Yelling is not journalism
August 14, 2023 1:30 PM Subscribe
Why can’t triple-A games come out with perfect polish from day 1? A response by Brandon Sheffield to IGN's Baldur’s Gate 3 is Causing Some Developers to Panic video which itself was a response to Xalavier's (of Hypnospace Outlaw fame) twitter thread about "gently, pre-emptively pushing back against players taking that excitement [about Baldur's Gate 3] and using it to apply criticism or a "raised standard" to RPGs going forward"
There is a good conversation to be had here, but frankly if Christopher Livingston can do as well as he did with his “Oops, all bears!” party then they put just enough polish into the game.
posted by m@f at 1:55 PM on August 14, 2023 [10 favorites]
posted by m@f at 1:55 PM on August 14, 2023 [10 favorites]
I think that Sheffield's and Xanavier's point is that, all things considered, yes the Baldur's Gate approach is superior, but it's a privileged approach contingent on a number of things , not the least of which is: "can you afford to burn cash for three years before tapping into the market of players who are only willing to pay for version 1.0?"
Not everyone is willing to pay for or play games at Early Access, so it's a challenging equation to solve for where you have to balance: what level of features people are willing to pay for in Early Access, how many devs you'll need to build thatl, how much those devs will cost, and how much money people are willing to pay for an Early Access game. And it's not like any of those numbers are things you can magically pull from Steam. It's all guesses, and getting any of those wrong means you're going to have to start cutting corners and getting people to think your game is a piece of shit.
As with all software development, the key thing to nail is that first question of what features you need to have. The simpler the better, as simple is cheap, and cheap gives you options. But simple is hard to nail, especially since all of your potential players has an infinite list of features that they want to see. Hence, why Xanavier and Sheffield are making this point of keeping standards and expectations sane. The more exaggerated expectations get then the more likely it is that the industry will stay tilted to big studios with established IP.
posted by bl1nk at 1:58 PM on August 14, 2023 [3 favorites]
Not everyone is willing to pay for or play games at Early Access, so it's a challenging equation to solve for where you have to balance: what level of features people are willing to pay for in Early Access, how many devs you'll need to build thatl, how much those devs will cost, and how much money people are willing to pay for an Early Access game. And it's not like any of those numbers are things you can magically pull from Steam. It's all guesses, and getting any of those wrong means you're going to have to start cutting corners and getting people to think your game is a piece of shit.
As with all software development, the key thing to nail is that first question of what features you need to have. The simpler the better, as simple is cheap, and cheap gives you options. But simple is hard to nail, especially since all of your potential players has an infinite list of features that they want to see. Hence, why Xanavier and Sheffield are making this point of keeping standards and expectations sane. The more exaggerated expectations get then the more likely it is that the industry will stay tilted to big studios with established IP.
posted by bl1nk at 1:58 PM on August 14, 2023 [3 favorites]
Yeah, a big part of Destin's video is citing the anger of a lot of consumers over the crappy monetization tactics that make purchasing a released game feel like a bait-and-switch. Pointing out that BG3 was in early access for three years isn't a rebuttal to that, when Destin's implicit point is that you can work within the constraints of a game company's financial ecosphere and still get a polished product out. "Game dev is hard" is a truism that doesn't excuse doing stuff that makes consumers angry. Surgery is also hard, and we don't give surgeons a pass for fucking up because of the difficulty.
There's a weird cross-talk going on in these three items. Xalavier's tweets (and Brandon's response) were more about understanding that these giant, epic games are the product of somewhat rarefied conditions for game development, and it's unreasonable to expect every game to have the same epic-ness. Destin takes that and responds "that doesn't excuse shitty and broken games!" and he's right, it doesn't, but Xalavier wasn't defending shitty or broken games, he was defending smaller games.
One is decrying bad actors, the other is defending sincere efforts, and they're not really opposed.
posted by fatbird at 1:58 PM on August 14, 2023 [9 favorites]
There's a weird cross-talk going on in these three items. Xalavier's tweets (and Brandon's response) were more about understanding that these giant, epic games are the product of somewhat rarefied conditions for game development, and it's unreasonable to expect every game to have the same epic-ness. Destin takes that and responds "that doesn't excuse shitty and broken games!" and he's right, it doesn't, but Xalavier wasn't defending shitty or broken games, he was defending smaller games.
