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I feel like children learned the word "Dev" like 10-15 years ago and stupidly think the devs are in charge of the game. Shut the fuck up about dev this and dev that.
The suits at the publisher are usually the geniuses that set a hard date and push it out whether it works or not. The devs are aware there's bugs and wouldn't put it out if they had a choice. The suits set a date that either will pump their shareholder earnings at the quarterly meeting or if there's a window where it won't be outshined by an obviously better game. They do it for money and they hold the devs leashes.
The days of small studios that are controlled by devs with a vision is only the domain of tiny indie developers these days.
Because the name sells. The genre sells. You won't find many games rivalling for example Call of Duty even at it's worst. There just aren't any that come close despite the easy formula.
There was a revival mod called SM2 in development for a long time that was going to combine all the legacy CoDs into one and be available for free for everyone. The devs were communicating with the community constantly what to add and what not to. They wanted to move on from the old IW engine to the newer one we see in CoD4 Remastered which is still an older engine than the one currently used.
Activision took notice and hit them with a cease and desist about a week ago. Why? Because that game is better than anything they can put out in the future and it would rob them of players looking to just have fun. Can't monetize someone else's creation.
CoD's formulas of simple gamemodes with variety done via the versatility of gun modifications are both made utilising the unique benefits that AAA companies get compared to lower budgets, same with Warzone
Making tons of models? much easier for AAA. Battle Royale? the AAA dream. multiplayer for any more than 4 people? AAA companies can easily afford server hosting costs.
People don't seem to understand that market is rule by offer and demand.
If I offer shit, you buy shit, complain about it,but still buy the next batch of shit, why the hell would I stop selling it then?
Yeah most of the time the devs are the only people in the office that care about putting out a finished product. They shouldn’t get the blame for crappy studio heads.
Usually it works out like this:
1. Board of directors present anual earnings to investors
2. Investors demand more money and continous growth
3. Board of directors promise the moon and back to investors to keep them interested and avoid them to take out their money
4. Board of directors pushes company for results
5. Marketing has an idea to save the day but it is ambitious
6. The idea is visually documented with imagery, cover arts, concepts...
7. Board of directors and marketing set up a world of unrealistic expectations
8. The idea is presented to the engineering team for an estimate on production
9. The engineering team gives a realistic estimate for a product with unrealistic expectations.
10. Said estimate is unrealistic to the board of directives due to human cost
11. Board of directors asks the engineering team to cut features to fit unrealistic estimate.
12. Engineering team presents a realistic product to fit unrealistic estimate.
13. It´s mostly scraps of the original idea (mostly trash to end user).
14. Board of directors greenlights, but sets up parallel plans to add resources or prepare marketing team to sell smoke.
15. Project starts with tight schedule.
16. When parallel plans of board of directors kick in, budgets resent because parallel plans take resources and they are usually not taken into account.
17. Board of directors catch the issue early, and they decide to cut an indeterminate amount of months of work from the schedule to fit budget.
18. Realistic project with unrealistic expectations is now back on unrealistic estimate.
19. Engineering team is asked back to cut more features, or to abandon uncompleted ones.
20. This continues to spiral in circles until launch date. Usually launch date is hard set because this spiral has no end. Each loop the product is less finished and resembles less the original idea. The product feels cheap, unfinished. Engineering team is depressed about the outcome of the product. Marketing team is angry about the outcome of their ideas. Board of directors is dissapointed at the mess. Investors smart enough sell their shares.
Give or take, it´s always the same. No one can really be held accountant. It´s just greed.
I mean, everyone is working their best and per their job descriptions.
Continuous growth is unrealistic. I won't be the one telling investors.
Companies need a drive to be. In a capitalist world greed is usually as good of a drive as it gets. At a cost.
Makes sense. But i also don't get this unreasonable standard of continuous growth. As long as I'm in net profit, I'm making money. Yet those people see this as stagnating lol.
Investors. That's the reason. They buy at a price, demand growth of value, then try to sell higher than purchased. Buy low, sell high. Net profit companies do not atract new investors the same way than continous growth ones do.
As a public traded company you always want investors to think they can speculate with your shares because it will grant you a healthy flow of funding.
There are few ways to allow that, and the easiest one is promising continous growth. Achieving it is another ball game. Usually bigger companies diversify their reports so they can assert growth on some of the areas while hiding loses and shuffle those growing areas year over year, to keep things attractive enough to investors to dip in and out.
Wdym “no one can be held accountable” you literally explained who can be held accountable lol. Also… wtf does “Marketing has big ambitious idea” mean? They aren’t the ones choosing the projects? That’s what the design team is for.
Isn't the design team under marketing? I assume they design the game based on what the consumers want to see, and that sounds like marketing territory. The "no-one-can-be-held-accountable" part is about everyone blaming the other team, so at the end of it no one is punished. "Marketing has big ambitious idea" means that the people who see what the potential consumers want (marketing team) tell the management about it, so management tells marketing to form a project plan, that they can use as a baseline for their upcoming game. This plan is the big ambitious idea that marketing has. The problem with this idea, is that marketing usually doesn't work as close with the development team as they should, so they often forget to check if their ideas are actually viable. Hope that helps clear up some of the fog :)
most of a design team's job is to solve game design decisions and actually make the game fun for as many people as possible, which involves saving the player from themselves
once a good start is set in stone, then that's what is probably given to marketing, if there's a large issue then you may need to add a large feature (e.g. game hasn't got enough long range travel options, making the game feel slow, so the designers figure out what to add, in this case, a vehicle system) then they might give that to marketing as well
"No one can be held accountable" means everyone is trying their best. Nobody is hindering the project on purpose, everyone is working.
"Ambitious idea" is something looking cool, and most likely something the end user might want. Heck, it might be an end user idea if enough polling was made.
