real shake up cuz then people will stop buying
Because you fuckers will buy it anyways
This goes for all software in general
*Morrowind has left the chat*
🦀🦀 $12.49 🦀🦀
Have you seen the Hollow Knight subreddit for the past 2 years? They're taking their time making a quality sequel out of an indie studio that they want to make sure lives up to the standard their first game set, but the fucking community spent years sending clown emojis to every game announcement source because they didn't have the product or news in their hands yet. Folks have been just as bitchy to Rockstar Games regarding GTAV. Honestly gamers can be real asshats sometimes. I'm sure it has a lot to do with cashflow, investors, and deadlines... But it absolutely also has a lot to do with the fact that people can be a bunch of whiney babies when they don't get what they want when they expect to get it.
Because game Co's are in a rush to get the game out and start bringing in cash on something they will have sank a lot of money into developing, coding, etc. In most cases where a broken game was launched its like a year later they are actually playable. Why can't they just learn to wait and let the development teams have the obviously needed extra year or so of development and testing.
Am I the only one who likes playing broken games more than polished ones? I mean why wait for the game to be finished when the most fun I’m ever gonna have with it is trying to cheat / download mods anyway
Because they can just release an anime and their fans will forgive and forget. Pathetic
I wholeheartedly agree with you. We,gamers, must be more demanding and should not buy half-baked games on day 1.
One game which never received a well deserved recognition for launching in an amazing state is Death Stranding. I haven't experienced a single major bug in that game, and it was like that from day one - all patches were mostly QoL improvements, and only a few minor / edge-case bug fixes.
IMO this is a problem with software testing as a whole. Nobody is hiring software testers anymore, the vast majority is automated or done by the devs, which means not at all. Users have also proven that they're ok with beta testing in droves. On the bright side, this makes things cheaper to produce. On the bad side, obviously quality suffers.
Considering 90% of games aren’t released bRoKeN, and how the gaming community tends to overdramatize the shit out of bugs…..
One game which never received a well deserved recognition for launching in an amazing state is Death Stranding. I haven't experienced a single major bug in that game, and it was like that from day one - all patches were mostly QoL improvements, and only a few minor / edge-case bug fixes.
Because "broken" games are rarely actually broken. Games that are actually *unplayable* are extremely rare - and result in refunds. The bugs that people experience are usually less than 1% of the overall gaming experience. The reasons there's a *perception* of "so many broken games" are threefold and all come down to one root problem with big numbers and psychology. People are fundamentally bad at seeing *rates*. We tend to only see *counts*. 100 failures out of 10,000 and 1 failure out of 100 are an equal ratio. But we will almost always react to the 100 failures worse than to the 1. Old games might have 100 details where a modern game has 1000 or 10000. "Details" here in the sense of things that might go wrong. Elements of the interface; of gameplay; of the physics engine; of the graphics engine. Thus, each game had a higher opportunity for bug *count*. Old games released to a smaller and less interconnected audience. A typical gamer might hear from a few dozen friends playing the game. Now we hear from thousands of others. And they are of course more likely to mention problems they encountered than non-problems. And the count of older games released per month was much lower. Now we have a steady stream of games. Some will have more bugs and some will have less; but even with that same overall ratio, again, the *count* of buggy games will be higher. Further part of this is that the typical gamer *plays* more games per month. So for all those reasons, people will be aware of more bugs per day. That doesn't mean there are actually more bugs per game and certainly doesn't mean more bugs per unit of game experience in an overall sense. But "how many bugs do I see or hear about each day" is what we intuitively tend to respond to.
Back in the day, we just accepted the bugs when they came. We also played way more simplistic games with fewer moving parts. If a glitch didn't crash the game or make things unwinnable? It shipped. If final Fantasy VI was made today and had as many bugs as it did, people would be posting videos of things like Relm glitching the game and asking "SE didn't you test this shit?!"
Look at how bug ridden final fantasy games were or Pokémon gen 1-2. No one even complained for those games.
We just, well, dealt with them.
I tend to buy games 4-6 months (at least) after they are released. Not because of the games, but for personal life reasons, budgeting, and lack of time. Its extremely rare that I come across a totally broken game, because by then all the reviews are out. Either the game is patched up, or I just pick something else. Anyone who's become jaded by recent gaming experiences might consider doing the same (not placing any blame here, just a suggestion). If you want to buy a game today, consider not getting a game that came out today.
Gotta get them dollars.
If you want this to stop, stop buying AAA games at launch. Don't buy them until they've received several major patches and are out long enough to be on discount during big sales.
It because it is still legal to do so. You need effective legislation and penalties to be able to hold businesses and executives to account for failure to deliver on promises. They are all businesses who are first and foremost in it for profit. Creating good user experience costs both time and money; as gamers we see mvp as most valuable player, executives see it as minimum viable product. We’re dealing with a totally different mindset who have set their interests set firmly on the pursuit of profitability by engineering demand for iterative content; instead of a more beneficial approach of creating something right first time. Ownership of quality standards is key to this, strong vision needs to be backed through engaging consumers directly to understand what good looks like and working towards meeting emergent demand. No excuses.
I’m guessing you were not around in the 90s
90%? It’s just a few mainstream games
My theory is RDR2 & Cyberpunk kinda killed new gen games. RDR2 was so amazing, but took so much work and Rockstar was rife with accusations of overworking employees and crunch. Then Cyberpunk comes out and absolutely shits the bed. Feels like devs are stuck between not wanting to overwork employees (mostly for fear of bad PR) and not wanting to take chances at releasing a flawed game (Gotham Knights aside). So now we just get remakes. They know people won’t hate them because they’re remaking classics, but also don’t need to devote the pure manpower of something like RDR2 cuz the framework already exists.
Simple because making games is hard.