One is decrying bad actors, the other is defending sincere efforts, and they're not really opposed.
posted by fatbird at 1:58 PM on August 14, 2023 [9 favorites]
I'm not a gamer, but honestly putting your game out into early access and not an official release for three years and THEN making an official release after all the bugs have been worked out feels a lot more professional to me than making an official release and then taking three years to work all the bugs out.
I play games pretty frequently, and sometimes pick up AAA titles (and when I do, I play them for a LONNNNNNG time; my 'hours spent' playing skyrim and no mans sky are laughably high). I almost always wait about 6 months to a year to pick them up, because of this very effect.
The counterpoint is that if I pick up early access games that are still in development, you get to see the progress, and even help file bug reports and discover issues that may arise. I got into Hardspace Shipbreaker as an early access game, because the demos that I saw were like, plenty good enough and polished enough for me to fuck around and play it while they finished the 'story' mode. They made some updates that were great, but mostly it was just quality of life fixes.
The other side of that coin is games that are just perpetually in development. Unexplored 2 is a good example of this; it was in early access, was pretty okay but clearly needed work, and now has reached 'full release' but the updates they put out weekly (or bi-weekly) are often game breaking. It's really frustrating, because it's really fun, and really cool, but there are a bunch of parts of it that are just perpetulally busted, or become busted with an update. I hope to revisit it in a year or two and hopefully it'll have stabilized?
I wish there was more of a benchmark for distributers to factor into this. Like, if Steam previewed games and themselves labeled things early access or full release, that would be great. Cyberpunk wouldn't have been a full release for like 6 months after launch.
Knowing what you're getting into, as a consumer, is really hard and just across the map.
posted by furnace.heart at 1:59 PM on August 14, 2023 [4 favorites]
I play games pretty frequently, and sometimes pick up AAA titles (and when I do, I play them for a LONNNNNNG time; my 'hours spent' playing skyrim and no mans sky are laughably high). I almost always wait about 6 months to a year to pick them up, because of this very effect.
The counterpoint is that if I pick up early access games that are still in development, you get to see the progress, and even help file bug reports and discover issues that may arise. I got into Hardspace Shipbreaker as an early access game, because the demos that I saw were like, plenty good enough and polished enough for me to fuck around and play it while they finished the 'story' mode. They made some updates that were great, but mostly it was just quality of life fixes.
The other side of that coin is games that are just perpetually in development. Unexplored 2 is a good example of this; it was in early access, was pretty okay but clearly needed work, and now has reached 'full release' but the updates they put out weekly (or bi-weekly) are often game breaking. It's really frustrating, because it's really fun, and really cool, but there are a bunch of parts of it that are just perpetulally busted, or become busted with an update. I hope to revisit it in a year or two and hopefully it'll have stabilized?
I wish there was more of a benchmark for distributers to factor into this. Like, if Steam previewed games and themselves labeled things early access or full release, that would be great. Cyberpunk wouldn't have been a full release for like 6 months after launch.
Knowing what you're getting into, as a consumer, is really hard and just across the map.
posted by furnace.heart at 1:59 PM on August 14, 2023 [4 favorites]
I think this thread conflates two different things.
One is the massive scope and ambition of the game. It is huge! It isn't reasonable to expect most studios to produce anything like that.
The other is the professionalism of ushering a game through a long development cycle, taking advantage of early access, and releasing a game that looks and performs like it should on day. one. That is absolutely a reasonable expectation.
So, I agree that it isn't a reason to say "Developer X should have provided more features!", it absolutely should be the standard for stability and quality of whatever scope is being sold.
posted by meinvt at 2:00 PM on August 14, 2023 [3 favorites]
One is the massive scope and ambition of the game. It is huge! It isn't reasonable to expect most studios to produce anything like that.