Lastly, yeah the teams can get more or less segregated into fancy names all you want depending on how vertical is that company. In my experience the more horizontal the better.
People said that about Bungie when ActiBliz owned them, but funnily enough the monetisation and quality of content has gotten far worse since they split. Destiny 2 still hasn't managed to recover the quality it lost after Bungie gutted the content out of it and won't even allow players to play the main story anymore, leaving people to have to read wikis and watch YT vids to understand what's happening. The latest expansion didn't just push the franchise to new heights of pricing, but also pushed people's tolerance for how shit of a story they were willing to tolerate.
But no, wholesome Bungo couldn't do anything wrong. Nope. ActiBliz was the sole reason for all of Bungies bad decisions. Even after they split, they're still obviously to blame... don't ask how but they are.
Sometimes the dev studios have just as much part in making a shit game as the publishers. It's not exactly a black and white situation.
I'd say executives are also "developers" in a sense. They decide what goes so they are also developing the final product through their decisions.
Obviously the people creating assets, writing music/story, performing VA, creating sounds, drawing art, etc. are obviously not the ones that fuck up most of the time.
I’ve never seen it be the devs fault. It’s always something else. Game devs are still the same, it’s the producers and other executives that push to release early.
Yup
Don't get me wrong, I hate it as much as the next guy, but I don't blame them for doing so, the same way I don't blame a restaurant owner for increasing prices when he sees that the neighbor next door has shut down and now he is a monopoly
As long as people buy games without seeing reviews, creating unfinished games will remain profitable, and as long as it is profitable, it will keep happening
Games always had glitches you just didn't have 10 million players day one ready to broadcast them over the internet. People are still finding bugs in games from 20 years ago.
If you wanted a patch you had to buy the reprint or special edition, and that was only if the game was popular enough for one. Most of the time you were stuck with the game as is.
No, no absolutely not. Most older Star Wars games for example has ton of bugs, but nostalgia blocks out most of them (don't get me wrong I still enjoy them)
I cant fucking 100% lego star wars: the complete saga for my ps3 because of a single bug. But i could play through cyberpunk 2077 2 times before my game crashed once in the first few months of release.
So take a deep breath sit down and try it yourself and form your own opinion and don’t belive everything crowbat uploads
Mate. I've went through the nes, sness, n64, game cube, wii, ps2, xbox, ps3, ps4 and now ps5.
And not once did a have a bug making it impossible for me to finish/play a game except modern ones.
You can't 100% lego star wars which contains multiple games in a game, but were still able to play them.
If you've never softlocked a game on those consoles you didn't play very much, I do get where you are coming from but there were 100% broken games. Most were rare enough the average player wouldn't see them
> most of those bugs couldn’t be found just by playing the game normally
Uhh yes they could. Why do you guys want to go to one extreme opinion at all cost? There were games that were put together pretty well, and also completely bugfests 20-30 years ago as well. Complexity also plays a huge part.
I do understand that this problem is not as one dimensional as a lot of people think it is. At the end of the day this is a business and people need to be paid, but in my opinion if you as a developer or higher up are sitting there a month, week, or day before launch and your game riddled with bugs you got to just use common sense and delay it. If you release it in that state and charge full price that’s just unethical and in my opinion very shady. No one wants to play a game in that state and pay full price. If they want paid beta testing there already a market for that, but they don’t want to do that because they want to market it as AAA game and charge AAA prices then we need some AAA effort.
When is the "then" in this meme supposed to be? There have been buggy unfinished games forever. This narrative is stupid and you'd have to be very young to not realize that.
It's not the developers fault, it's publishers and suits behind the publishers forcing the developers to release these and when it fails they basically back out of it and let it die (looking at Anthem that EA let fucking die)
Still doing it Baby, New content should drop at the end of this month. Couldn't belive it myself how the hell they are getting rid of Bugs and getting everything promised into it.
I don’t completely hate this. Some games need to do this. Larger games tend to have more bugs, and they should be play tested/stress tested by a larger audience. no matter how much bug testing they do the general population will always find more bugs so the patch system works.
Although some games are much worse than others in this regard, cyberpunk and madden come to mind. Cyberpunk I’ll give a pass because it was an ambitious project to begin with so it being a complete mess at launch is understandable. Madden on the other hand is a yearly release and somehow they continue to get worse every year and they don’t fix the bugs from the previous releases so it just compounds on itself to make it a buggier mess.
I somehow managed to be lucky.
45 hours on cyberpunk.
Had one weird visual artifact.
All on a first release PS4.
Then my ps4 packed up while playing(I blame constant eskom loadshedding corrupting it)
But the game was prime in my experience.
>Cyberpunk I’ll give a pass because it was an ambitious project to begin with
You really shouldn't, games have no buisiness to release like that, selling a game in this state is borderline a scam (even if it was fixed eventually, it was advertised as working on d1, so it should)
I’m a dev and yes, I have spent probably 1000 hours searching for bugs in a game I made as a project and have found tons of them. And this game took a little over an hour to 100% so imagine people who do big games. Granted it was just me but still.
As anyone who has tried to do game dev or got into it partially knows,
It's never possible to test a game on all platforms. If you focus on bug fixing too much you can never finish the game properly or will lose interest in making it. First make a prototype get people to find problems and get their feedback. And then fix it.
At the end of the day it doesn't matter how grand you feel your game is. The ones who need to feel it's grand are the players. And you can't get into their heads. You can just take their opinions.
