[devbug]

This echos my experiences, especially with the move to “live services” model for games. Often the teams working on the services for multiplayer games are very small so it’s all about leverage. They’re also embedded within a culture that doesn’t value or understand the practices and tools that are taken for granted in webdev, mostly because they’re hard to transfer to the other domains in gamedev.

I’m glad to see the open source development of these tools. Personally, there’s a lot of stuff colleagues and I have built that I would love to see open sourced. Otherwise we just end up implementing the same services over and over again.

Another example is patch delivery. It’s a solved problem yet everyone keeps rolling their own, or only shipping to Steam. Of course, all managed with some Jenkins scripts written by someone that’s no longer at the company. I want Fastlane for games that makes it easy to target the various distribution channels across desktop/mobile/console.

[lazypenguin]

The lack of a standardized patch system for games is mind boggling! Sure there’s some for desktop software exes which just ship the new version every time but those apps are rather small and games can be several GB! We had to roll our own for our game but I couldn’t believe there wasn’t a universal standard when I went searching for one last year. Butler from itch.io looked interesting but I couldn’t decipher how to use it in the end. Also rolling patches manually seemed crazy to me and we ended up using a library similar to rsync that works pretty well and makes deploying patches easier but still not perfect.