The other is the professionalism of ushering a game through a long development cycle, taking advantage of early access, and releasing a game that looks and performs like it should on day. one. That is absolutely a reasonable expectation.
So, I agree that it isn't a reason to say "Developer X should have provided more features!", it absolutely should be the standard for stability and quality of whatever scope is being sold.
posted by meinvt at 2:00 PM on August 14, 2023 [3 favorites]
Hence, why Xanavier and Sheffield are making this point of keeping standards and expectations sane. The more exaggerated expectations get then the more likely it is that the industry will stay tilted to big studios with established IP.
But if a game is entirely buggy on release then it's not a AAA game. I'd say it's an A game, at best.
It'd be like a Hollywood studio movie being released to theaters as a workprint, and promising the special effects and editing problems will be fixed in the next year or two.
If you can't fully develop a game to the point of being finished before release, are you really a triple-A game studio?
posted by hippybear at 2:02 PM on August 14, 2023 [6 favorites]
But if a game is entirely buggy on release then it's not a AAA game. I'd say it's an A game, at best.
It'd be like a Hollywood studio movie being released to theaters as a workprint, and promising the special effects and editing problems will be fixed in the next year or two.
If you can't fully develop a game to the point of being finished before release, are you really a triple-A game studio?
posted by hippybear at 2:02 PM on August 14, 2023 [6 favorites]
I might wade into this discussion with actual thoughts when I have actual time 'cause it's been The Discourse amongst the gamedevs on my socials, but quick note that Xalavier Nelson's name got typoed & it's Xalavier : )
also he's lovely, his OG thread was completely reasonable I thought, & anyone harassing him can fight me in the parking lot -- ok I'm out for real
posted by taquito sunrise at 2:03 PM on August 14, 2023 [3 favorites]
also he's lovely, his OG thread was completely reasonable I thought, & anyone harassing him can fight me in the parking lot -- ok I'm out for real
posted by taquito sunrise at 2:03 PM on August 14, 2023 [3 favorites]
Brandon makes another good point as well - don't fucking enable the Gaters.
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:04 PM on August 14, 2023 [15 favorites]
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:04 PM on August 14, 2023 [15 favorites]
I mean Sheffield all but comes out and says it: AAA studios are owned by shareholders who care about absolutely nothing other than maximizing return on their investment and they force devs to release buggy, unfinished games because every dollar spent on development and QA is a dollar that doesn't end up in the pocket of somebody whose only entitlement to that dollar is that they had enough dollars already to buy stock. Game development is subject to the same pressures as every other firm under capitalism and like every other industry under capitalism, the purpose of the firm is not to do what the firm ostensibly does, it's to maximize the amount of money extracted from the employees and transferred to the owners of the firm.
posted by Pope Guilty at 2:04 PM on August 14, 2023 [27 favorites]
posted by Pope Guilty at 2:04 PM on August 14, 2023 [27 favorites]
Paying for a game during "early access" sounds a lot like paying to do QA, which is a job that people are normally paid to do.
posted by grumpybear69 at 2:09 PM on August 14, 2023 [22 favorites]
posted by grumpybear69 at 2:09 PM on August 14, 2023 [22 favorites]
If business software were released as buggy as some AAA games are, those companies would go bankrupt.
As a professional developer in the corporate environment, let me just say you have no idea how buggy business software can get. For a rather notorious example, Excel literally forced scientists to change how they handle dates because of its...unique interpretation of what A Date is.
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:10 PM on August 14, 2023 [34 favorites]
As a professional developer in the corporate environment, let me just say you have no idea how buggy business software can get. For a rather notorious example, Excel literally forced scientists to change how they handle dates because of its...unique interpretation of what A Date is.
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:10 PM on August 14, 2023 [34 favorites]
Business software is often awful because a) the people who choose the vendor and approve the purchase are almost never the people who actually have to use the stuff and b) it's cheaper to build a whole scaffolding of bug workarounds for your employees to perform than it is to pay the company for fixes, especially since, again, the people actually doing actual work with the software are in most cases not also the people in charge of acquisition.
posted by Pope Guilty at 2:15 PM on August 14, 2023 [10 favorites]
posted by Pope Guilty at 2:15 PM on August 14, 2023 [10 favorites]
I follow a lot of games, buy many games, and play a few exhaustively. And I used to be a game dev. Pope Guilty is spot on. The player expectation studios are afraid players will adopt is quality, because quality is more expensive, and quality means having to hire real talent, and then let them do their job.