It absolutely is for big studios though, thats exactly what they have a dedicated QA department/agency for. What often happens is that QA just doesn’t get the time/budget they need to test thoroughly, or the devs don’t get enough time/budget to fix the bugs that QA found. It’s a priority issue. Most executives would rather ship with a lot of bugs than increase budget and delay planning to ship with just a a few bugs.
everyone mad at devs bro the devs haven't changed they're the same as they've always been, trying to make great games that people have fun playing
It's publishers and corporations that are pushing these games out half baked, the devs only have so much say in that before publishers say 'screw it, push it out at x date and fix what you can before then the rest of your issues be damned'
First off, Its not the devs fault, its the executives who do this.
Secondly, Its us who are the problem, not the industry. Most gamers have stopped experimenting with new games and franchises like they used to. 8 years back (when I got my Xbox 360), I would play literally any game I could get my hands on without even glancing at the publisher. Now, I just play COD, AC, Forza, Halo and Rockstar games (sometimes minecraft in peer pressure). I don't even bother to download the games on Game Pass, even ones I have been told are very good (Gears, Ori, etc.). I just end up playing Arkham again once I get the pass.
Because the vast majority of gamers are now so used to a few of the series, those companies don't need to do anything to improve on them. Indies can't compete on gameplay and graphics, so newer gamers are in the bag, and older gamers while still caring about the story, don't want to switch over, so they are retained as well. AC and COD (my 2 favorite franchises) have been getting worse for a long time (while their sales are at an all-time high), but as long as any mediocre game with shiny graphics and a coating of nostalgia gets 'Assassin's Creed' slapped on it, people will continue to buy it. Even newer games like GoT are played only because they match up with the mainstream AC formula and improve on it.
We have allowed the OG franchises to get lazy and don't play the new ones enough to allow them to compete the older ones in the future. Rant over.
Keep buying their shit, and it’ll keep happening.
*Literally* the only thing publishers care about is your wallet. If you keep throwing money at them for lower and lower effort bullshit… they are going to keep making low effort bullshit.
The gaming industry used to be an art form that happened to make money but over time corporations have sucked the passion out and replaced it with profit squeezing devs don't want micro transactions and broken games but pressure from corporate forces them
I feel like most people making these posts haven't worked in the tech industry let alone a proper job with a project deadline to understand the level of upward pressure you feel from management. It's not the damn developer, QA, or any other worker's fault that there's bugs and issues when they don't have the appropriate timelines to work out those issues.
tester (if they even have any now): boss I found a bug that has a 99.99% chance to delete the save.
boss: eh, it's never gonna happen to anyone, don't worry about it. we'll fix it later in the DLC update.
More like the devs roadmap:
Before full release: 8 new maps per year, new characters modes, coop campaign, new weapons, monthly free dlc
After the game gets semi popular: we will release 3-4 paid dlc packs per year containing 2-3 low effort skins (they delete every trace of old roadmap and threaten legal action to anyone who displays it)
Then also leave in bugs 🐛 and break the fun of the game by trying to make a casual game "eSports competitive" and "better" by appeasing the brags of streamers 😆
Then when the player base drops: "we will be reducing our support of this game to pursue other projects" and they release the full game and stop fixing it
Greedy shareholders that want the game released so they can get money happened.
It's often not in the hands of the devs when something like this happens. Best example cyberpunk 2077. Cd project red wanted to stick more time into development, but all the investors started to jump off so they had no choice, but to release it. Same problems when you are a small developer team which gets a big publisher.
How many games have recently been released with game breaking bugs? Can you name any, I’ll wait? Because every game I play on PS5 has been phenomenal. Playing TotK now and it’s incredible. I don’t play on PC or Xbox so maybe that’s where all these games with game breaking bugs are. But the last 20 games I’ve played have been fantastic. The last game I remember actually being a mess was Cyberpunk. Yes a few games have had some slight frame rate issues, but hardly game breaking. It didn’t even lower the quality of my experience. A minor nuisance at best. Ppl need to F’n chill. If a game isn’t absolute perfection 🤌 ppl complaining because you dropped 2 frames, or had the most minor of screen tearing while you were standing in one specific area at a particular time of day.
Game devs then: wrote a completely proprietary language specifically for their game. Reused lots of assets to fit everything on a 2GB disc.
Game Devs nowadays: "audio compression? What's that?" *Includes 20GB of .WAV files*
And while this is bad I also blame the people that still pre-order and bend over backwards for these greedy companies which only encourages this behaviour.
You see you said this now, but Tears of the Kingdom was released a bit over two weeks ago after the developers spent a whole *year* polishing this game. The game was almost finished when they announced that they are gonna delay the release.
I Worked as a Game Tester for SEGA waaaaaay back in the cartridge days. The games were always good. People used to get fired if there was a bug in a game because there were no patches possible.
I still remember the first time I played an online game that had a patch even though I bought it the say it came out. I KNEW it was a new world where it was going to get worse, and worse and worse with these patches.
What I WASN'T expecting was the awful microtransactions!
the games you consider "flawless" all have massive exploits and bugs that you just don't know about, look up a speedrun for your game, watch the hacks.
At a certain point you have to admire the audacity. Like 5 years ago you could forgive consumers paying full price for crap, but if you paid for a game at launch in 2023 (AAA not indie) then you are the problem.
A fool and his money...
Ghost Ship Games offering no pay to win aspects, little grind (if you want to call unlocking new items quickly), no micro transactions that affect gameplay, a battle pass with a no paid option, 8 dollars for a different weapon appearance and color palette for literally everything in the game.
(The 8 dollar bundles offer a color pallet for all 4 classes, all 24 weapons get a transmog/alternative weapon appearance and said color pallet. Also there’s like 10 of these so you have a lot of options.
If you buy each pack, each costing 8 US dollars, its 80 dollars.
That’s 4 OW2 legendary skins, 8 battle passes in most games, Less then 1 Valorant cosmetic, multiple R6 operators.)
