3 Commando Brigade

New Games - Dev's or Customer Fault?

This isn't recent, nor is it exclusive to software.

The more complex a product, the more likely it is to have 'bugs' or need fixing, perhaps even by third parties.
Think about cars for example. They often go wrong. Or are made even better by a custom car shop or enthusiastic amateur. Bugs and modding right there.

How forgiving the purchaser is of problems determines whether the product will continue to sell and if the manufacturer stays in business. What makes us forgiving? Comparative cost, unique selling point, fixability, fashion, amongst others.

There is almost always pressure to sell/release a product before it is "complete". Either financial (we need the monies NOW), or competitive (being first to market is usually an advantage). Hardly ever because the developer didn't want to produce something awesome. But what separates the good from the great is those companies that can deliver amazing products on budget and on time, without sacrificing quality or customer service. Those tend to be the ones which stick around longest.

PREORDERS. 

Publishers know that they can get away with buggy launches when they look at their pre-order numbers.
Assassin's Creed Unity had ~400'000 pre-orders just on PS4 and xbone [source:vgchartz] and just in the US.
Add in pre-orders on PC and the non-US markets and you can see how publishers get away with releasing broken software: Just the US console pre-orders made them 23 million dollars in revenue.
That's 15% of the insanely high (150mil) production cost already recovered before the game even launchers...and again, that's just one sites estimate of the US console pre-orders.

LAUNCH-DAY BUYERS

Even if you didn't pre-order the game you can still throw your money away by buying the game before anybody had a good chance to review it: Launch day purchases!
I can't find good numbers on this but in the UK Unity and Rogue (the 360/PS3 version) outsold COD:AW and Unity on it's own made it to place two of the sales charts on its launch day.
(Most of these charts ignore downloads, btw, so that's why it's mostly console figures since I'd assume most of the PC sales were steam or uplay downloads)

ECONOMIC SUCCESS

Unity was a famously broken game, right? So you'd expect that -- apart from the fools that pre-ordered or bough it on launch day -- the sales weren't all that great, right? 
Nope. Unity/Rogue sold more copies than Black Flag. What does that tell Ubisoft? Making good games (blackflag was apparently pretty decent) doesn't get rewarded. 
Hyping games up, spending big on marketing and a tight control on press (unity had a famously long review moratorium) will get you money. Lots and lots of money.

I have not playey Project Cars, so I can only relate to the press and community echo I got. What I know from Project Cars is that the majority of complaints come from poor performance on AMD chipsets. This is a topic for itself, because there is some nasty business going on between NVIDIA and AMD and both of them kind of play with some dirty tricks these days against each other.

The "Problem" if you like to call it, is that the development of games have changed a lot in the past 2-3 years. Early Access is the new thing and what started out as good option for small developers, Is now also used by big companies and AAA+ Games. The lines between a finished game and a beta/early access versions are not as clear as in the past. Take games like War Thunder, World of Tanks for example. Are those finished games? Are they still in the beta? You cant really answer both questions with a clear yes. But if they are not one of it, what are they?

When it comes to all this shiny Early Access, it is also naive to think the main reason to do this, is to let people have an impact on the development of the game. While this applies to some games (especially smaller games), this is only a small part of it. The main reason is to get money for people preordering the game. Who doesnt like money? Especially money that comes in advance? All companies love preordering and think of it as personal example.


This is of course simplified, because you will have your own expenses. Also especially small developers could not develop some of their games, if not for preorders or early access. If anyone has played Red Orchestra 2 from the start, you remembe the very bad state of the game for the first 3-4 months. The reason for this was not incompetence, but they simply ran out of money and they could not afford to hold the release any longer. The VC of Tripwire actually had to put in about 20k of his own money, so he could continue to pay the team.

But in the end it is very risky to preorder games these days and I handle preorders like some kind of declaration of my trust to the developer. Since I know how some companies act and have acted in the past, there are certain companies that I will not trust at all. Meaning I will certainly not preorder any games from then and also wait until the game is released and I can get some info from the press and players.

As Apollo said, there is also the pressure to release a game at a certain point. Especially if the game is in some kind of competition like BF vs COD, a game might get released earlier. This can especially be brutal if it is in combination with the seasons, In summer after the E3 a lot of games get released, but of course the most AAA+ games try to get a release in winter.

This is true, but we should not forget that especially in games, bigger projects also have a very, very, big budget these days. The problem is that most of the budget does not go into Q&A or bugfixing, but into marketing.

Now I understand that devs can test for months and will still not find every bug in a game, and the sheer volume of players on most games at release will flag these issues. But my problem with this is that any other product you can take it back to the shop and say, "This is faulty/not fit for purpose, I'd like my money back", whereas with a game, your only options are to trade in at a loss, assuming you bought a physical copy of course, or wait and hope that the devs will fix the issues, which is not guaranteed. 19 months on from release and i still cant complete the Battlefield 4 campaign on PC due to a big that has never been patched. (Yes I paid for bf4, yes I am ashamed). This bug has also been posted on numerous forums at Dice and EA, but they are happy to ignore the community once they have your money, and move onto the next project.

Yeah thats the problem. Sadly the law's that could make those situations more clear, have not yet arrived in the year 2015.

I always take criticism of with a big pinch of salt, online you're always going to get the more vocal outrage. It's easy to go on Metacritic for example with some butthurt about a CTD and give a game zero rating in a rage. Yet who takes the time to go on after enjoying a game and writing a proper evaluation about their experience.

I personally rarely get any real debilitating bugs or snags in games, but I'm probably a rarity in that I don't use Windows for my day to day (Ubuntu and Arch linux for me), so when I do go into Windows to play games it's well maintained and not chock full of crap software to bring it all down. Good quality clean hardware, a maintained OS not running beta drivers and legal software probably do wonders for stability and thus gaming experience.

Sometimes though you do genuinely come across a game that at some fundamental level is just gubbed. My own is Rome 2. That effing AI man, Jesus.

Having been lucky enough to visit many game dev studios, I've seen how much effort goes into testing a game for release.  Some studios have huge build farms, and automated test, with AI acting as players, testing all code to destruction. after every commit to the source repository.   One company ran hourly builds and tests.   But even then, bugs get through.

The reality is that games are really complex, and getting even more so.  It's no accident that the PC, Xbox and PS4 all share similar architectures.  They have to get the cost of development down, or be beaten by the mobile market.  It's always worth remembering that we're now part of the gaming industry that makes very little money.  Casual gaming is where its at.

Getting games right first time on the consoles is hard, but achievable.  Getting it right on the PC is a near impossibility.  The advantage the consoles have is that studios only need to test against a single hardware config.  Whereas for the PC there are millions(billions) of combinations of hardware, anyone of which can potentially cause a game breaking bug.  It's a huge generalisation, but its why console gamers get so upset when their games break, where as PC gamers are use to it.

Apollo touched on a really important point --- the publishers.  Until recently, finding a publisher was the only reliable route to market.  Publishers hold (or held) all the strings and could dictate release dates, etc.  There have been ample examples in the UK over the last few years, where one bad game, was enough to close a studio.  This might have been poor reviews, loss of a franchise from a publisher, or cancellation of a game because it was running late.  Within this context its easy to see why games get released too early and are partially finished.

The advent of kickstarter has changed the dynamics a little, with companies (or more usually named individuals), getting funding for a game which is beyond the reach of the publishers.  We'll have to see how effective this new mode of operation is, but it will still come down to a finite monetary resource to complete and ship a game.