Not as nice as “If Quake was done today” but still cool, because it’s true:
:chimpanzee_wink:
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Hm… throwing broken games into market because of $$$ seems not a modern-days-only phenomenon:
EDIT: Even though people are much more used to this crappy selling strategy today and in the meantime most hardcore gamers playing those AAA games that are published in semi-functional state have grown accustomed to this crappy selling strategy…
…‘if you don’t know…now you know’…lol
I read somewhere (so it’s probably a lie) they do this often to (ab)use early addopters as free beta testers.
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I’ve been abused as beta tester of $$$ middleware before - sadly I realized it when the project was almost done.
I think the only company that can afford the luxus of not publishing broken games is Blizzard. They have the patience and the money to wait until “the game is ready” (e.g. the next Starcraft). Their internal motto is “it’s done when it’s done”.
I found it kind of interesting when that Batman game came out and the company pulled it back out of the stores. Of course it was too late - the desaster had already ruined many player’s days. Several months later they sold the game again and I guess they only solved half of their bugs.
Early access is a particular thing - there are games that will never be not full of bugs or even finished. And still these people collect money.
The latest kickstarter of Romero and Carmack comes to my mind when thinking of poor concept and still getting money for it. Don’t get me wrong - I like these two gentlemen - but it’s not the way to get money (or how Southpark said it: “Go fund yourself”).
Here is another “hit list” of desastrous games:
I’m going to flip the script here because I love internet fighting …
Now I hate launch week bugs as much as the next guy, perhaps more so since I’m a pro l33t gamer at heart and love to be the first and the best and ego and big balls etc… considering the complexity of modern games compared with those of the cartridge era, of course there will be issues! There is some famous quote floating around from some NASA chimp: “…With 99.9 percent reliability, we could expect 5,600 defects [on the Apollo 8]”… Yup, if the boffins at NASA hit 99.9% perfection, 5,600 parts of the Apollo rocket would’ve/could’ve broken… humbling.
That hit list of “desastrous games” kinda erks my gherkin. World of Warcaft a ‘"desastrous game’ ??? Battlefield 4 ??? I feel current expectations are way to high. Every industry faces launch issues, it’s just a thing, it’s in the nature of a new product. I love @Ogli’s quote “I think the only company that can afford the luxus of not publishing broken games is Blizzard”, since I have a massive man crush on Blizzard, they can do no wrong in my eyes (except for making Hearthstone too complicated now)… yet Blizzard are in that list.
Companies could bow to this public pressure and go down the pussy route of Apple and launch products with major features “commented out” so they can open them up later as a point release or ‘updates’. Unfortunately this is already kinda the case with DLC content ON THE DISK !!! I pray this does not become the norm.
and on a completely different side note, I accidentally hit some key combination that opened up all my previous Chrome session tabs, in a new window… which is awesome since I closed it on accident after raging at the laggy as balls, yet hella fun slither.io .
I lost my point, oh yeah, I feel we the gaming community have created this problem by pressuring companies to hit unrealistic release dates, heavily penalising missed deadlines and the like. I think what I’m trying to put out into the universe is lighten the fuck up, yes, games will launch with problems, yes it happens, get over it, they don’t last long, nobody did this on purpose, it’s just part of being a gamer.
… I also really like boobs.
… discuss, rip my arguments apart, agree, disagree, I greatly respect most of your opinions, some more than others, please enlighten me if i’m completely wrong…
[awesome sign off]
tl/dr: …f u … (eh I can’t blame you, I tend to skim majority of the posts anyway :chimpanzee_laugh:)
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I can kind of agree… I generally don’t need to get day-one releases of games, though. I like to wait a bit for the first patches to come out. The ‘gold disk’ has to be ready so far in advance of actually being released to the public that it’s only logical that once it’s ‘on its way’ that developers are smacking themselves in the face every day with the ugly stuff they left in. I’m sure if I worked on a AAA team, my butt hole would be sore from clenching that entire month.
Then there are things like this that only fuel the fire:
^^ this is why we suggest here that doing your networking properly from the beginning is important. There will never be time to rewrite the whole game to be server-authoritative.
Pretty good stuff. However I wouldn’t say game companies are researching new and innovative ways to take your money. I mean you could say that, it’s misleading in my opinion.
Game companies are finding new and innovative ways to survive. That’s a better way of putting it because without money they die along with all their employees.
While it’s probably not always the case generally I think game developers are often passionate about game development. They want to spend their time making video games and if they don’t find ways to monetize those games then they end up working for some fortune 500 fixing broken network equipment.
It is an unfortunate state of affairs because there’s only so much market share to go around and more developers than the market has room for. So these passionate developers have found themselves living the very deathmatches they program. Fighting each other for a spot, fighting each other just to stay alive.
Ultimately this battle has resulted in those combatants forcing each other to release not the most ambitious projects, not the most wonderfully crafted and executed gaming experiences, but the most profitable. The beige Honda accord, no one really hates it, no one really loves it, but it appeals to a wide audience.
