Is the difficulty of debugging complex games non-linear?

The other solution is the one almost nobody seems to be able to do : boycott.
I don't buy EA, UBISoft, and Gearbox games at all, and never buy a game before release.

While everyone is free to boycott companies for any and all reasons, personally I won't do it. I've played games only on home computers and personal computers so I've never experienced bug free games. Over 30 years of more or less buggied games. I don't expect it to change. I do belive those who played with consoles and only bought limited number of games might have experienced polished titles in the past but that world is unknown to me. So I keep on buying titles and ignore the bugs the best I can. And bugs are something I can deal with - game design issues are another matter.
 
The other solution is the one almost nobody seems to be able to do : boycott.
I don't buy EA, UBISoft, and Gearbox games at all, and never buy a game before release.

What works for me is buying games 6 to 18 months after release. I literally have not stumbled across one bug or crash in pc gaming for many many years now, and the main reason is I stopped buying games at launch. Presto, problem solved and I've had many years of trouble free pc gaming. The last crash I had was with Fallout 3 (one of the last games I bought at launch) which had an occasional threading crash on quad core pc's that they eventually patched. So given that I've been able to game without issue for over 5 years now simply by not buying games at launch tells me that the issue of buggy games can indeed be solved at least to the point of no fatal game breaking bugs, and to me also points to an issue in how games are tested. Either they aren't tested for long enough or the old brute force methods simply aren't adequate anymore. When you look at the testing process today it hasn't really scaled with game complexity. Teams have become 50x bigger, code has become orders of magnitude longer, game complexity has increased dramatically and yet the testing process has what, maybe tripled compared to what it used to be? I'd argue that it's simply not enough, anecdotaly proven to me by the simple fact that I can play games without any issue simply by letting the $60 buyers first beta test the games for me after which I buy them around 6 to 18 month later and have no issues.
 
What works for me is buying games 6 to 18 months after release. I literally have not stumbled across one bug or crash in pc gaming for many many years now, and the main reason is I stopped buying games at launch. Presto, problem solved and I've had many years of trouble free pc gaming.
I have wondered why people have lately complained about so many bugs in games, because I haven't encountered any game breaking bugs in the latest AAA games I have played (The Last Of Us, AC: Black Flag, GTA 5, etc). But now I realize that (for the last 3 years or so) I have been too busy to actually buy any games at their launch day. I basically only buy games after my friends/colleagues have hyped them so much that cannot resist anymore (= ~half years after the releases). I don't remember when was the last time I started playing a new game and it didn't say "there is an update available...".
 
Back
Top