Games not broken on release?

Do you remember any from recent times? Seriously, I can't. Paradox games need at least 6 month to be patched out of the most serious flaws. Total War games are released and left quite broken (Rome and Medieval 2 were disasters). Colonization 2 is a wreck.

What is the world coming to?

Hail the manager-culture!

Medieval 2 is actually not a disaster given its complexity

Why should the Managers/Companies even concider changing something, if the people keep buying (and Preordering, so games go Gold month before the actual release) the games as they are ? (Like we did with Colonization . And honestly - Colonization has a lot of shortcomings, but compared to many other games on the market, it's not too bad.)

The only way to make things change, is to change the customers behaviour. Unfortunately customers are far to disorganized to effectively do so.

Anyone care to found a gamers-labor-union to fight for the rights of gamers vs. the evil industry ?

Refar said:

Anyone care to found a gamers-labor-union to fight for the rights of gamers vs. the evil industry ?

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I'd join were it not for the fact that I'm liable to become a scab upon the release of Empire: Total War.

Refar said:

Why should the Managers/Companies even concider changing something, if the people keep buying (and Preordering, so games go Gold month before the actual release) the games as they are ? (Like we did with Colonization . And honestly - Colonization has a lot of shortcomings, but compared to many other games on the market, it's not too bad.)

The only way to make things change, is to change the customers behaviour. Unfortunately customers are far to disorganized to effectively do so.

Anyone care to found a gamers-labor-union to fight for the rights of gamers vs. the evil industry ?

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I agree that this issue is getting worse. Any UT3 fans here...?

Solution: Buy your games second hand ~a year after release. By this time they're a fraction of the price, have been patched to a reasonable standard and you're not supporting those sellout games companies. I don't think I could face buying another EA game new for quite some time.

Refar said:

The only way to make things change, is to change the customers behaviour.

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Starting with the constant clamoring that the game be released NOW. Give them the time they need to complete it.

But even still, you have to realize that a team of developers/testers/QA will never be able to find all bugs or compatibility issues that the general public will. Economies of scale if you will. It's simply not possible for them to test the game with every hardware configuration, or to think of every crazy exploit that someone will dream up.

It's the first time i hear someone saying, that they actually care about the gamers calling for a faster release of the game (not to mention patch).

The Devs work on a scedual imposed from the publisher, which is trimmed to produce the product at low cost as possible and to throw it on the market. Nothing wrong with it generally - and it is in the best interest of the companies to push it as far as the customer will bear it.
Right now in the game market the customer is willing to bear quite a lot.

There is a difference between having some crazy exploit or screwy behaviour on specific hardware and obvious flaws.

PS.: But, yes you are right about stop nagging for a fater release should be part of the new, better and more conscious customer behaviour

Refar said:

It's the first time i hear someone saying, that they actually care about the gamers calling for a faster release of the game (not to mention patch).

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The fact is, there are vocal people who will complain no matter what. For every person complaining that they obviously didn't take the time to fully test it, there is another who would complain about the release date if they did take more time. That's just a fact.

There is a difference between having some crazy exploit or screwy behaviour on specific hardware and obvious flaws.

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I'd say most of the obvious flaws are not so obvious.

Dralix said:

The fact is, there are vocal people who will complain no matter what. For every person complaining that they obviously didn't take the time to fully test it, there is another who would complain about the release date if they did take more time. That's just a fact.

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Actually it can even be the same dude

Still... Even balance issues aside, which can be less obvious / depend on taste... AI not working on scenarios, making them Sail forever instead of founding colony ? Defensive Bonus from Walls broken ? How one can miss stuff like this ? Tax Rate not Scaling on gamespeed making for 65% Tax in Marathon games ?
How one can miss that ?

Refar said:

Still... Even balance issues aside, which can be less obvious / depend on taste... AI not working on scenarios, making them Sail forever instead of founding colony ? Defensive Bonus from Walls broken ? How one can miss stuff like this ? Tax Rate not Scaling on gamespeed making for 65% Tax in Marathon games ?
How one can miss that ?