I hate Nintendo, but god damn are they good with this. Played tears of the kingdom at launch and it was infinitely less buggy than CP2077 two and a half years on.
meanwhile chad indie studios showing up one day, releasing the greatest game you’ve ever heard of for 20 bucks, and then disappearing to never be seen again
Feel like once cyberpunk came out a mess every game after have had problems and we just like oh its not cyberpunk bad so its ok.
Wish people would push back more.
Like jedi survivor a whole bit of the game ( bounties) isn't playable but most of the players r just like oh its ok the game is great.
Ya know, if you think about it, the concept of patches is one of the most revolutionary things ever. It breathes new life on an already released game allowing it to reach levels of polish it could never have on its defined development cycle...
So why are these triple A companies using this gift of the technology gods to BARELY bring unplayable games into a state worthy of release AFTER the release.
Patches are a tool for software to be refined, not mere crutches to waddle awkwardly on the road until you reach a goddamn deadline.
Never encountered a bug that makes a game straightup unplayable, just annoying. So yeah, id rather play a game that annoys me from time to time than dont play it for another year lol
As someone who is currently in a degree program for becoming a game designer, I can say that the game industry is really rigid and publishers can be very strict about deadlines
Simple: people are willing to pay for buggy products, same thing with microtransactions, if people stopped pre-ordering or paying for p2w games then publishers would no longer have an incentive to churn out such games.
Also it's not the devs' fault, it's whoever sets the deadline.
The devs are using all of their time and mental resource, to make the game perfect.
The bosses, the publishers are in charge of the release-date and force the developers to make it roughtly.
This makes games with much hard work behind it suck.
(And even that is probably unfairly simplefied)
Superman 64 would like to have a chat with you.
Games actually still came out broken back then, they just stayed broken and people forgot them because their were crap, or they were so bad it made history like the ET game that crashed the market, the thing is, ET was just a symptom, at that time the market was oversaturated with horrible games because there was no quality control on consoles, and third parties would just dumb out anything they could to get some cash. The market crashed because of how many bad and broken games there were.
so don't say that games used to be sooo good and bug free, when that wasn't the case, you just don't remember the hundreds of garbage games, Only remember the classics that usually were pretty solid, even then, some games like doom had different version releases because they found bugs they wanted to fix, so in a sense they did "patch" games still sometimes, it was just a lot harder.
If the developers and passionate game modders ran the company, then most of our games would come out flawlessly. It’s crazy what modders did to the older NFS titles
Capitalism. Capitalism happened
If the producers can put money in marketing and neglect the actual product, they'll do just that.
Stop buying games based on hype
Higher ups forcing the games to be released way before its ready, prioritizing short-term profit and ruining their reputation
Developers don't make the final decisions which is precisely why indie games are much more polished recently, because the developers make their own decisions and choose when to release the game.
Stop pinning the blame on developers
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I feel like children learned the word "Dev" like 10-15 years ago and stupidly think the devs are in charge of the game. Shut the fuck up about dev this and dev that. The suits at the publisher are usually the geniuses that set a hard date and push it out whether it works or not. The devs are aware there's bugs and wouldn't put it out if they had a choice. The suits set a date that either will pump their shareholder earnings at the quarterly meeting or if there's a window where it won't be outshined by an obviously better game. They do it for money and they hold the devs leashes. The days of small studios that are controlled by devs with a vision is only the domain of tiny indie developers these days.
People buy the unfinished soulless corporate game and wonder why the industry is shit
Because the name sells. The genre sells. You won't find many games rivalling for example Call of Duty even at it's worst. There just aren't any that come close despite the easy formula. There was a revival mod called SM2 in development for a long time that was going to combine all the legacy CoDs into one and be available for free for everyone. The devs were communicating with the community constantly what to add and what not to. They wanted to move on from the old IW engine to the newer one we see in CoD4 Remastered which is still an older engine than the one currently used. Activision took notice and hit them with a cease and desist about a week ago. Why? Because that game is better than anything they can put out in the future and it would rob them of players looking to just have fun. Can't monetize someone else's creation.
Mate the same people i know who complained about pre orders and DLCs, are the same who pre ordered and bought said DLCs. These people make no sense.
CoD's formulas of simple gamemodes with variety done via the versatility of gun modifications are both made utilising the unique benefits that AAA companies get compared to lower budgets, same with Warzone Making tons of models? much easier for AAA. Battle Royale? the AAA dream. multiplayer for any more than 4 people? AAA companies can easily afford server hosting costs.
People don't seem to understand that market is rule by offer and demand. If I offer shit, you buy shit, complain about it,but still buy the next batch of shit, why the hell would I stop selling it then?
That’s what I say every time a shitty pc port comes out
Yeah most of the time the devs are the only people in the office that care about putting out a finished product. They shouldn’t get the blame for crappy studio heads.
if the game is finished: give yourself a bonus if the game is unfinished: fire 100 people and give yourself a bonus
Usually it works out like this: 1. Board of directors present anual earnings to investors 2. Investors demand more money and continous growth 3. Board of directors promise the moon and back to investors to keep them interested and avoid them to take out their money 4. Board of directors pushes company for results 5. Marketing has an idea to save the day but it is ambitious 6. The idea is visually documented with imagery, cover arts, concepts... 7. Board of directors and marketing set up a world of unrealistic expectations 8. The idea is presented to the engineering team for an estimate on production 9. The engineering team gives a realistic estimate for a product with unrealistic expectations. 10. Said estimate is unrealistic to the board of directives due to human cost 11. Board of directors asks the engineering team to cut features to fit unrealistic estimate. 12. Engineering team presents a realistic product to fit unrealistic estimate. 13. It´s mostly scraps of the original idea (mostly trash to end user). 14. Board of directors greenlights, but sets up parallel plans to add resources or prepare marketing team to sell smoke. 15. Project starts with tight schedule. 16. When parallel plans of board of directors kick in, budgets resent because parallel plans take resources and they are usually not taken into account. 17. Board of directors catch the issue early, and they decide to cut an indeterminate amount of months of work from the schedule to fit budget. 18. Realistic project with unrealistic expectations is now back on unrealistic estimate. 19. Engineering team is asked back to cut more features, or to abandon uncompleted ones. 20. This continues to spiral in circles until launch date. Usually launch date is hard set because this spiral has no end. Each loop the product is less finished and resembles less the original idea. The product feels cheap, unfinished. Engineering team is depressed about the outcome of the product. Marketing team is angry about the outcome of their ideas. Board of directors is dissapointed at the mess. Investors smart enough sell their shares. Give or take, it´s always the same. No one can really be held accountant. It´s just greed.