Sheffield is also right that most of the games that reach tremendous levels of polish are games with a ton of past success buoying their ability to keep working on it until it gleams. Or dominant market players making huge loss leaders to sell hardware.
Or, interesting variant, keep patching it until it's amazing. I haven't played Cyberpunk, so I can't comment, but I've put insane hours into No Man's Sky since launch. When it was underwhelming. Today, it's pretty damned whelming. Hello Games was able to stick with it release after release because they made a ton of money on earlier projects.
Bang for buck, NMS and Minecraft ($26) are the most ridiculous value I have ever received in my long history with games.
But, I also like weird indy games (ok, there was a time when Minecraft was a weird indy game), and maybe a weird indy game will be ambitious in scope and a bit janky, or maybe tight in scope and well polished. There room for all these things if people can keep in mind the people that make games, show a bit of empathy, and...have fun.
posted by chromecow at 2:26 PM on August 14, 2023 [6 favorites]
Sheffield is also right that most of the games that reach tremendous levels of polish are games with a ton of past success buoying their ability to keep working on it until it gleams. Or dominant market players making huge loss leaders to sell hardware.
Or, interesting variant, keep patching it until it's amazing. I haven't played Cyberpunk, so I can't comment, but I've put insane hours into No Man's Sky since launch. When it was underwhelming. Today, it's pretty damned whelming. Hello Games was able to stick with it release after release because they made a ton of money on earlier projects.
Bang for buck, NMS and Minecraft ($26) are the most ridiculous value I have ever received in my long history with games.
But, I also like weird indy games (ok, there was a time when Minecraft was a weird indy game), and maybe a weird indy game will be ambitious in scope and a bit janky, or maybe tight in scope and well polished. There room for all these things if people can keep in mind the people that make games, show a bit of empathy, and...have fun.
posted by chromecow at 2:26 PM on August 14, 2023 [6 favorites]
...Excel literally forced scientists to change how they handle dates...There's no good solution there; should Microsoft instead have forced all of the world's non-scientists to change how they handle dates?
There are millions of people in the world, that, when they type '3-5' into Excel, are trying to say either "March 5 of this year" or "May 3 of this year". Far more, I would wager, than there are scientists who enter DNA base pair 03-05 into a spreadsheet. (I might be misremembering the exact issue, but I think it was something like that.)
SpockNeedsOfMany.jpg
posted by Hatashran at 2:31 PM on August 14, 2023 [4 favorites]
I'm not a "gamer" but I do play video games occasionally (verrry occasionally), and I'm perpetually baffled by the way people seem to talk and think about the games industry in a just completely different way than other industries.
For one thing, what is going on with the equivocation of the word "developers" to conflate workers and management? Like, people make criticisms that quite obviously (to me) target management, but the responses to those criticisms seem to be righteously defending the actual coders themselves. No other industry anywhere sells a product that just doesn't work right with vague promises that if enough other people buy it, and if you keep giving them an indeterminate amount of money over the near future, they'll maybe get around to fixing it. And then when consumers complain about it, everyone's falling over themselves to say "well they don't have a choice because their bosses give them impossible deadlines and not enough funding!" Well yeah, no shit, the deadlines and funding etc is exactly what people are complaining about! When I complain about my old Ford Taurus that was constantly breaking down, I'm not mad at Oliver on the assembly line who drove the bolts, I'm mad at the executives whose policies dictate everything from the engineering designs to the materials and staffing. It's just insulting to act like consumers being mad that they are getting sold defective goods are attacking the workers themselves.
"Oh but they actually DO harass the workers on social media because they are GamerGate nazis." OK fair enough, those people exist. But AAA games are bigger than Hollywood now, they are a multi-billion dollar industry. They have a huge player base that aren't ideologues, just people who want the thing they buy to work right. And when everyone on both sides of the question, including the workers themselves, keep equivocating on what a "developer" is, well, who's to blame consumers for criticizing the people who stand up and volunteer defenses of the industry?
