Day 1 Patch as clever business move?

News & General Discussion
1

“No Man’s Sky’s day-one patch dramatically builds out and changes the entire game”

If a game is patched before anyone plays it, isn’t that functionally identical to releasing a different game than you shipped on the physical discs?

You get the hype of this shot to use for marketing:

They get the ball rolling on distribution, they have something to send reviewers- all the stuff you need a “finished game” for.

While at the same time, they’ve bought some time to work furiously on the day 1 patch to actually finish the product the way they want.

Day 1 rolls around and all the digital customers download the patched version, and all the physical medium customers get to wait a little longer while they download the patch.

AND all the progress of anybody who used advance copy material gets wiped out- any leaks aren’t as relevant, because they were playing a game without X content and Y tweaks. Heck, the word of the guy who finished it in 30 hours is now thrown into question because he was playing a game without the same amount of content as the one everybody is going to play at launch. You probably still can finish it in 30 hours but its the idea that maybe that’s a thing that was changed that matters.

I used to think of day 1 patches like the developer was shipping a broken/incomplete product, and the patch was a last minute round of spackle and glue to hold things together until they had a chance to do the job properly. As games become increasingly digital, their life cycle seems to be changing to where it’s okay to ship something not quite done, As you can always patch it later or put out a DLC- sometimes you just run out of time and money and you have to launch it and plug the holes later with the launch money.

This example strikes me as something different because it meshes so nicely with their marketing focus of mystery and exploration- just before all was about to be revealed, they go in and change some things and now there’s more mystery about what changed and what stayed the same. This seems too calculated to be a rush job.

The only downside I see is that this move snubs some reviewers who were due to get advance copies, and now can’t. Not great, but it doesn’t seem like the worst thing in the world either- NMS has pretty good saturation right now and it seems like everybody wants it, and even those who don’t are at least curious. Reviews might actually hurt sales in the atmosphere of mystery that they are selling.

What do you think? Clever business move? New trend in game releases we’ll see even more of? Or is it just a really good marketing cover for a rushed release?

2

In this case I’m pretty sure it’s a desperate attempt to regain lost sales from the leaked gameplay that looked more disappointing than anything else. The patch will probably just shore up some bugs like all day one patches do.

3

Well, this is just a result of modern technology, thats all.

When you are shipping for a physical release, the publisher says “We ship on this day” and on that day, you give him what you got. In the old days, that was it, because there was no way of fixing the cartrages, with the notable exception of Legend of Zelda OoT, since that had like 4 releases to fix various things.

But today, you can keep working after you send out the game to the publisher, because you can send out patches. And given how long it takes to get the physical game ready, that can give you weeks to fix stuff.

Frankly, I’d think less of a developer if they didn’t take advantage of this.

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4

Been going on ever since patches became a thing. Decades?

5

Just because the discs are made, it doesn’t mean work on the game stops. So day 1 patches are inevitable and are the norm for quite a while now.

Give the No man’s sky guys a break, it seems everything they do becomes news, even when it’s completely mundane things like releasing a day 1 patch.

6

You have to remember that the entire universe in No Man’s Sky is procedurally generated. The position of the planets, the way they appear, the flora, the fauna, etc. It’s all being generated and placed procedurally. They don’t have the advantage of Minecraft where everyone has their own world. Any massive changes to NMS’s procedural generator need to go through before it launches or they can’t go through at all.

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7

That’s ineffective marketing. No one’s going to be inspired to go buy a game because the staff has an apéro to celebrate it’s release.

8

This.

Sure I expect some of the pressure to come off once the disc has been sent to the publisher. But that doesn’t mean you stop working on the game.

If anything you should have testers in overdrive. Releasing a patch on day one is expected. Releasing a game that is fundamentally broken on day one is virtually unforgivable.

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9

Interesting take on it, never really considered all the angles of doing that. I always thought of it as something similar and not as a ‘ship broken stuff and patch it day 1’ thing, but it makes a lot more sense when looking at it a bit more.

10

Right? Thanks for a second I thought I was the only one who didn’t see it like that.

11

Actually that’s deliberate on their part. They made the day 1 patch news.

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12

Fair point.

13

True, but that pic was in most every article on the subject from then till now, and then I guess people started photoshopping stuff in place of the disc so it became a thing in meme culture- I figure that made the image significant.

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14

They got 15 man team, so they should able to get alot more done in a few weeks then a 1 man band.

15

This. Given how complex and challenging large games are it’d be a waste to let that time slip by unused. I’ve not done a single project where there wasn’t stuff I’d have liked to improve when we called it “finished”, so if there’s time and resources available to do so… why not?

There are downsides, though. I’ve bought a number of games over the years which I then couldn’t play at the time because they were patching. Even single player games sometimes force patching before you can play… even on a console! Or, in some cases, despite having a disk the distribution system decides to install via my internet connection instead.

My wife and I installed a game the other day that require a 9 gigabyte patch. Admittedly that wasn’t a day one patch, and it was an online game so we knew patching would be a thing… but 9 gigabytes? (That was 9 gigs each, of course…)

To put that in context, we’re in Australia and most internet connections here are quite slow. We’re lucky enough to have recently been upgraded to the new network being rolled out and be able to justify the cost of a higher speed subscription on it, but the former isn’t yet available to most of the country yet and a lot of people won’t see dramatic improvements at prices similar to their existing services. I guess huge downloads might not be a big deal elsewhere in the world.

16

Couldn’t one of you update your game and then use a thumb drive to copy the game folder to the other system? Assuming the game is on a computer of course.

17

We actually tried something like that, and UPlay (the game was The Division) decided to re-download the whole thing anyway. I’ve also had EA’s Origin do the same thing a few times in the past. Neither seem particularly respectful of existing game data.

I can kind of understand that. It’s easier and probably more reliable to control it within your own system than to account for arbitrary stuff that could come from anywhere, especially when there’s different versions and then patches to consider. That being said, though, Steam seems to handle it as long as you’re willing to fiddle with things a bit.