Why are games the only product we are continually expected to buy in a half finised state?

Can you imagine buying a music CD and all the songs are half finished and within 6 months you can perhaps get something downloaded that's complete? No, neither can I. But we expect this with games now and if you dare ask when a patch is appearing we get told 'OMG just leave the poor devs alone! They work very hard!' and everyone just accepts this.

I have done it myself and only just recently can't understand why there hasn't been some governing body setup to manage how some games are forced out into the world. Nothing else would be bought in this state and you can't say 'Well don't buy them then' as not enough people would also do this to make a difference.

Perhaps, because they are 'just games' that there isn't deemed a problem? I don't know but it seems to be getting worse.

Are you talking about half finished games or unpolished games?

Blizzard takes 12 years to make a game, because they have a gazillion dollars. They polish it, set the standard, everyone claps, they get another Gazillion dollars.


Smaller game companies do not have a gazillion dollars. They have some money, and some time, but I'm guessing its mostly investments, their own capital and loans, free time, and passion. At some point, they have to say "This is how much game we have left, this is how long our money will last, and this is our predicted sales, and our expected fan base reaction" At some point, those will converge on a "must ship date". If they dont' ship or get more money, the game will never see the light of day. (see DukeNukem Forever)

Let's take Arma II, a buggy, unpolished piece of mana from heaven. Because of its complexity, because of what it ATTEMPTS to do and often succeeds at, yes, I'm willing to give the devs slack, buy their game and wait for a gazillion patches. I have yet to be burned.

People who bought Cliffs over Dover might not feel the same way about their willingness to give devs slack... some might.

So I'm asking, what do you mean by unfinished?

It's not that they're "games" but "software".
Check your your list of updates with your OS, browser, AV....software much more widely used than games. Games are in a pretty darn good shape at release comparatively. That's just how it is. Had a teacher that was a brilliant programmer. Still gets calls about some code he wrote for an insurance company 15 years ago. Good enough to be used all this time, but still needs attention from time to time. The more complex the software is, the more ways people will find to break it--accidentally or intentionally. Games are more and more complex, not to mention the variety of hardware involved with the public and dependency on other software updates on the pc.
I still get amazed at some of the simple things that get by too, but I'm not surprised that there are issues.

Cuz Every company has done this:


Fire all Beta Testers, stop paying them.

Release games early or in beta stage, charge people for them, fix in a patch a few months later.

Basically why pay people to beta test when you can charge them to do the work.

It started the same time companies started abusing PDLC, its so easy for them to deploy patches to Xbox360, PC, and PS3 now that there is no incentive to get the game right before they release it. Same with Day 1 / Week 1 PDLC, the content was developed in the same cycle as the rest of the game, and yet they hold it from the gold disc when they send it to be mass produced. Release it on launch day as PDLC and make even more $$.

late 90s early 2000's, most games shipped in the best playable state, and patches fixed issues that were over looked,

now they ship them in the crappiest state (because of their deadlines or whatever), and use money from sales to pay the team to troubleshoot, debug and patch the game.



the only company I dont mind paying for a game and playing a beta for a while is DCS, but they don’t exactly do what the other companies do, they say if you pre-order you get access to the open beta.

It's not just games, is software in general. The excuse seems to be money or, in case of open source software, man power.

Software has become more and more complex. Major games today take like 500 or more people to complete, and it's a FPS, which would be pretty simple comparing to other things, but yet, 500 people to have a game. That's a lot of money every month, hence the need to hurry things. The same happens with any software: cost is astronomical.

We could argue if this really is a matter of games being more complex or due to bureaucracy in development. Maybe both, I don't know. I'm not a game developer, but a software one, and I can tell you it's amazing to see the amount of crap going on for just a simple little tiny aspect of the product. Granted, if you have 500 people working you'll have a hell of a job organizing it. Btw, that seems to be the philosophy: throw more people in the mix and expect a boost in productivity.

In any case, all boils down to money, like Rakov said. You have a pretty much fixed budget, you either release or...

Game development is very similar to film making and tv show production. Time is money and hence everything needs to be completed in the shortest amount of time possible in order to avoid cost overruns. However, unlike a crappy movie or crappy tv show episode, at least you can have a reasonable expectation that a crappy game can be improved later on with patches.

George Lucas patched the starwars movies

But he corrupted solo.dll in the process.

They're reshooting an entire movie because the the first attempt sucked so badly.

http://screenrant.com/gi-joe-2-retaliation-release-date-delay-channing-tatum-niall-175512/

I guess we can blame the internet... Back in the day, once your game shipped, people might buy it, play it, have fun, and never go on the internet. How would you get them patches? What if they had a bad experience, and said the game was bad and you lost sales? You HAD to get it right the first time.

