[jlg23]

This article completely ignores that single player, mostly-offline games have exactly the same launch problems.

The reason games have these launch problems is that publishers got away with it for too long. Having users who already paid for the game do the beta testing is much, much cheaper and more efficient than in-house testing.

I sincerely hope that steam's move to grant refunds (http://store.steampowered.com/steam_refunds) will sort this out. "Oops, 30% of our pre-alpha-published-as-final purchasers want their money back". Have one or two publishers file for bankruptcy over that and it might be a very valuable, albeit painful, lesson for the industry.

[scrollaway]

It doesn't ignore it, it's just a completely different issue. General awfulness of a game on a tight budget and deadline has little to do with backend scalability issues on large budget games...

[cgriswald]

The issue Augustine raises is why games have launch problems. He pins the blame on backend issues and ignores other issues. (I think primarily he was just using failed launches as a vehicle to talk about gaming backends, but nonetheless he argued that backends were the primary cause of failed launches.)

Another issue the article failed to address is that many games fail catastrophically when servers cannot be contacted even for online features that are not necessary for core gameplay; or for DRM purposes. This is a flaw in the front end that contributes to the same problem.

All those "causes" are primarily fueled by the following:

"It's a major threat to their business. So why does it keep happening?"

This here should have clued him into the larger context. It isn't a major threat to their business. Getting a refund on a videogame is becoming easier, but has historically been difficult. Try returning an opened copy of a game to any retailer. Even explaining that it is the game itself that is broken does not always result in an accepted return.

The consumer, rather than the business, is bearing the cost of a failed launch.

So Augustine is correct in a technical sense regarding how backend issues contribute to failed launches. However, it is the market as a whole that is the primary driver behind failed launches. There is little incentive to fix the failed launches regardless of the technical means by which they occur.

[georgemcbay]

It pretty much does ignore it, pinning backend service issues as at least the primary if not the only major issue:

"So why does it keep happening? It comes down to the fact that most games are now online services, with updated content, special events, virtual economies, player interaction, etc"

As someone who plays both online and offline AAA games on console (PS4, Xbox One) and PC, I haven't seen any evidence that online-heavy games are more likely to ship with major problems than offline games.

For both types of games it is routine these days to get games on day one where you have the base game, you have the near obligatory multiple-gigabyte 0 day patch applied to deal with problems found between gold master and actual release, and then you still have obvious crash bugs, serious problems with animation systems, physics systems, etc. Connection issues with backend services are just one of a very long list of game breaking problems, many of which are seen in totally offline single-player games.

The whole "preorder" culture for gaming is a large factor in this problem, IMO. There's not that much incentive to ship a product that is solid when you've already gotten a large amount of the money you will get on release before the product even ships. This is even more evident in all the failed kickstarters where people have paid for alpha-level games that were never released or evolved much past where they were at the time of fund raising.

To a large degree the gamers are thus to blame for perpetuating this problem due to buying into the preorder culture (presumably in order to avoid loss aversion due to missing out on preorder bonuses).

[minimaxir]

Steam refunds was suspected to be the primary reason the Batman: Arkham Knight PC sales was suspended until the game was fixed.

[ekianjo]

> The reason games have these launch problems is that publishers got away with it for too long. Having users who already paid for the game do the beta testing is much, much cheaper and more efficient than in-house testing.

I'd say the main reason is that video games companies are usually run by a bunch of amateurs who are good at a few particular things (coding, design, creativity, and maybe even "hyping" things) but have shortcomings when it comes to engineering and delivering consistent, solid quality. Many companies dont have regular processes, and rely on employees forsaking weekends in order to deliver things on time.

I know it's usually not popular here to talk about the necessity of Project Managers, but the Video Games Industry is a pretty good example of an situation where more (i.e. better) management could help make things better compared to the current mess.

[hibikir]

I do not think that games need more project management, but more people who share the lessons we've also learned in business and system programming.

For instance, we've had articles here about how beautiful the Quake 2 and Doom 3 codebases were. It's not that John Carmack isn't an amazing programmer (I am sure he is far better than me), but the techniques for readability and maintainability that he used in those games are just what anyone writing in a large codebase should be doing. The style he used is exactly what we demand when interviewing senior devs. But then game programmers look at it as if he had discovered cold fusion. But when all you see is games, that are written expecting that once the game is shipped, nobody is going to touch your code again, standards go down. Very different from what we do in business programming, where we know some systems might end up living 15+ years, so we have to write things planning for the system to keep evolving for decades.

If anything, online games and MMOs should be written better, precisely because they are far long lived, and will be edited more, than a throwaway that will just see a few patches if users complain.

[flohofwoe]

You never saw a games company from the inside did you? Major game studios are just as much entrenched in their software development processes as any other company that size. Also, there is no single 'typical' game company. You have EA or Ubisoft which put 600 people on a single project, and on the extreme other end you have the one-man-army indie developer, and everything inbetween.

[alexk7]

In the current game dev industry, there is no longer anything "in-between". The days of the medium sized games are long gone. It is either big winner takes all or very small indie under the radar.