In gamer communities, if you mention the fact that being able to patch games has created a tendency among developers to release buggy games with the intention of patching them after release, everyone will just solemnly nod. It’s not really questioned. And you would think that this strategy would be self-selecting: all the developers who released games like this would flop. But that isn’t really happening.
Instead, it’s things like this that make me wonder if the “patch it in later” mindset isn’t becoming even more pervasive:
The console on the left is an XBox 360 suffering a “Red Ring of Death”, the console on the right is an original Nintendo Entertainment System, which will turn 25 years old this year.
Hober Short and 
Pat are discussing. 
Long Trance 
Pat 12:31 pm on 6 March 2010 Permalink |
I’d be interested to know what these smug gamers think the alternative is. In my experience, ALL software is released in a buggy state and patched afterward. Anyone who tells you different is a liar or in a state of denial. The question is not whether the released game will have bugs; it will. The question is how prepared the publisher is to accept feedback about bugs and correct them quickly. And the gamer communities seem to be saying that such preparation is a BAD thing.
Are they really foolish enough to believe that games should only be released when they are perfect? If so, I have a three-word answer: DUKE NUKEM FOREVER.
Hober Short 3:24 pm on 6 March 2010 Permalink |
I…. disagree. There’s a difference between having bugs at all, and being _buggy_. As a gedanken experiment, imagine priorities for releasing a game for the Super Nintendo: if it had a bug when you went to market that was there for all time. Playtesting your game to death and making sure that it was 99.9% bug-free was much more important.
Duke Nukem Forever wasn’t trying to be perfect, it was trying to be bleeding edge in every respect, which is just impossible these days.
The problem here are games that are bug-ridden in an obvious way, and the developer clearly spent their last few months of production cramming more things in, not bug-fixing (“We can always fix the bugs later, let’s get the single player campaign finished by release.”)