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Actually, I'd say that most probably they were aware of these facts. And most probably they needed to release the game anyway.

Dralix said:

The fact is, there are vocal people who will complain no matter what. For every person complaining that they obviously didn't take the time to fully test it, there is another who would complain about the release date if they did take more time. That's just a fact.

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While it may be a fact, it's not nearly as big an issue as the economic factor. The longer the development period, the greater the costs. It's in their best interest to take as little time to develop as possible and release as early as possible while still producing a game people are willing to pay for. Not only does this reduce costs, it hurries the time that they'll actually see a return on their investment, which... depending on the financial standing of the company at the time, could be critical.

Indeed, it's quite possible that this problem will get worse in the near future. Companies of all sorts are dependent upon getting short-term loans in order to continue day-to-day operations, and very few of them sit upon huge heaps of cash to draw upon. Unless you've been living in a cave for the last few weeks, you know the credit market has been seizing up with banks unwilling to make new loans. For a game company, games require years of investment without any return. While they've certainly got other titles that are already on the shelves bringing in new revenue, I would imagine that the drying up of credit will put pressure on them to release even earlier than they might otherwise and just hammer out the bugs later.

In fairness, I'm not extremely familiar with the game industry specifically, but I work for a multi-billion dollar retail corporation, and I can say that we're having trouble getting money to pay our suppliers, and our suppliers in turn are having trouble getting money to make their products to send to us. As a result, our customers haven't been able to get their products.

In short, I think these concerns weigh a lot more on them than the complaints of eager fans.

avain said:

Actually, I'd say that most probably they were aware of these facts. And most probably they needed to release the game anyway.

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Yes, this is what i mean.

Dom Pedro II said:

While it may be a fact, it's not nearly as big an issue as the economic factor. The longer the development period, the greater the costs. It's in their best interest to take as little time to develop as possible and release as early as possible while still producing a game people are willing to pay for. Not only does this reduce costs, it hurries the time that they'll actually see a return on their investment, which... depending on the financial standing of the company at the time, could be critical.

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Exactly. So the Question remains, what the people are willing to pay for. And it seems that right now the customer are quite forgiving.

PS.: Actually with all it shortcomingd Col is still one of the better games by today's Market standards... It still sucks, seeing how Firaxis - being certainly one of the better companies in theis regard - is releasing a Product which is below they usual quality standards.

But this growing problem of garbageware is NOT the solution. Granted, they want to get the product to market asap for greater profits, but the gaming community is getting sick and effing tired of this. And because of that, the initial sales boom is going to bring in less and less, with the only end result being taking a loss on a game because they rushed it. If the suppliers of your industry sent you such an inferior product, you would not make the sales needed to justify further shipment orders. imho

The thing that disgust me more is that the game manufacturers are increasingly seeing the fans as paying beta testers, debuggers and software developers....... and the game prices don't drop because of that.

If they are doing half of the work , they only deserve half of the pay IMHO..... otherwise stop doing fancy games and get to the drawing board with better designed games, even if less flashier. I'm still from the time when games were smaller that most of current JPEGs or MP3 and I still play some, because they have good core concepts..... OTOH I doubt that I'll play any of the games that are coming out now in 15 years in the future

Refar said:

Yes, this is what i mean.

Exactly. So the Question remains, what the people are willing to pay for. And it seems that right now the customer are quite forgiving.

PS.: Actually with all it shortcomingd Col is still one of the better games by today's Market standards... It still sucks, seeing how Firaxis - being certainly one of the better companies in theis regard - is releasing a Product which is below they usual quality standards.

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Agreed. The consumer is quite forgiving. I am part of that problem as well. I like having games when they first come out.

