Inuhanyou
Veteran
Unfortunately in a lot of cases it can be. Infact you don't even have to sell a product or even offer a service and do it badly just for easy short term profits as recent events have shown
Current Generation Games Analysis Technical Discussion [2023] [XBSX|S, PS5, PC]
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Things are shipped like this because it's too expensive to fix certain issues if you don't catch them early enough. At the beginning of game production you don't have a slightest idea about performance bottlenecks or content budgets. Those things surface somewhere in the middle of production when you have a chunk of game ready. Assuming that people will constantly test it on target platforms and accordingly adjust budgets and prioritize work. Which often isn't the case, as at the same time you may need to work on E3 demo or simply have larger issues like missing features which are critical for shipping. And if you discover content performance issues or gameplay performance issues near the end of the project it's usually too late to fix that as it's unrealistic to redo content or rewrite carefully crafted gameplay at the last stretch. You don't have an extra year when pre-orders are already sold, marketing machine is running and project money is running out. No matter if you have the best engine team around or use custom engine for your game.
Nothing really new here, every console generation had performance issues and projects which barely shipped.
DavidGraham
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Regarding engine development and rewrites.
That's not our problem.
And if you haven't noticed, the issue is that often, within days or weeks... most of these issues get fixed, or greatly improved.
We are not QA testers. We are the customers buying the product... it has to work at an acceptable level when it launches.
At the core of it, this is why we see Unreal and Unity succeed. They are 100% focused on engine only, customers will upgrade when they are ready to.
Though he indicates that Unreal is still going the fast path, they haven’t undergone a massive overhaul.
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All of that makes a lot of sense, but some of the most egregious things we've seen recently seem like they should be predictable from early on development.
For example, the performance implications of allocating memory in a main thread during gameplay, or the importance of having balanced / graduated texture settings so you can run acceptably on 8GB vram cards (the largest chunk of the PC buying market) while not looking like ass. That shouldn't be catching any PC developer out, surely?
You don't know how long the patches are in the pipeline though. The code on release day is probably old. Patches that go out are probably not that new either. I'm pretty sure games that are cross-platform have to go through that whole console certification, so pc patches end up being slow too.
If you know the patches are in the pipeline... then delay until they are ready.
Again, I understand that there's a million different factors at play and eventually they have to make the decision to launch it regardless of the issues that it has.. and I completely understand that they release things with the intentions of getting them fixed up... but the reality is that that's not our problem at all. That's their problem.
They can feel free to continue on the road they are... but it WILL affect their bottom line as things become so bad that many people simply don't buy their games, or wait until they are massively discounted and potentially fixed.
Consumers are rightfully starting to stand up against this stuff. Perhaps things need to change in the way some publishers announce and budget their games? Again though.. that's not our problem to solve. We're buying a product, and it needs to be acceptable, otherwise they'll eventually start paying the price with loss of sales and massive amounts of negativity dominating the discussion around their games.
Plenty are hard, but I don't think any are as complex though. The interplay of systems in games is something special. Something mechanical goes wrong on a large production line, you can find and fix the problem. Something goes wrong in software, often you're days trying to find a one-line fix, because you've no idea where the problem exists.
That's not an excuse, just an observation. People used to say, "it's not rocket science/brain surgery," as the ultimate tests of difficulty. Rocket science has remained the same since apples fell on people's heads - predictable maths that hasn't changed. Brain surgery needs a steady hand, but there's not a lot you really do, carefully chop and prod. Each computer system is effectively like a city management of components, full of interplay of system you have no control over. A hospital management of an inherently oversized, understaffed city megaplex full of international staff who don't speak the same language or have the same ideas.
Assuming all of that is true (which I doubt since there are many critical systems that are likely more complex than video game software) it still points to poor management. Video games have the luxury of not having to be precise in essentially any aspect. The margin of error in capturing the environment (mouse clicks, controller input) and producing output (small graphical artifacts are unnoticeable) is huge yet these guys are frequently blowing past it. If you know you’re building something complex then you need to allocate sufficient time and resources to do it right.
Imagine if every other commercial SpaceX rocket exploded. They couldn’t exactly brush it off by saying rocket science is hard.
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DavidGraham
Veteran
This sums up the situation perfectly.
Games are bigger and more complex than ever. The increasing demands of publishers to create features that they think customers wants is making games an incredibly harder project to complete. Developers aren’t dumber, in that he is right.
No major AAA game is made by a studio individually. Many other smaller studio and developer shops are involved in the creation and support of these major studios. games are just frankly too large. By expanding the number of workers you expose yourself to more quality control issues. Now you got this tightly knit group of developers with experience and skill now be flooded with a bunch of juniors.
We don’t see this problem in the indie space where everything can be completed by a single team, but once you dial up everything, from branching storylines to graphics, voice acting and mocap, dozens of studios will be involved in the process and sync is required.
Even a smaller game like cuphead had multiple studios working on it.