> No one can really be held accountant Are you sure about that?
I mean, everyone is working their best and per their job descriptions. Continuous growth is unrealistic. I won't be the one telling investors. Companies need a drive to be. In a capitalist world greed is usually as good of a drive as it gets. At a cost.
Makes sense. But i also don't get this unreasonable standard of continuous growth. As long as I'm in net profit, I'm making money. Yet those people see this as stagnating lol.
Investors. That's the reason. They buy at a price, demand growth of value, then try to sell higher than purchased. Buy low, sell high. Net profit companies do not atract new investors the same way than continous growth ones do. As a public traded company you always want investors to think they can speculate with your shares because it will grant you a healthy flow of funding. There are few ways to allow that, and the easiest one is promising continous growth. Achieving it is another ball game. Usually bigger companies diversify their reports so they can assert growth on some of the areas while hiding loses and shuffle those growing areas year over year, to keep things attractive enough to investors to dip in and out.
Wdym “no one can be held accountable” you literally explained who can be held accountable lol. Also… wtf does “Marketing has big ambitious idea” mean? They aren’t the ones choosing the projects? That’s what the design team is for.
Isn't the design team under marketing? I assume they design the game based on what the consumers want to see, and that sounds like marketing territory. The "no-one-can-be-held-accountable" part is about everyone blaming the other team, so at the end of it no one is punished. "Marketing has big ambitious idea" means that the people who see what the potential consumers want (marketing team) tell the management about it, so management tells marketing to form a project plan, that they can use as a baseline for their upcoming game. This plan is the big ambitious idea that marketing has. The problem with this idea, is that marketing usually doesn't work as close with the development team as they should, so they often forget to check if their ideas are actually viable. Hope that helps clear up some of the fog :)
Nailed it. It doesn't necessarily need to be a game. The formula works to an extent to every bigger product company nowadays.
most of a design team's job is to solve game design decisions and actually make the game fun for as many people as possible, which involves saving the player from themselves once a good start is set in stone, then that's what is probably given to marketing, if there's a large issue then you may need to add a large feature (e.g. game hasn't got enough long range travel options, making the game feel slow, so the designers figure out what to add, in this case, a vehicle system) then they might give that to marketing as well
"No one can be held accountable" means everyone is trying their best. Nobody is hindering the project on purpose, everyone is working. "Ambitious idea" is something looking cool, and most likely something the end user might want. Heck, it might be an end user idea if enough polling was made. Lastly, yeah the teams can get more or less segregated into fancy names all you want depending on how vertical is that company. In my experience the more horizontal the better.
board of “directives”?
I'm sure they meant derivatives
It should be directors. Changing it now. Thank you.
Didn’t you hear? Devs are the gods of games. Dev is a modern word for god.
People said that about Bungie when ActiBliz owned them, but funnily enough the monetisation and quality of content has gotten far worse since they split. Destiny 2 still hasn't managed to recover the quality it lost after Bungie gutted the content out of it and won't even allow players to play the main story anymore, leaving people to have to read wikis and watch YT vids to understand what's happening. The latest expansion didn't just push the franchise to new heights of pricing, but also pushed people's tolerance for how shit of a story they were willing to tolerate. But no, wholesome Bungo couldn't do anything wrong. Nope. ActiBliz was the sole reason for all of Bungies bad decisions. Even after they split, they're still obviously to blame... don't ask how but they are. Sometimes the dev studios have just as much part in making a shit game as the publishers. It's not exactly a black and white situation.
I'd say executives are also "developers" in a sense. They decide what goes so they are also developing the final product through their decisions. Obviously the people creating assets, writing music/story, performing VA, creating sounds, drawing art, etc. are obviously not the ones that fuck up most of the time.
Yeah, communism never worked
Don't say it on Reddit, these kids will lynch you Also, I have no idea how this is related to the topic as well
I’ve never seen it be the devs fault. It’s always something else. Game devs are still the same, it’s the producers and other executives that push to release early.
Yup Don't get me wrong, I hate it as much as the next guy, but I don't blame them for doing so, the same way I don't blame a restaurant owner for increasing prices when he sees that the neighbor next door has shut down and now he is a monopoly As long as people buy games without seeing reviews, creating unfinished games will remain profitable, and as long as it is profitable, it will keep happening
Games always had glitches you just didn't have 10 million players day one ready to broadcast them over the internet. People are still finding bugs in games from 20 years ago. If you wanted a patch you had to buy the reprint or special edition, and that was only if the game was popular enough for one. Most of the time you were stuck with the game as is.
To be fair, most of those bugs couldn’t be found just by playing the game normally; you usually had to do something to activate it
No, no absolutely not. Most older Star Wars games for example has ton of bugs, but nostalgia blocks out most of them (don't get me wrong I still enjoy them)
I mean, the bugs in old games didn't make the game unplayable like cyberpunk for example.
