Yeah, it's because of this statement from an extremely trustworthy source that I'm looking for context here. I suspect most of the big problems haven't been suddenly and magically overcome? E.g. how close are we, given this, to supporting an AAA game, let's say from a few years ago?
> What’s going on in game dev? I’m seeing a ton of companies, big and small pump out what seems to be the opposite of what their fans want.
A lot of companies are chasing what they have determined to be bigger revenue generators - seasonal content, micro transactions, mobile-first etc. In some cases this has proved successful despite backlash from fans (Diablo Immortal) and in others it's been an unmitigated disaster (Battlefield 2042).
AAA games these days are not about creating a great game any more, they're about creating a highly profitable one.
> A close cousin to crowdfunding is the trend of pre-releasing games before they are finished.
This has contributed to a disturbing trend of actually releasing games before they are finished. AAA titles have been released in the past couple of years that should have been delayed several months to be fixed and polished first. Batman: Arkham Knight was so terrible on PC that all stores offered no-questions refunds, and even stopped selling the game altogether until it was patched. Fallout 4 committed the cardinal sin of tying physics to framerate, so people with high-end gaming machines are actually experiencing more bugs and issues than most, unless they cap their framerates.
> How can a game even get to this point? Everyone in the development process must have noticed that it was running poorly
A lot of games run poorly during most of the development process, performance and bugs get fixed in the last stages. But when the publisher forces a premature release this means the fixes have to be done in the months afterwards. See Cyberpunk 2077, Mass Effect Andromeda, Battlefield 2042 and countless others. And this will continue to happen as long as gamers keep preordering.
This is a game from 2007, 16 years ago (and its development would have started in 2005), so that it has not been true for many years is not a useful assertion even if true.
Or worse, it confirms that it used to be an issue, and thus may well have affected a game created “many years ago”.
I'm not sure, probably not. But I think in similar cases in the gaming industry this has definitely happened. BF5 just as a recent but non-ideal example. So it's dangerous for them, and hence my baffling.
> Or is there a weird culture of fear where you’d rather silently try to fix it without acknowledging that it exists, because acknowledging a problem means taking some legal responsibility?
That is probably one aspect of it for sure. I think the gaming industry itself might have problems with sharing because 0days in games could really mean no more purchases, at least for awhile, and even then you have lost momentum from your marketing. Also, for non-zero days, just bugs in general, look at No Man's Sky or even more recently Cyberpunk 2077, so much social backlash.
Part of the problem is that AAA is just (IMO) too big and expensive. Devs might actually have to ship a broken game around holiday time just to get enough sales to survive.
And the other extreme can be dangerous too, like how Mass Effect Andromeda's development dragged on forever, and EA let it happen because its such a golden IP.
I think the ultimate solution is to just scale down most studios a little bit, so the studio and publisher can afford to delay. Medium sized studios are the sweetspot, especially going forward with GenAI.
> So I guess my thinking is that the big problems came when game developers lost control of their companies
Some willingly sold their companies to bigger ones (Garriott sold Origin to EA, and Origin's legacy was lost forever since).
> But when gradually their companies hired professional management
Yet professional is what's badly needed. Look at the Doublefine mess with Broken Age (massively over budget, massively late, massively under-delivering in every area).
>The problem now, and perhaps always was the graphics APIs and cost of porting.
Perhaps some special financial incentives from Valve to big studios would be able to get the rock moving down the mountain? Temporary discounts perhaps?
> People have trusted the developers with 0.40T dollars worth of value
And that's the thing that causes the most cognitive dissonance. If you're going to trust someone, why not trust entities that have had hundreds of years to work out the kinks?
> For a modern example: who's still complaining about Cyberpunk in 2023?
Those who bought it and played it in 1.0! Many of them never saw the fixed game. They weren’t helped at all by the fact that the game was quite good 6 months later.
Worst case they’ll never buy a CDPR game again, best case they’ll buy the games after 6 months (which by the logic of rushing releases is disaster because apparently not selling millions the first holiday season is a failure).
> Starting to feel like the whole 'gamers'-issue a few years ago where suddenly it wasn't good enough to make a nice product that people wanted to play; you had to include moral messages or you were the reason why the world's going downhill.
reply