Now you don't... everyone is connected, if you blew something, you can fix it, and have a patch out to EVERYONE with in weeks, days, hours...

Not only that, but its expected. Issuing out patches and content is almost a .... community building excercise... What if a game came out with no patches these days, the forums were just filled with people saying "good job". And the Devs saying "I know. We'll see you for Perfect Game 2!"

Tumbleweed...

I think it's fair to say that all PC games are expected to be released with some level of bugginess or incomplete features. The question is about the extent of said bugginess and incomplete features. For example, the state of Shogun 2 on release I found to be quite acceptable even though there were some issues. By comparison, the state of Cliffs of Dover on release was an absolute disgrace IMHO.

I'm very picky about my gaming collar these days. I've been buying a few of the older LucasArts games on Steam here lately because they're cheaper, they're finished, and they're good. Do they look as good as BF3? No, but then my eyesight sucks to begin with.

DCS has a good history for quality right now, so I'm waiting patiently for whatever they push out the door next. I've even downgraded from FSX back to FS9 because more of my addons run on it without a problem and they don't look bad. I'm waiting to see what Mag says about the new Ghost Recon before I try that; it probably won't be anything good.

I'm like the OP. I'm tired of unfinished games. I'll wait for a finished product, I don't mind. But, it's getting to the point where I'm assembling more plastic models than playing PC games.

I always thought it interesting how many old PC games I own, games for DOS or Windows 3.1 even, that just work. Back then, and still today in DOSBox. Install, and they work. Of course some have a well known "bug" that appears under certain situations.

I've got to wonder if the bar for development difficulty and customer expectation on those titles was as high as it seems to be today. Will there come a point where the entire game development manpower on Earth could spend the entire game development budget on Earth and still not be able to finish one game?

I agree with you panzer that software is software and hardware is hardware so there is undoubtedly going to be some form of bug requiring tweaking to get optimisation out of the game.

however missing features is a no no. UBI is synonomous for this and its down right below the belt (Silent hunter 2 onwards anyone?)

I have no understanding where we can be delivered crap (FSX) and the devs and people to say well you need a beast of a computer to run it (knowing full well they are relying on leaps in technology of computers to cover their sh1te programming). Or maybe you just need some decent coders to do their job and fix the glaring errors in it. That team deserved to get fired and microsoft should have put their hands up and said sorry and spent some of their raging fortune in fixing that sad piece of crap.

It is one of my sore points.

There are too many people willing to say.. well its ok, and put it down to coding troubles for shoddy workmanship.

Clod should be sued, silent hunter should be burned at the stake and the FSX team and micrshaft.... well, we should find a cure for death so we can kill them and then revive them just to kill them again.

No excuse for crap, not even the golden word "coding".

Plenty of crap out there and if i could rub my arse with code, my motherboard would be chunky monkey with last nights curry !!!

I think the bar is set higher now since gaming isn't just a minority of pc gamers and an Atari 2600/Sega/Playstation owners and communication *about* games has changed so much.

Bugs in games "back-when" weren't as big a deal or common since games weren't played online, or not many were, so they were simpler. Most games these days that are single player only are very solid. Those that can put real time into single player alongside multiplayer are usually solid single player games. Most issues that come up are with MP/co-op gaming, where the most variables are. Keep in mind that MP gaming as an expected component of a game is still relatively new.

Also keep in mind that going online to talk about games is fairly new for the average gamer too. Before that it was mainly specialty groups like here. Now most that play online also get online to talk about it. Expectations are higher just due to communication about complaints. It used to be that magazines were the main source of info about gaming on pc or console--that's where your info and reviews came from. Now there are 1000's of forums where everyone has a voice--more often negative than positive.

If I actually experienced every bug in a game that I hear people complaining about, I'd quit gaming. As it is, I rarely see what I hear about, and even fewer bugs that really ruin the experience for me. IMO, the natural human tendency to b!!ch and moan is a more rampant problem than bugs in games, since it blows expectations out of proportion and influences a player's perspective of a game more than their own experience with the game.

I assume you mean "Flight" instead of "FSX"?

Case in point, Iron Front - stay away from that buggy POS.

Phew, good thing I decided not to pre-order it from Steam.

See? Raw Kryptonite is absolutely right in his post!

Nope definitely FSX.... I just can't do a poo nasty enough to even consider flight as a medium to clean my rectum with......

What a great analogy

SD

Well, at least Cliffs Of Dover became a standard of sorts. Whenever people have discussions of this kind, you know you have a golden (shower) standard example that defines what an incomplete game means. Or what "disaster on release" means. Or that analogy with the poo and rectum in it.

and this one too...