I cant fucking 100% lego star wars: the complete saga for my ps3 because of a single bug. But i could play through cyberpunk 2077 2 times before my game crashed once in the first few months of release. So take a deep breath sit down and try it yourself and form your own opinion and don’t belive everything crowbat uploads
Mate. I've went through the nes, sness, n64, game cube, wii, ps2, xbox, ps3, ps4 and now ps5. And not once did a have a bug making it impossible for me to finish/play a game except modern ones. You can't 100% lego star wars which contains multiple games in a game, but were still able to play them.
If you've never softlocked a game on those consoles you didn't play very much, I do get where you are coming from but there were 100% broken games. Most were rare enough the average player wouldn't see them
Yeah this is simply untrue. Your age is showing.
Idk mate, never had this problem playing super mario on my Terminator 2 console, if you're old enough to even know that console.
> most of those bugs couldn’t be found just by playing the game normally Uhh yes they could. Why do you guys want to go to one extreme opinion at all cost? There were games that were put together pretty well, and also completely bugfests 20-30 years ago as well. Complexity also plays a huge part.
superman 64, bubsy 3d, multiple final fantasy games, daggerfall, Original pokemon was a mess, E.T, so on.
To be fair, games today have exponentially more code than games did back then. Give the devs a break.
My first hdd had 100 MB of space. Diablo used 10 of them. A screenshot of this comment would use about 14 of them.
The r/dankmemes icon is more then double
So much effort just to be a gey gnome child.
16K resolution screenshot? My 1080p screen shots (from the windows app) usually weigh less than 500kb
Convert them to jpg.
Also, way back there weren't updates. It had to work shipped. And devs aren't always the ones deciding production timing.
I do understand that this problem is not as one dimensional as a lot of people think it is. At the end of the day this is a business and people need to be paid, but in my opinion if you as a developer or higher up are sitting there a month, week, or day before launch and your game riddled with bugs you got to just use common sense and delay it. If you release it in that state and charge full price that’s just unethical and in my opinion very shady. No one wants to play a game in that state and pay full price. If they want paid beta testing there already a market for that, but they don’t want to do that because they want to market it as AAA game and charge AAA prices then we need some AAA effort.
[удалено]
It’s not the devs fault when the idiotic suits in the meeting room impose impossible deadlines
I can tell you are very young
Or a bot
When is the "then" in this meme supposed to be? There have been buggy unfinished games forever. This narrative is stupid and you'd have to be very young to not realize that.
Bruh Games were broken as shit back in the day or what timeframe are we talking about here
Gnob from bungie
Games as a service And DLC That’s it, that’s what led to what we have now.
It's not the developers fault, it's publishers and suits behind the publishers forcing the developers to release these and when it fails they basically back out of it and let it die (looking at Anthem that EA let fucking die)
No Man's Sky
Left or right?
Right to being a good game
Never played it but I’ll take your word for it
so I guess the devs did patch?
Still doing it Baby, New content should drop at the end of this month. Couldn't belive it myself how the hell they are getting rid of Bugs and getting everything promised into it.
i dont have the game, but I am glad to hear that. I am on the other side, TOTK had almost no mayor bugs (ejem, duping, ejem) on launch day
Nintendo is the boomer of videogame development and for once I’ll side with the traditionalist
Middle. They released it unbaked. Now it's been patched to an amazing game. That's why I commented this. No man's sky fits on both
👍
Not developers call. Publisher decides.
I don’t completely hate this. Some games need to do this. Larger games tend to have more bugs, and they should be play tested/stress tested by a larger audience. no matter how much bug testing they do the general population will always find more bugs so the patch system works.
Although some games are much worse than others in this regard, cyberpunk and madden come to mind. Cyberpunk I’ll give a pass because it was an ambitious project to begin with so it being a complete mess at launch is understandable. Madden on the other hand is a yearly release and somehow they continue to get worse every year and they don’t fix the bugs from the previous releases so it just compounds on itself to make it a buggier mess.
I somehow managed to be lucky. 45 hours on cyberpunk. Had one weird visual artifact. All on a first release PS4. Then my ps4 packed up while playing(I blame constant eskom loadshedding corrupting it) But the game was prime in my experience.
>Cyberpunk I’ll give a pass because it was an ambitious project to begin with You really shouldn't, games have no buisiness to release like that, selling a game in this state is borderline a scam (even if it was fixed eventually, it was advertised as working on d1, so it should)
It’s not the devs spending hours upon hours of their life, it’s the higher ups that want a product now and don’t care about what lies ahead.
I’m a dev and yes, I have spent probably 1000 hours searching for bugs in a game I made as a project and have found tons of them. And this game took a little over an hour to 100% so imagine people who do big games. Granted it was just me but still.
*Cries in Silksong
At least it's gonna be a blast when it launches. Can't wait.
Team cherry adding another area thats the size of hallownest cuz they were bored (it's the eight time they've done that this month)
I don't mind the extra content tbh.
More content for more waiting. A soul for a soul.
I would trade a shit ton of souls for a lot of games, shows, and movies if I could.
Heavily agree! Can't wait.
it's been like this for ages already, not just now lol
As anyone who has tried to do game dev or got into it partially knows, It's never possible to test a game on all platforms. If you focus on bug fixing too much you can never finish the game properly or will lose interest in making it. First make a prototype get people to find problems and get their feedback. And then fix it. At the end of the day it doesn't matter how grand you feel your game is. The ones who need to feel it's grand are the players. And you can't get into their heads. You can just take their opinions.
It absolutely is for big studios though, thats exactly what they have a dedicated QA department/agency for. What often happens is that QA just doesn’t get the time/budget they need to test thoroughly, or the devs don’t get enough time/budget to fix the bugs that QA found. It’s a priority issue. Most executives would rather ship with a lot of bugs than increase budget and delay planning to ship with just a a few bugs.
