Business and Software Development perspective on Civ 5

[The_J]

Great first post.

Indeed.

But the same for the post above. I think a mix of both is true.

 

[poncratias]

ok we know this now, so we can only hope that the features that got cancelled will be put in later and not completely scrapped...

 

[DaveGold]

From my experiences working in IT I came to the same conclusion; that the game had not been fully beta tested and many peripheral features had been rushed through at the end of development. You probably don't need much experience in IT to see that to be honest. Congratulations to the original poster for looking into the financial background and completing the story.

 

[Thoughtful Thug]

Still it is hard to know for certain how the corporate ladder work (Take 2 < 2K < Firaxis) by looking into it from the outside, but as Dave Gold said, how is it that the game look to us as it had not been fully beta tested? Did they release the game for the few beta testers to look at it too late before the official release date? Beta testers ought to have months more of testing it before any hint of announcement of the game's release.

 

[babo78]

Still it is hard to know for certain how the corporate ladder work (Take 2 < 2K < Firaxis) by looking into it from the outside, but as Dave Gold said, how is it that the game look to us as it had not been fully beta tested? Did they release the game for the few beta testers to look at it too late before the official release date? Beta testers ought to have months more of testing it before any hint of announcement of the game's release.

There's many answers to this so we can't know for sure but based on my experience it typically falls into one of these.

1. Not enough time before committed release date to make the non-show stopper changes found during beta test.
2. Not enough testing time built in or testing time was cut shorter to give more development time.
3. Pool of beta testers weren't big enough and/or duration wasn't long enough.

We won't know what went down exactly but I'd be highly surprised if they didn't plan their release this way to be iterative. Release a first version that needs polishing to bring some cash into company then follow up with patches to address critical items or items that most people are vocal about and some content upgrade (like Mongol civ).

If I were to use Starcraft 2 as example to my case above. SC2 was in open beta test mode for at least 5 months and later when free beta key was offered with pre-order their beta pool jumped incredibly. As matter of fact the free beta key with pre-order ran out. I remember this because several of my friends around NY tri-state went around and couldn't find any free beta key give away left. At the same time, this gave ATVI an idea on how many copies they will sell at minimum (minus those who would rather loose deposit than pay remaining balance).

Anyhow Starcraft 2 had a big beta pool, long duration, and went through lot of changes during beta and after close of beta. Plus ATVI already had additional contents planned Heart of Swarm and and legacy of void.

Personally I think Civ 5 would have been much more polished and received less critique if TTWO opted to similar road to GA and do open beta for those who pre-ordered. Pool would have been quite huge and maybe hard to manage but risk of cracked game would be much higher but I think overall more satisfying for players.

 

[Psyringe]

Personally I think Civ 5 would have been much more polished and received less critique if TTWO opted to similar road to GA and do open beta for those who pre-ordered. Pool would have been quite huge and maybe hard to manage but risk of cracked game would be much higher but I think overall more satisfying for players.

True as far as the quality of implementation is concerned - an open beta would indeed catch more bugs. In the context of Civ5, I don't think an open beta for pre-orderers would have been good for business. As you can see in many user reviews, many people bought Civ5 without thinking much about it, they simply took for granted that it would be a great game. Then they saw (a) how much content was taken out compared to Civ4:BTS, and (b ) that the gameplay didn't work very well and the AI couldn't grasp the new combat mechanics. Now if Take2 had made a huge open beta, they had created exactly the same situation - with one difference: The game's actual release is still months off, and the disappointed pre-orderers have plenty of time to voice their dissatisfaction and undermine Take2's marketing efforts. This could hurt a lot; even reviewers might have rated the game differently, had they seen it as a "design that disappointed many fans and created an uproar in the fan forums".

I think Take2's marketing strategy relied heavily on not permitting organized disappointment until at least the reviews were written and first week's sales were in, so a huge open beta would have been counter-productive. Imho.

 

[babo78]

http://www.marketrap.com/article/view_article/91230/take-two-chairman-we-are-reporting-good-results

We'll find out soon enough in December when TTWO report their earnings...

 

[greggbert]

Dude, play elemental war of magic and then tell me the civ release was a failure. People need some perspective.

And from a business software perspective, you can't really know any of the things you claim to wihtout inside knowledge. You calso cannot know how many defects were found and fixed so you can't really comment on staffing for testing progress. Also wihtout the functional spec you can't tell what the definition of a bug was that they were working on. And you can't call something a show stopper because you did not know what the threshold is for "show stopper". When I read your post I think that you define showstopper is som gameplay element that is so irritating that it annoys you personally as a player.

Truth be told, So far I see very few of what I would consider to be defects, and none of them prevent you from finishing several a game on Standard / Normal and having a good time.

 

[babo78]

Dude, play elemental war of magic and then tell me the civ release was a failure. People need some perspective.

Where in my post did I say Civ release was failure? My conclusion is "Civ 5 is the way it is now because business made the decision to get it out for their bottom-line in 2010 even though it lacked many nice to have features and extras (and they knew it)"

And from a business software perspective, you can't really know any of the things you claim to wihtout inside knowledge.