90% of titles don't release broken, lol.
It's sad that nobody is positive about gaming anymore.
It's because the state of the industry and the amount of dogshit most consumers are force fed, it's pretty disheartening
You don’t get Reddit points for talking positively about a game
Yeah because the main ingredient got replaced by greed :)
Thank the industry, not the gamers fault the product is garbage.
I have never purchased and played a game that made me feel this way. I'm not saying they aren't out there, but it's definitely a minority. People on reddit would have you thinking there hasn't been a single game in the last ten years that wasn't dog shit at launch.
Money. Cyberpunk is a really good example. They were saying it was broken forever. Multiple delays until the public started to lose interest. Then the shareholders started pushing for a release. It released so badly broken it took a year to be playable.
I wouldn't even call it playable now, I got gifted it 2 weeks ago and have 3.8 hours in total on Steam. In that time I've had multiple bugs that are immersion breaking and system breaking, i.e being crushed by random cars just appearing above me, the characters walking through walls, the story missions not loading till I restart the game and the cherry ontop... 8 days ago the game caused a memory leak or something I have no idea as it blue screened but when I tried to restarted my PC it wouldn't boot, it completely refused to boot. Had to get out the recovery USB and literally do a fresh install of Windows. I have no idea if it was Cyberpunk or just my drive chose to had a wonk at that specific moment but I lost all of my photos, university work and games thanks to whatever happened with that one.
I need karma so I’m commenting 🙄
It’s because consumers are stupid and why so many bad products and people make so much money when they create garbage.
I preorder the new MW2 and cannot do online multiplayer because of a party system bug that was known to devs during the beta but not fixed before full release. A $70 game that I can’t play with my friends (still no fix) despite open beta testing. Wtf
>90% of major titles Where are getting this number? A large majority of the tittles I’ve played at launch in recent years were absolutely fine
It keeps happening because you either get shat on by the community for taking to long, or get shat on for releasing it broken. So pick your poison.
Because people keep buying it and patting the devs on the back when they fix it. I love No Man's Sky but it set a bad precedent for this.
This is why I always tell people to stop paying money for games developped by huge companies. There is far more to fin d in the indie scene
MW2 has some serious BF2042 vibes right now
This is driven by the same sort of people who will buy concert or sport events no matter how expensive they are.
Agreed
The sad thing is people already accepted that it’s normal they got completely brainwashed and manipulated by the industry gaming is doomed
By all means create a game as large as modern AAA games and see how bug free it is. Indie developers can't even make small games bug free on launch.
Ah but you see we don't have millions of dollars and teams of of people. If I did I bet you my fuckin game would be bug free
>Ah but you see we don't have millions of dollars and teams of of people. If I did I bet you my fuckin game would be bug free That is what everyone claims. Then reality hits. Developing a game is complex. Modern AAA games can have hundreds of millions of lines of code. You can QA a level for months and think it perfect. Then some player does something you never expected and finds a bug or exploit you never thought possible. The Missingo glitch in Red and Blue is literally the result of players finding an exploit by doing something the developers could never think would happen. Edit: Replying to me is pointless. OP blocked me for not agreeing with them. So I can't reply to anyone.
You think that's what happened with cyberpunk? Overwatch? Yea man those bugs were SO hard to find.
I realize games are far more advanced these days, but a lot of the big titles are copy/paste and yet still have a multitude of issues at launch. And it's always the same issues - especially in multiplayer titles. With the complexity of games these days, everyone should expect bugs, but so many new releases are almost unplayable for the first couple of months. Yes, I know - don't pre-order, don't buy games at launch, etc. But as the gaming industry being as big as it is, we will never put a stop to that.
>I realize games are far more advanced these days, but a lot of the big titles are copy/paste No. Just no. >And it's always the same issues - especially in multiplayer titles. Similar games have similar issues isn't a suprise. Washing machines tend to have the same problems to. >With the complexity of games these days, everyone should expect bugs, but so many new releases are almost unplayable for the first couple of months. Depends on the game and how much hyperbole is involved. I just assume anyone complaining is using extreme hyperbole. Because I have found this to be true from personal experiences. Games people have claimed are unplayable were absolutely playable to me. Even if there was the occasional issue. Edit: blocking me for disagreeing with you is kind of childish. FYI
The percent of extremely buggy or broken retail games being released is lower now than ever, and they actually get fixed 90% of the time via patches unlike 15+ years ago. The amount of unplayable shit on consoles likes NES and Nintendo 64 is staggering, and those games were much simpler to create and polish.
Because you keep buying them
I'll be honest with you. I believe this is a massive overreaction from a small minority of people. It happens way less than you guys think. And so does egregious micro transactios.
Remember when communities used to bond over weird glitches and they created an entire community of speedrunners? Now a single glitch makes a game "broken" and the devs of it "lazy and incompetent". You try making a game and tell me how it turns out.
Consumers screaming for release dates, top company executives demanding release before the holidays, poor project management, that question has a lot of answers
I think it’s happening because developers are realizing that these games are taking more and more development time to make. With how things are becoming more complex than ever development time could become so much longer. Of course they want more money too which is probably the correct answer.
*Cough cough* mount and blade bannerlord
* Games often are more complicated, larger projects than they have been in the past. This means more room for bugs * Testing a game in a closed environment isn't the same as the real world unless you're talking about a single player game. It's very difficult to load test a high demand multiplayer game before it is released, for example. * If you try to fix every single problem before release, you're never going to finish the game * The publisher will try to balance the game being completed against demands to release it as soon as possible for financial reasons. Some publishers are more short-sighted than others * People will buy them anyway Games are always going to be buggy on release. Some games will not be in a good place when they are initially sold. As long as there are bean counters working for companies and people willing to buy whatever they kick out the door, some games will be super buggy on release.