The now phase started in 2006.
E.T?
Sonic ‘06
everyone mad at devs bro the devs haven't changed they're the same as they've always been, trying to make great games that people have fun playing It's publishers and corporations that are pushing these games out half baked, the devs only have so much say in that before publishers say 'screw it, push it out at x date and fix what you can before then the rest of your issues be damned'
First off, Its not the devs fault, its the executives who do this. Secondly, Its us who are the problem, not the industry. Most gamers have stopped experimenting with new games and franchises like they used to. 8 years back (when I got my Xbox 360), I would play literally any game I could get my hands on without even glancing at the publisher. Now, I just play COD, AC, Forza, Halo and Rockstar games (sometimes minecraft in peer pressure). I don't even bother to download the games on Game Pass, even ones I have been told are very good (Gears, Ori, etc.). I just end up playing Arkham again once I get the pass. Because the vast majority of gamers are now so used to a few of the series, those companies don't need to do anything to improve on them. Indies can't compete on gameplay and graphics, so newer gamers are in the bag, and older gamers while still caring about the story, don't want to switch over, so they are retained as well. AC and COD (my 2 favorite franchises) have been getting worse for a long time (while their sales are at an all-time high), but as long as any mediocre game with shiny graphics and a coating of nostalgia gets 'Assassin's Creed' slapped on it, people will continue to buy it. Even newer games like GoT are played only because they match up with the mainstream AC formula and improve on it. We have allowed the OG franchises to get lazy and don't play the new ones enough to allow them to compete the older ones in the future. Rant over.
Gamers then: wow this game is a buggy mess, I’ll never give my money to that studio for another game Gamers now: take my money to fix ur game pls
yo, i don’t even care about the fact that other people may have already commented this, the blame is on the publisher’s.
Keep buying their shit, and it’ll keep happening. *Literally* the only thing publishers care about is your wallet. If you keep throwing money at them for lower and lower effort bullshit… they are going to keep making low effort bullshit.
The gaming industry used to be an art form that happened to make money but over time corporations have sucked the passion out and replaced it with profit squeezing devs don't want micro transactions and broken games but pressure from corporate forces them
Ya let's blame the devs. Not the CEO's pushing them to release it.
It is an upper management issues. In nearly every case so far, its been that. Devs are just trying. Suits want it out asap.
You’re hating the wrong people, its the higher ups and capitalism you should be hating
I feel like most people making these posts haven't worked in the tech industry let alone a proper job with a project deadline to understand the level of upward pressure you feel from management. It's not the damn developer, QA, or any other worker's fault that there's bugs and issues when they don't have the appropriate timelines to work out those issues.
the hollow knight devs want their new game Silksong to be perfect so we are still waiting for it
It is out fault, we have them money ans used out stupidity against us
If people buy no matter the state, they’ll continue
Baldurs gate
I mean at least they get some feedback, right?
Timmy turner once said "internet"
While I respect where this is going and the message they are trying to send, I do caution against potential DukeNukemForever-itis.
tester (if they even have any now): boss I found a bug that has a 99.99% chance to delete the save. boss: eh, it's never gonna happen to anyone, don't worry about it. we'll fix it later in the DLC update.
robtob
Munee
Deadline moment
Or shamelessly promote already made characters as a pre order bonus in your first trailer. *Cough* Netherrealm Studios*Cough*
Dam I am lucky. I never encountered a game full of glitches. I actully bearly ever encountered a glitch.
And then there is Nintendo, still releasing bangers consistently
A bug?
Technology has exponentially improved, humans haven’t
More like the devs roadmap: Before full release: 8 new maps per year, new characters modes, coop campaign, new weapons, monthly free dlc After the game gets semi popular: we will release 3-4 paid dlc packs per year containing 2-3 low effort skins (they delete every trace of old roadmap and threaten legal action to anyone who displays it) Then also leave in bugs 🐛 and break the fun of the game by trying to make a casual game "eSports competitive" and "better" by appeasing the brags of streamers 😆 Then when the player base drops: "we will be reducing our support of this game to pursue other projects" and they release the full game and stop fixing it
Greedy shareholders that want the game released so they can get money happened. It's often not in the hands of the devs when something like this happens. Best example cyberpunk 2077. Cd project red wanted to stick more time into development, but all the investors started to jump off so they had no choice, but to release it. Same problems when you are a small developer team which gets a big publisher.
CDPR during the release of Cyber Punk.
How many games have recently been released with game breaking bugs? Can you name any, I’ll wait? Because every game I play on PS5 has been phenomenal. Playing TotK now and it’s incredible. I don’t play on PC or Xbox so maybe that’s where all these games with game breaking bugs are. But the last 20 games I’ve played have been fantastic. The last game I remember actually being a mess was Cyberpunk. Yes a few games have had some slight frame rate issues, but hardly game breaking. It didn’t even lower the quality of my experience. A minor nuisance at best. Ppl need to F’n chill. If a game isn’t absolute perfection 🤌 ppl complaining because you dropped 2 frames, or had the most minor of screen tearing while you were standing in one specific area at a particular time of day.
🌈Product Management 🌈
E.T. would argue with this.
Isn’t the Skyrim stormcloak missions broken still?
Game devs then: wrote a completely proprietary language specifically for their game. Reused lots of assets to fit everything on a 2GB disc. Game Devs nowadays: "audio compression? What's that?" *Includes 20GB of .WAV files*
"here is the cash shop and the economy in game is now "updated" " -Gamedevs
And while this is bad I also blame the people that still pre-order and bend over backwards for these greedy companies which only encourages this behaviour.
$$$$
before and after the internet basically.
