I’ve been digging into postmortems lately to try and learn what made games fail or what successful games failed at (trying to combat survivorship bias) and I came across an archived Gamasutra article with an Age of Empires postmortem. As a fan of the series and being my most played game in my teenage years it was impossible to avoid clicking on.
It’s a pretty interesting read and highlights some of the changes in game dev mentality.
For example he says "The general argument is that if you know you are going to need to release a patch, then you shouldn’t be shipping the game in the first place. " When you take into account how often we see AAA titles with day one or day zero patches (Tony Hawks 5) you can see how the quality mentality has slipped. It’s no longer about lovingly crafting a title that gamers will love, it’s about getting it out the door and meeting marketing deadlines so the company can make its $$$.
He also mentions bugs caused by using modems connected to ISP and using speed in house that “not even a 56K modem can provide”. I found that fairly amusing, would be interesting to see what those same devs are up to these days. Although the article was written 18 years ago…some of them might have retired by now.
I think that might be going a tad too far. (Edit: Changed language in case I was being too harsh! )
I agree that in some cases people seem happy to push out something that really isn’t ready yet, but I don’t think that’s indicative of a change in developer mentality. As individuals I’m pretty sure we all want to make good stuff. Heck, if we didn’t care what we were making there are much easier ways to get a paycheck!
As you point out, the article was written 18 years ago. Things were indeed different back then. For starters, you couldn’t expect that any given member of your audience has internet access with which to download a patch. If something is in a patch you have to assume most of your players never get to see it. That’s… bad. (And worse on console where that’s just not an option.) Secondly, the complexity of (many) games has blown up in the nearly two decades between then and now. Yes, we have better tools to help manage that, but we’ve also got increasing competition in the space, and budgets can get insane, and timelines haven’t gotten longer. (To the contrary… I heard somewhere that the PC port of Arkham Knight was only given 8 weeks. If that’s true then I wouldn’t hold the developer accountable for its issues.)
This right here is what I’m talking about though. For a some AAA companies it’s more about getting it out the door than taking the time to polish and get the quality up to scratch.
Look at Blizzard, I’d never accuse them of not taking enough time, it’s common for them to delay titles because they aren’t satisfied with it.
Others seem to have lost this mentality though and just rely on post development, DLC and patches to complete the game.
In general I don’t see the same thing from the indie community, timelines drag out because they’re trying to get things right. Probably survivor bias there though because only the stand out titles get my attention.
Oh, I see what you mean. There’s very different perspectives at play, though. I doubt that a developer made the decision to only give Batman 8 weeks for a major platform change.
Admittedly that’s just an example, and provided by you, I was just pointing at it to help my point
The recent Tony Hawks 5 game that had a day zero patch that was larger than the game itself is a pretty standout case, game is still horrible and buggy despite it. They apparently rushed it due to licences expiring rather than giving consumers something that’s worth their money (costs $60 btw).
It’s hard to think of more examples given I only remember the good ones but there’s been plenty of AAA titles with day 1 patches. Just shows that they rushed the release to meet a deadline and then madly worked to patch issues they knew existed.
I very much agree with the mentality of the AoE devs…test it like hell and if it needs a patch to fix then it isn’t done yet. Don’t get that confused with scope creep and a perfectionist mindset though, that stuff needs to have the line drawn and content cut with a firm deadline.
Yeah, I just don’t necessarily see that as a bad thing. Would you prefer to not have the game or the patch?
The ability to patch means that they can keep developing after the day a disk gets set to be pressed. I see that as an advantage in general, even if there are cases where it gets abused.
Except age 2 was patched. There was some minor exploit about placing a waypoint in the bottom corner of the map.
Oh, and the major exploit that the game had no DRM on release. My younger self wasn’t as scrupulous about actually paying for games. So I never installed the patch.
As mentioned before in my example with Blizzard - I’d prefer the game is delayed rather than a rushed launch that needs to be patched. These days I only but digital copies anyway. Time to move away from physical copies, just supply the for collectors edition if people really want it. There’s the argument that if servers are taken down you lose your game but physical media has an expiry date anyway and you can always burn your own disk if you want it that badly.
I’m not saying patches in general are bad, just day 1 patches for issues they knew about but released the game anyway. Sounds like the AoE 2 patch was an issue they weren’t aware of if it was only a minor problem.
Ok but consider: Game is good enough for release, passes QA, goes to get published. Meanwhile, passionate dev team cranks out some additional work - improvements, content, balancing, whatever. That is also done and passes QA before release day in time to get included as a patch. Game is better, win-win… right?
The logical conclusion of you’re saying is that either a) the game shouldn’t get released based on some optional stuff that wasn’t actually needed or b) that optional stuff shouldn’t be added on principle based purely on when it was developed - between ship time and release time.
We now have the means to take advantage of that time window. Why discard it?
Note that I’m not saying it should be relied on or that forcing day one patches is a good practice. Just that the its dodgy practices are what we should be bothered by, not the ability to patch in and of itself.
I think you’re completely missing the point im making whilst you’re looking for ways to correct me.
I’m talking specifically about rushing a game out the door despite knowing their are existing bugs, I’ve given a couple examples on each side of this.
If they’re adding extra content later to improve it then of course it’s fine. If the game has significant bugs that they’re aware of but they rush it out the door and go with a launch day patch I don’t agree with it. Not only could they miss bugs but their fixes are unlikely to have had a decent amount of testing and they could introduce more bugs.
It’s a fundamental rule of design…if your product isn’t finished don’t ship it.
It’s also a fundamental rule of marketing that timing is critical. Both speed to market and the release date are significant drivers of revenue.
I’ve lost track of the number of products I’ve released before they were ready, just to hit market timing. It’s even more brutal in my industry, you miss launch date by a couple of weeks and you have to wait another year for the season to come around again. Meanwhile your competitors are establishing their brand.
It’s always a risk management issue. Is the upside of potential sales worth the downside of potential product failure? Especially if there is someone else in the market ready to take that risk.
I’ve had some big successes from early launches, and some dramatic failures. But with a skilled management team the rewards for ploughing ahead can be immense.
Edit: Just to clarify this experience is with ag chems, not software. Fixing a formulation once it’s in bottles on warehouse shelves is much harder then releasing a software patch.
Yep, same for me as a Mecahnical engineer and dealing with physcial products…hard to reshape something that has been cut by CNC or laser after its done.
I understand that it’s easier for software to get the “final” version to launch and patch things after but with some AAA titles it’s gotten to the point where I won’t pre-order (that was rare to begin with) and I won’t even buy the game within the first month of release until they’ve actually done some patches and fixed their bugs. If I pay $80 or more for a game then it better work without major bugs or I’m going to get pissed off.
You can´t compare the two. Adding patches to a game now is trivial. Back then, a decent portion of your playerbase could not patch the game at all so you had to get it right the first time.
Back then, if you were a dev and you released a broken game, you basically knew you were screwing a large portion of your players.
Now it isn´t ideal, but you can be reasonably sure most players get a functioning game on day 1.
of course this has lead to my pet peeve… day 1 DLCs
(Edit: Changed language in case I was being too harsh! 
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