It’s not easy, and that’s why games are becoming “samey”. If you have to span your project across multiple studios , it’s easier to follow a template though that development chain, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t vulnerable to failure; new AAA IP games are the hardest because you’re basically having to find all new partner studios to support an entirely moving target. Moving Halo yo open world might be exactly the type of change that hurt it badly.
I agree with all that you say here, BUT, the economic aspect is most likely more complex.
Potential scenario:
A) We release our game buggy, we profit 10M, but we need to spend 2M to fix it ie we get 8M in the end. And we get some reputation loss, but since everybody else is also doing it, it is a compromise we can live with it?
B) Now if we do not release the buggy game, we go over some deadlines, we can not pay on a couple of our loans, we wont get more cash from our publisher, we can not pay wages etc.
Our publisher says that we can loan you some cash, but the interest i X and we also want Y more of the income from the game. We end up with maybe 2M on the bottomline, our investors are pissed, because they expected a higher return on their investment. And you might not get your next project green lighted.
What do you choose?
There are so many companies being run on high cashflow rates and windfall income, but basically are endeavours that are loosing money every month/year and are just delaying bankruptcy or hoping for acquisition.
and
C) There are launch and release window timings. And if you have a huge pipeline of games coming, sometimes that is the date, or the game will never have a good time to 'ship' without being impacted by other titles.
If we assume that MS has titles queued up all the way to Starfield release (once per quarter) then, Redfall had to come now if there is another title landing for next quarter.
You cannot delay indefinitely, only Nintendo can do that, because people are only interested in buying just Nintendo titles. That won't work with Sony and MS. They eventually must ship, or the rest of their pipeline will fall out of step and conflict with the 3rd party release windows.
D
Deleted member 11852
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I think you've underestimating the complexity in most things to do with transportation, critical national infrastructure, non-critical telecommunications, food and pharmaceuticals. The world is full of things that have software at least as complex as videogames, and they are just one component, or part of the manufacturing process for, the finished product. Anything using a realtime OS is going to have a narrow tolerance for error or failure and if you get it wrong, people can get ill, injured or even die.
Fixing software generally has the luxury that you can do it removely, finding an engineering problem in something like a car, aircraft, the food chain or medicine can mean a full product recall.
When I was one gingering in aerospace, you try to diagnose something that crashed and burned for more than 800 degrees for over ten mins. Good luck with that!
Silent_Buddha
Legend
I think you've underestimating the complexity in most things to do with transportation, critical national infrastructure, non-critical telecommunications, food and pharmaceuticals. The world is full of things that have software at least as complex as videogames, and they are just one component, or part of the manufacturing process for, the finished product. Anything using a realtime OS is going to have a narrow tolerance for error or failure and if you get it wrong, people can get ill, injured or even die.
Fixing software generally has the luxury that you can do it removely, finding an engineering problem in something like a car, aircraft, the food chain or medicine can mean a full product recall.
When I was one gingering in aerospace, you try to diagnose something that crashed and burned for more than 800 degrees for over ten mins. Good luck with that!
Also, keep in mind some industries are extremely intolerant of any errors.
Imagine if banking software was as error prone as games? Imagine if people's money just randomly disappeared. And that's not exactly simplistic software as banking software has to be able to interact with other banks and other banks in other countries and non-banks, etc.
Or software driven flight controls of modern jets. Or software to model the climate (hmmm, maybe not a good example.
).Regards,
SB
DavidGraham
Veteran
They are among the ultimate tests of difficulty, the systems involved in making a brain surgery successful are too many to be counted.
From the diagnosing part, the examination, the scans, the lab work, the devices that facilitate all of that, then the decision taken by the surgeon on the parameters of operation, to the operating room, the devices/tools that will be used in it, to the skill and knowledge of the surgeon and the assisting crew, to the post operation care, medications, follow up, counseling ..etc. So many steps and so many systems that need to work flawlessly for the whole thing to be successful. I don't know much about rocket science, but I imagine it would be even more complex and error sensitive.
In comparison, what does making a video game entail again? Finding errors and optimizing code? This is just a matter of time and skill, hire more skilled personnel to scan the code and the problem is solved. None of the systems involved are critical, and there is no live at stake here, these are very low key, low priority operations, and equating video game making to brain surgery/rocket science is not a valid analogy.
People permitted to do brain surgery are simply the top notch in their field, they don't get where they are until they undergo a rigorous phase of education, training and validation, none of that is required in the video game industry, it's full of experts and skilled people, but it's also full of hobbyists, amateurs and underpaid interns, a lot of them is not even partially validated, which drags the whole process down. If brain surgery was like making video games, then I a lot more people would have been dead by now.
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As I mentioned, many companies are just delaying their bankruptcy, so then you just got there quicker.
With that said, I am not sure how A can become the worse option, unless the release day sales tank. Then you got a flop on your hand that did not even got any hype going.
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