Do I need to work and have inside knowledge for Blockbuster to know that they were doing badly and hurting? News and knowledge of their fiscal and business issues with pending bankruptcy loom was pretty obvious several months ago. It wasn't a surprise for anyone following the industry when Blockbuster filed for Chapter 11. Details like when and which bankruptcy code are the ones you know as insiders but not required to make educated deductions on course of action they take (which was filing for bankruptcy).

You calso cannot know how many defects were found and fixed so you can't really comment on staffing for testing progress. Also wihtout the functional spec you can't tell what the definition of a bug was that they were working on. And you can't call something a show stopper because you did not know what the threshold is for "show stopper". When I read your post I think that you define showstopper is som gameplay element that is so irritating that it annoys you personally as a player.

If you read my post thoroughly, it is very clear that my use of autofollow function example is defined as extra that TTWO didn't have time for that was cut out in this version of Civ 5. Not as "show stopper".

Truth be told, So far I see very few of what I would consider to be defects, and none of them prevent you from finishing several a game on Standard / Normal and having a good time.

Nothing in my post is about whether you can start and finishing several games. There are more than few defects, take a look at the patch notes. You will see "Misc crash fixes" and "Multiple crash fixes" in patch they are working on and patches they have released. That alone is more than few defects.

Edit: I'm not sure why you are getting so defensive. I don't consider Civ 5 to be failure. I consider it to be short on the mark and could have used more time to have released more polished product. I consider game like Master of Orion 3 to be failure in both gameplay and finances. It pretty much killed Moo series.

 

[TacTac]

A remarkable hypothesis OP. And well written.

 

[TheBlackHole]

The argument stated is well-written and makes sense.

However, with that said, I just don't really that being the major issue with the product. Honestly, I find the product is actually quite polished -- far better than Civ4 was. There are very few show-stopper bugs and besides the typical minor bugs and annoyances that every modern game has, I don't really see that many complaints of crashes to desktop, failure to load, etc. YES, there are such complaints, but compared to most other modern games, I actually think the release was pretty clean overall. I remember Civ4's release was terrible, particularly concerning technical issues, failure to launch, crashes to desktop, and failure of the auto-patch system.

To me, the issues lie with the actual game design decisions, which indeed are affected by deadlines, but are much more fundamental than that. I honestly don't think the game was THAT rushed, just littered with very QUESTIONABLE design decisions. These fundamental design decisions are made much earlier in the game development process, so unless back in 2007 or 2008 they knew they were going to have to rush to make a 2010 deadline in order to rectify what happened in 2009... I dunno. I think it's more the change in philosophy and direction of the series, rather than rushed-released, that is causing so much ire with Civ5.

"Rushed" game release, to me, has symptoms like missing textures, missing audio files, crashes to desktop, hardware and software incompatibilities, game-breaking behaviors when you do unexpected actions, etc.... things that only tested and found at the very end and are usually rushed-through when deadlines are looming. I really think Civ5 is generally pretty good in this department (again, compared to most large, modern games). However, it's the fundamental nature of the game itself that has people up in arms... and although rushed release plays a part in it (balance issues, AI, etc.), I don't think the deadline would have been THE major crippler in this department.

But again, the OP's argument is almost certainly correct... I just also think there's more to it than that.

 

[babo78]

Well TTWO released their earnings and they did quite well. Swung into profit (58 cent per share), revenue up 32%, beat analyst expectation. That's doing really good compared to last year's quarter's loss of 30 cent per share.

I haven't dug into their reports but initial summary from analysts point to Civ 5, Mafia 2, GTA 4, and red dead redemption that boosted their bottom-line.

While there are many factors that influence their earnings so I can't say this is supporting proof for my statement... But I think it's pretty safe to say that Civ 5 coming out to be included in their earnings report helped them quite a bit on their profits and their stock price.

 

[LegioCorvus]

I just wanted to state a few things:

*Intro videos are rarely made in house these days. Blur Studios is a popular example of a company that specializes in exactly this. (Click here for link)

*While I agree that TTWO is responsible for the release date, and therefore shares some responsibility of 'blame' in this regard, this was decided far in advance.

(An Aside: I still blame the mentality of putting a release date first than figuring out details later for ruining the films Aliens 3 & X-Men 3).

*Didn't Firaxis lose 20-30 employees last July? Likely this was a decision handed down by TTWO. This, if anything, being so close to the pre-planned release date is what would deserve the 'blame' for the game being in the state it was at release. (Click here for link)

Thanks for all the information, though. It's good to have confirmation for some of the suspicions I had.

 

[Valerian]

I think by its nature, Civ is such a complex game, with so many variable outcomes, that beta testing it takes far longer than most games to truly determine game balance, broken mechanics, etc.

I'm just glad now that TTWO is in the black, they will give the developers time to fix things and eventually we'll all have the game we want.

The latest patch seems to show that they are listening.