ZippyRiver said:

But this growing problem of garbageware is NOT the solution. Granted, they want to get the product to market asap for greater profits, but the gaming community is getting sick and effing tired of this. And because of that, the initial sales boom is going to bring in less and less, with the only end result being taking a loss on a game because they rushed it. If the suppliers of your industry sent you such an inferior product, you would not make the sales needed to justify further shipment orders. imho

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Don't get me wrong... I'm not defending them. I'm simply saying that the pressures they're dealing with are not coming from the consumers... they're coming from production costs. If it really is a big problem, consumers will gradually get sick of it. Then the problem corrects itself because they'll have to do more testing, more bug-hunting and more balancing prior to release to satisfy a gaming public that's holding them to a higher standard.

Will the gaming community do that though? That's the question... I mean, patches are pretty easy to get these days. Even console games can now be pretty easily patched. Because it's not a hassle to patch it, most consumers are willing to shell out money for something they think will be complete and fixed at some point. Consumers are more forgiving because these problems are more forgivable. In the early days when a game was released without any good way to patch it, the game company had to release games that had as many bugs fixed and balance issues addressed as possible. No longer.

Btw, as far as my industry is concerned, the customers have no choice but to buy the products. So the suppliers have no incentive whatsoever to provide a quality product

r_rolo1 said:

The thing that disgust me more is that the game manufacturers are increasingly seeing the fans as paying beta testers, debuggers and software developers....... and the game prices don't drop because of that.

If they are doing half of the work , they only deserve half of the pay IMHO..... otherwise stop doing fancy games and get to the drawing board with better designed games, even if less flashier. I'm still from the time when games were smaller that most of current JPEGs or MP3 and I still play some, because they have good core concepts..... OTOH I doubt that I'll play any of the games that are coming out now in 15 years in the future

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Well, and that's exactly the point. The game companies don't care if they games having staying power or replayability. They care whether you'll drool all over yourself at the previews and initial screenshots and have to rush out and get it right away.

As a result, games have become very flashy and very gimmicky but with limited substance. They either just stick to a core game mechanic borrowed from a hundred other games but slap a new coat of especially pretty paint on it, or they come up with something wild, seemingly creative, but ultimately little more than a novelty to get you to buy it (Spore would be a great example of that).

Unfortunately that is a self-destruct order for the companies in this era of less-than-legal possibilities of getting the games .I increasingly see the people around me downloading the games in a less-than-legal fashion and only buying the games if they really, really like them, mainly because people are getting increasingly scorched with this kind of actions of the game developers

Dom Pedro II said:

As a result, games have become very flashy and very gimmicky but with limited substance. They either just stick to a core game mechanic borrowed from a hundred other games but slap a new coat of especially pretty paint on it, or they come up with something wild, seemingly creative, but ultimately little more than a novelty to get you to buy it (Spore would be a great example of that).

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Exactly, all flash, no substance. That would be fine, I mean if somthing ain't broke there is no need to fix it, but game wants to build their flashy new wheel from scratch. That is old thinking. Firaxis has the right idea, they used widly available 3rd party formats for most of Civ4. XML, NIF, Python, why write a new scripting language, data storage format, and graphics standards when you can use ones people already are familar with. The production time alone that would be saved makes it worth while.

But thats fine. Let the old dinosaur companies use their outdated styles of creating games. The more time that passes, the better the free game engines become. What your going to start seeing is a return to the beginnings of video games and its not going to be the brand name companies with the hit games, its going to be modders making their own games on free open source platforms and releasing them for a fraction of the price but with 10 times the substance.

simple solutions
1 Try before you buy and only buy good/fun and unbroken games if needed wait on buying them until they are patched and no longer broken.

2 Wait 1 year before you buy the games by then you should know if the games are any good and if they are still broken and need patching from the forums.

Im personaly feed up with broken games so i do nr 1 and delete the bad/broken games normaly withing 24h of testing them and the broken ones i try again after a few patches and give them another chance if they are fixed i buy them.