Just some things:
I’ve talked to someone who was partner of a big company for mobile and web gaming. Told me that they make 10 games but only release 1 which the marketing tests showed to be the one which will likely generate the best income. The people who worked on the other 9 games just lost an internal competition and the company doesn’t need to invest much when they only release 1 server landscape for 1 game - and they also don’t split the user account numbers (better one game with 1.000.000 users than 10 games with 200.000 users each). So they are planning like other businesses designing their products.
I read an article about a company which was very active in Asia. Don’t ask for the link - it’s 2 years ago now and I only remember the main feature - which was: There was a really great game (game devs said) - and they wanted to release “their baby” because - of course - they loved their work. Their company stopped the project and told them that they won’t release their game because it will most likely only generate 10 percent profit (which was an estimation that must have been based on the intuition of sales people or astrology). Instead they put the same people into a different project twice as big which had an estimated net income slightly above 10 percent. And also they wanted to focus on one such game instead of two to not generate internal competition.
For those who like fun and satire - I highly recommend the episode “Freemium isn’t Free” from Southpark (for those who like criticism on media companies there are other good episodes too like “The Ring”). Currently there are these “new” game maker schools which have been producing game developers over the last decade - today they highly focus on how to generate the best income by creating addictive algorithms. I’ve seen a video from a class room where they showed some students and a teacher engineering the best sales strategy for their “product” - it was intended as a PR video for that game school. Blizzard is no exception here which did intense research for Diablo 3 about the optimum sweet spot for addiction and online economy. Some games are designed not around a game world or story or play mechanic anymore but around an algorithm for maximum attention and monetization which dictates the mechanics. Games aren’t games because someone wanted to make a game anymore. Games are engineered monetization machines (“cash cows”). The market is too small. The invested money and numbers are being treated like mathematics. And I think the video is absolutely right.
I think it’s really good that there are indie devs (people ruining their health, income and life to create art - most of the time). Abstract games, innovative games, art games, experiments like minecraft. Those are the thing I like - because these are games that were made to stand for themselves and not planned by big companies. The other commercial games - well, it’s quite often totally irrelevant what the game is about. Teams get hired, teams get fired. Trends are scouted and followed, trends are not being created. Sales figures are numbers and people are numbers too (for them).
Do I need to name things? Probably not - because all of you know. Some might even have tried that new Dungeon Keeper mobile app - I waited for the first press critics and was glad that I didn’t play it. It’s “mobilified” it’s “cutiefied” and most of all it’s a “monetization machine without soul”.
So it’s good that there are indies - and especially that there are artists among indie game developers. Their heart beats for the unplanned, for the inspiration, for the thing - not for plans, numbers, trends.
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That link made me LOL. These “professionals” made a mistake that even I as a networking-noob would not have made.
That game has also some design flaws related to world logic - for example you give a small food ration to poor people and they give you clothes in return (it’s winter and those people have next to nothing).
perhaps they make garments out of scraps they find, and trade them for food, something they can’t make ? What if you had an extra coat but no food, sure may trade it… IRL I’ve spent enough on one meal to buy 10 outfits …so what is more important. Also, im a Division fan boy, who barely plays it, but I feel the need to defend it to my death bed, for no good reason.
“They higher they fly, the further they fall” … indie game dev really bucks the curb, like most creative industires (music, almost film, art) where one can invest virtually no $, only time and passion, and see great reward… we fly very low, so we can take the risks, I think that’s pretty cool.
This has become quite a thought provoking thread.
time equals money. passion is an interesting thing - most artists are centered on passion and some are centered on being the first who ever did something. I’m more one of the ‘passion’ people, but being the first is nice too.
which often yields next to no reward… I think the key to success in the digital world is innovation … take something and make it better … Apple are innovators (perhaps the greatest), not inventors or creators… iPhone, iPad, iCloud, AppleTV, iPod, home PC, iTunes … nothing new, just old ideas updated for the ‘current trend’. That, and they have the single greatest marketing department on the face of the earth.
Minecraft… old ideas mixed up into a newer formula.
But hey, I think it would not be so cool if it will turn into this:
https://www.ibiblio.org/Dave/Dr-Fun/df9612/df961220.jpg
:chimpanzee_closedlaugh:
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I think Minecraft is great innovation and I totally admire Notch. He is my big idol. The superstar that I wanted to become (and still a little bit hope to become - even though my window of opportunity may already be closing before I publish my project - which is my vision - and also innovation - and also passion - what I am).
I put this to you @Ogli, why is Notch an idol to you ? Why him over the likes of John Carmack, Will Wright, Miyamoto, Sid Meier, David Rosen… I’m not saying you’re wrong, just interested =)
Reality Escaping Electric brick 
, I want to buy this one 
The answer is less emotional than you might have expected: I had almost the same idea 3 years before the first minecraft version. I used OpenGL and Java already in 2006. He sold his innovation for 2.5 billion after having made millions before. So it’s quite easy to see the reason.
I like Carmack too and saw several of his tech talks on youtube. He’s a genious of a software engineer and a VR pioneer. I played many id games (in the 1990s and in the 2000s). He’s a great achiever. I just see the arguments of people who say that the kickstarter campaign only relies on the reputation of the two - not on any concrete ideas.
I have a T-shirt of our local roleplaying convention here in Rostock. The T-shirt says “escapism from reality for advanced players”. :chimpanzee_closedlaugh:
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