...CloD..*shudder* it really has set the bar for me as far as sims go. Luckily i live in Australia so i only paid $110.00 for it ..i could have seen Titanic in 3d at least four times for that, and had popcorn at every viewing, large.

Cliffs of Dover. Seriously, the biggest most borderline rip-off in the history of games. It has nearly single handedly ruined the reputation of the industry with not just its initial state but its present state.

Somehow, games like War in the Pacific, etc. manage to be built, released and continually supported. So, it's not just big places that make quality. Out of the Park Developments is a guy in a shack in Germany. Yet, it is one of the best baseball franchises around. I think there is a lot of evidence that demonstrates that it is less about initial capital and more about the culture of the seller of the product, and what they value. Most businesses outside of government contractors don't condone using the customers money to finance their product, provide a very lousy, incomplete and non starter of a product, let alone years (literally) later do what CloD did to its customers and continues to do, all the while talking down to them and telling about how they are going on "holiday." (am I the only one who hates that phrase and thinks many game developers take more "holiday" than anyone on the face of the planet??? What is the standard work week where they are anyway? Standard hours in a year? I know my business, which I own and which employs several hundred now, requires me to put in around 2200 hours a year, which until about two years ago was around 2700 hours/year.

As long as games are still built with codes, and not voodoo, bugs are inevitable. But yes, there has to be a certain limit of "bugginess" that can be considered acceptable. The way I see it, most unacceptable games these days come from big dev/publishers. I rarely seen one game from indie dev that's even close to being unacceptable. At least, among those that I bought.

Yeah, developing complex software is not easy, but I personally think one of the biggest culprits is the publishing industry. They often have unrealistic and unmoveable release dates, put tremendous amounts of pressure on dev teams and 9/10 times decide whether broken games are even worth fixing in the first place.

Well lets look at FSX again on this one. The ACES team were only contracted (well before release) to only 2 patches. So the first was to get fsx original playable out of the box and the second was thrown in the "paid patch" called FSX acceleration.

So even before the game was finished, microshaft already limited the progression of FSX which i can't understand, as previous fsx versions have sold loads and fs9 is still being widely used today.

I remember (foolishly) purchasing FSX on day dot of release. The minimum specs said i could run it, so i bought it. Well, the minimum specs was a blatent lie and microshaft knew it. Making people think it will run fine on computers that really can't handle it due to poor coding.

Talking about coding, who remembers the classic f*ckup by the aces team on the FSX release of the head turning memory bug.

"What was this?" i hear you say...

Well it was a simple error in coding where the wank aces team stuck in a figure for memory way to low which resulted in about 5 fps if you panned your view in cockpit. Yep, this 5 fps was felt all accross the community and made the game unplayable if you wanted to turn your head. But this bug made it to release, past the devs, past the beta testers, past quality assurance.

It took a community member to point out a simple fix via notepad to increase the memory value number (which was absurdly too low). Hey presto, we can now pan with an acceptable frame rate. WTF were the aces team thikning? doing? researching?

Buying FSX on release was like sitting under an elephants rear end who has chronic diorhea, feet tied with only a straw to get out. It left a really bad taste in my mouth.

UBI - well, they shafted us time and time again with silent hunter and failed features (that even appeared on packaging) that were not and never intended to be implemented in game - Milche cows anyone?

But what is the problem here? I was an avid member on the ubi-zoo forums and whilst everyone (rightly) moaned and groaned over the sh1te state silent hunter was in, the time it took for basic patches, the missing features, the lack of polish.............. well these people bought SH3, SH4, SH5.

I had enough after SH3. i refused to buy any more. What message are we the public sending to publishers if we cannot show any self restraint but mindlessly buy every next iteration of a game even though we prolifically poo-poo it?

The publishers are just laughing as the joe schmo local public have set a precedent that says we cannot control ouselves and we will accept rubbish and happily pay for it.

Clod - well don't get me started. I was one of the most avid die hard fans of IL-2. I have refused to pay for clod and i am glad i didn't. I am sorely dissapointed and they lied to us on release, as it was not no where near completion.

The day we are allowed to get our money back from shoddy, incomplete games, the standards will rise again.

If there is some downside to digital distribution channels, is their no-money-back clauses. (Even though Steam will return your money on pre-sales).

But mostly, they hook the fans on release day, or worst, with a pre-sale, and when the gold chariot turns out to be a turd covered in gold colored foil, you are shafted.

This is why I wait for user reviews (mostly on SimHQ) before I decide to whether or not buy a new game. I've been burned a few times before and I hope to prevent myself from being burned again **cough** CLOD **cough**.

I remember years ago there was a game that when you uninstalled it it deleted your whole hard drive. Now THAT was a serious bug.


Terry

Kinda wish I had found another thread to read....as I download Day 1 Max Payne!

Max Payne 3 works great for me, no problems with it