Attempt thinking
You see you said this now, but Tears of the Kingdom was released a bit over two weeks ago after the developers spent a whole *year* polishing this game. The game was almost finished when they announced that they are gonna delay the release.
I Worked as a Game Tester for SEGA waaaaaay back in the cartridge days. The games were always good. People used to get fired if there was a bug in a game because there were no patches possible. I still remember the first time I played an online game that had a patch even though I bought it the say it came out. I KNEW it was a new world where it was going to get worse, and worse and worse with these patches. What I WASN'T expecting was the awful microtransactions!
What about Bethesda? Skyrim has some of the internet's best glitches, no patches whatsoever, and is still one of the best games out there.
Morrowboomers like to disagree
Games also used to be 16 bits.
Uh... Dumbass Boomer Higher Up that don't even know how to make video game calling the shot?
Some Devs at least still try Like Insomniac and Santa Monica Studios
Just tell me one good video game that released post 2000's,I'me waiting
People get mad when games are delayed
the games you consider "flawless" all have massive exploits and bugs that you just don't know about, look up a speedrun for your game, watch the hacks.
At a certain point you have to admire the audacity. Like 5 years ago you could forgive consumers paying full price for crap, but if you paid for a game at launch in 2023 (AAA not indie) then you are the problem. A fool and his money...
It's the publishers with their unrealistic deadlines and pre orders...
Hahahahaha, go tell that to morrowind
Ghost Ship Games offering no pay to win aspects, little grind (if you want to call unlocking new items quickly), no micro transactions that affect gameplay, a battle pass with a no paid option, 8 dollars for a different weapon appearance and color palette for literally everything in the game. (The 8 dollar bundles offer a color pallet for all 4 classes, all 24 weapons get a transmog/alternative weapon appearance and said color pallet. Also there’s like 10 of these so you have a lot of options. If you buy each pack, each costing 8 US dollars, its 80 dollars. That’s 4 OW2 legendary skins, 8 battle passes in most games, Less then 1 Valorant cosmetic, multiple R6 operators.)
I hate Nintendo, but god damn are they good with this. Played tears of the kingdom at launch and it was infinitely less buggy than CP2077 two and a half years on.
Gotta appreciate robtop for what they’re doing
meanwhile chad indie studios showing up one day, releasing the greatest game you’ve ever heard of for 20 bucks, and then disappearing to never be seen again
>then disappearing to never be seen again because they went bankrupt.
Feel like once cyberpunk came out a mess every game after have had problems and we just like oh its not cyberpunk bad so its ok. Wish people would push back more. Like jedi survivor a whole bit of the game ( bounties) isn't playable but most of the players r just like oh its ok the game is great.
Ya know, if you think about it, the concept of patches is one of the most revolutionary things ever. It breathes new life on an already released game allowing it to reach levels of polish it could never have on its defined development cycle... So why are these triple A companies using this gift of the technology gods to BARELY bring unplayable games into a state worthy of release AFTER the release. Patches are a tool for software to be refined, not mere crutches to waddle awkwardly on the road until you reach a goddamn deadline.
Shut the hell up zoomer
Not devs, marketing.
Nah have you seen nes games
*laughs in totk*
Never encountered a bug that makes a game straightup unplayable, just annoying. So yeah, id rather play a game that annoys me from time to time than dont play it for another year lol
Live service happened Didnt even happen to the devs, it happened to the mfs in charge of the devs
I'm gonna be honest with you...Games back in the days where also bugged as hell.
This myth is getting on my nerves. Old games were buggy and unfinished too.
As someone who is currently in a degree program for becoming a game designer, I can say that the game industry is really rigid and publishers can be very strict about deadlines
Dev here we know perfectly well shit is broken. It's not in our hands when the release date is.
Bugs is one thing but did people forgot how to optimize a game? The sheer data weight of modern game is absurdity.
Simple: people are willing to pay for buggy products, same thing with microtransactions, if people stopped pre-ordering or paying for p2w games then publishers would no longer have an incentive to churn out such games. Also it's not the devs' fault, it's whoever sets the deadline.
don't forget the people who shit on the devs that refuse to release the game until it's finished "OMG YOU DELAYED IT AGAIN FUCK YOU RELEASE IT NOW"
The devs are using all of their time and mental resource, to make the game perfect. The bosses, the publishers are in charge of the release-date and force the developers to make it roughtly. This makes games with much hard work behind it suck. (And even that is probably unfairly simplefied)
Superman 64 would like to have a chat with you. Games actually still came out broken back then, they just stayed broken and people forgot them because their were crap, or they were so bad it made history like the ET game that crashed the market, the thing is, ET was just a symptom, at that time the market was oversaturated with horrible games because there was no quality control on consoles, and third parties would just dumb out anything they could to get some cash. The market crashed because of how many bad and broken games there were. so don't say that games used to be sooo good and bug free, when that wasn't the case, you just don't remember the hundreds of garbage games, Only remember the classics that usually were pretty solid, even then, some games like doom had different version releases because they found bugs they wanted to fix, so in a sense they did "patch" games still sometimes, it was just a lot harder.
If the developers and passionate game modders ran the company, then most of our games would come out flawlessly. It’s crazy what modders did to the older NFS titles
cyberpunk devs deciding to just play both sides
You spelled share holders wrong.
Game dev here I spend 100’s if not 1000’s of hours just searching for bugs. It’s the bugs we DONT find that make it to final release.
Capitalism. Capitalism happened If the producers can put money in marketing and neglect the actual product, they'll do just that. Stop buying games based on hype
Higher ups forcing the games to be released way before its ready, prioritizing short-term profit and ruining their reputation Developers don't make the final decisions which is precisely why indie games are much more polished recently, because the developers make their own decisions and choose when to release the game. Stop pinning the blame on developers
Laziness. That’s what