Sony PlayStation 5 Pro

[Below2D]

They absolutely do! It's their walled garden and they can place any requirements on any developer. Previous Sonys had extensive TRCs that your game had to manage without fault. This followed on from Nintendo's 'gold seal' to ensure mindless crap wasn't on their platform and a game on Nintendo was worth your money. Sony were selective of who could publish on their PlayStations, charged a significant entry cost which kept out the riffraff, and even penalised devs for patches back in the PS3 era - they charged for devs to patch, thereby making it more important to get it right first time, or then ensure patches wouldn't need further patches.

Standards have just dropped off a cliff with platforms becoming more and more Steam-like. Anyone can publish on PS now, with no quality standards whatsoever, and no enforcement of basic suitability-for-purpose, with Sony dragging their heels on refunds when they sell games that don't work properly.

A substantial, if not complete, portion of blame lies at Sony here. They released an upscaling tech that can effectively break in games, presented it as flawlessly awesome in their marketing, and now allow any old broken implementation to ruin PS5 Pro owner's experience. They should have not released it before it was ready, or ensured no game uses it wrongly, and not spite their £700 console purchases with this. Utterly disrespectful.

They absolutely do. All games patched and released go through certification each time.

Sony definitely has some say on the quality of release. Certain games should not have passed cert, but it does feel like since ps3 days, they have really lowered their standards because developers had such a hard time extracting performance out of that machine.

Yes, and I don't believe Sony will do the devs' QA for them. During the launch of Cyberpunk, a dev came out and shed some light on the patches and game certification and mentioned there was basically nothing from the QA side. Nothing about how a game should run, its resolution, IQ, or anything of the sort. It was mostly stuff related to accessibility, security features, OS compliance, and a few other things. Almost nothing about QA and if Sony did it in the past, they stopped a long time ago and I don't see how they could come to a dev and go, "this isn't good enough" nor did I ever hear them of doing such a thing because we've had broken games since time immemorial.

 

[iroboto]

Yes, and I don't believe Sony will do the devs' QA for them. During the launch of Cyberpunk, a dev came out and shed some light on the patches and game certification and mentioned there was basically nothing from the QA side. Nothing about how a game should run, its resolution, IQ, or anything of the sort. It was mostly stuff related to accessibility, security features, OS compliance, and a few other things. Almost nothing about QA and if Sony did it in the past, they stopped a long time ago and I don't see how they could come to a dev and go, "this isn't good enough" nor did I ever hear them of doing such a thing because we've had broken games since time immemorial.

There's several layers of QA.
Internal studio
Publisher
then platform.

back when I was pushing through their @Home platform, I was given feedback on performance etc. Mainly bugs. but the most at what was looked at was localization etc. Each area has QA looking at different things.

I was given feedback, but I was never explicitly told to fix things or it wouldn't ship. But Sony does have the final say, as they are responsible for cert. They have to ensure patches are not killing their user base, and we aren't injecting code to mine bit coin or harvesting user data we should not be etc. They also want to avoid another hot coffee moment where developers are placing content in their game hidden that is not part of their rating.

 

[Below2D]

There's several layers of QA.
Internal studio
Publisher
then platform.

back when I was pushing through their @Home platform, I was given feedback on performance etc. Mainly bugs. but the most at what was looked at was localization etc. Each area has QA looking at different things.

I was given feedback, but I was never explicitly told to fix things or it wouldn't ship. But Sony does have the final say, as they are responsible for cert. They have to ensure patches are not killing their user base, and we aren't injecting code to mine bit coin or harvesting user data we should not be etc. They also want to avoid another hot coffee moment where developers are placing content in their game hidden that is not part of their rating.

You know a lot more about this than I do, but yeah, what you're saying lines up perfectly with what I read over the years. I honestly haven't heard of them once blocking a game over quality or requiring certain performance metrics to be met. That they give feedback is one thing, but that they straight-up tell devs, nah, this isn't up to par with what we want is a different matter.

I can't imagine that sitting well with developers either if the platform holder started to police the quality of their work.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

... if Sony did it in the past, they stopped a long time ago and I don't see how they could come to a dev and go, "this isn't good enough" nor did I ever hear them of doing such a thing because we've had broken games since time immemorial.

They absolutely did, right up until PS360 era for sure. One of the most famous that was public was MS's mandate that all games on XB360 had to be 720p minimum in HD mode, and pretty sure there was some AA requirement on that too. It was repealed...

One huge benefit consoles had over other platforms was the platform holder could, and did, ensure what titles were licensed and so controlled the quality of titles on their platform. this didn't mean all games were faultless, but it did ensure a certain quality standard with fewer bugs and less issues. They have largely abandoned this and thrown the doors wide open. The upside of this is more content - check out the copious indie dross on PS Store for example. The downside is zero standards on title quality and a reliance on caveat emptor, but without the generous (and necessary!) refund policy of Steam.

but that they straight-up tell devs, nah, this isn't up to par with what we want is a different matter.

I can't imagine that sitting well with developers either if the platform holder started to police the quality of their work.

I know personally one dev who tried to get a game on PS3. They got it on Europe but not the US due to a difficult-to-replicate multiplayer bug and SCEA refused to pass it, nor did they provide any help with solving the issue. Console development used to be hard and devs very much did crash against the platform holders, and it was highly contentious. However, they had the market that you had to sell to, versus PC which was (believed to be) riddled with piracy. Hence it was just something you put up, kowtowing down to the ridiculous console company demands.

We have the same now with Apple and Google. They can and do refuse to allow titles.

https://www.reddit.com/r/GameDevelopment/comments/14mlss2/painful_trctcrxrlotcheck_examples_memories_and

One of my most annoying was on iOS, where the Apple API was bottled and returned invalid errors, but Apple wouldn't let us show the errors to the player because it made previous fucking apple look bad. By far the worst most unprofessional TRCs I've gone through. That's including every PlayStation from PSX and Xbox and game cube and switch.

So long as these platforms are closed, the platform holders has 100% control over everything that appears on it. If it's a pokey little platform, devs will just ignore them as more trouble than it's worth. If it's a major market and necessary for the devs to turn a profit, the devs just suck it up out of necessity.

 

[iroboto]

I can't imagine that sitting well with developers either if the platform holder started to police the quality of their work.

Yea as competition heats up friction comes down. As you don't want to be in a situation where a developer feels they can't get across the line fast enough with company A, so they just release on company B instead.

The dynamics of the market has indeed changed, so much of what we discuss in the past is no longer applicable in the modern day, though technically they could if they still wanted to. The idea that you could withhold a release, and the studio has run out of money for instance, means the game never sees the light of day. But that was the bar when we couldn't patch games. Today with patching, you can run hard until you're out of money and you budget for a specific window. The platform holders have a lot more lenience knowing that you can return to patch it later.