By the way, Baldur's Gate crashed on me five or six times in 10 hours of play since the full version came out, and I had to do a bunch of frankly pretty technical tweaking to get it to run reliably. This is how low the bar is for this supposed "new standard" in stuff you buy actually working out of the box.
The money is ABSOLUTELY there for games to be finished and work on release. Most people want to pay their $50 and get a product that works and be done with it. If that's not possible, and the game would actually have to be $100, well, that's probably a lie, but fine. If even that isn't possible and video games actually have to be subscription-based to be profitable, well, that's definitely a lie but fine! Make the initial installation free and be up-front about what the monthly subscription is. I just don't understand why this ONE product simply can't work like everything else, and any criticism of this fact gets painted as a dastardly attack on the working class creatives who work the assembly line and not an attack on the big money interests who are fucking robbing us.
posted by Krawczak at 2:33 PM on August 14, 2023 [14 favorites]
For one thing, what is going on with the equivocation of the word "developers" to conflate workers and management? Like, people make criticisms that quite obviously (to me) target management, but the responses to those criticisms seem to be righteously defending the actual coders themselves. No other industry anywhere sells a product that just doesn't work right with vague promises that if enough other people buy it, and if you keep giving them an indeterminate amount of money over the near future, they'll maybe get around to fixing it. And then when consumers complain about it, everyone's falling over themselves to say "well they don't have a choice because their bosses give them impossible deadlines and not enough funding!" Well yeah, no shit, the deadlines and funding etc is exactly what people are complaining about! When I complain about my old Ford Taurus that was constantly breaking down, I'm not mad at Oliver on the assembly line who drove the bolts, I'm mad at the executives whose policies dictate everything from the engineering designs to the materials and staffing. It's just insulting to act like consumers being mad that they are getting sold defective goods are attacking the workers themselves.
"Oh but they actually DO harass the workers on social media because they are GamerGate nazis." OK fair enough, those people exist. But AAA games are bigger than Hollywood now, they are a multi-billion dollar industry. They have a huge player base that aren't ideologues, just people who want the thing they buy to work right. And when everyone on both sides of the question, including the workers themselves, keep equivocating on what a "developer" is, well, who's to blame consumers for criticizing the people who stand up and volunteer defenses of the industry?
By the way, Baldur's Gate crashed on me five or six times in 10 hours of play since the full version came out, and I had to do a bunch of frankly pretty technical tweaking to get it to run reliably. This is how low the bar is for this supposed "new standard" in stuff you buy actually working out of the box.
The money is ABSOLUTELY there for games to be finished and work on release. Most people want to pay their $50 and get a product that works and be done with it. If that's not possible, and the game would actually have to be $100, well, that's probably a lie, but fine. If even that isn't possible and video games actually have to be subscription-based to be profitable, well, that's definitely a lie but fine! Make the initial installation free and be up-front about what the monthly subscription is. I just don't understand why this ONE product simply can't work like everything else, and any criticism of this fact gets painted as a dastardly attack on the working class creatives who work the assembly line and not an attack on the big money interests who are fucking robbing us.
posted by Krawczak at 2:33 PM on August 14, 2023 [14 favorites]
Ok so, it seems like part of the equivocation is "indie developer vs AAA developer" as much as it is "worker vs management" but I mean, hippybear's Hollywood comparison is pretty apt - if Marvel movies cost $80 but the special effects weren't done, and if you wanted them you'd have to wait 4 months and buy a "special effects package," and also the movie sometimes crashed in a way that ruined your glasses and you had to get another pair, I don't think Jim Jarmusch would or should be jumping to their defense on twitter. And if he did, I bet a lot of people would yell at him.
posted by Krawczak at 2:39 PM on August 14, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by Krawczak at 2:39 PM on August 14, 2023 [4 favorites]
Paying for a game during "early access" sounds a lot like paying to do QA, which is a job that people are normally paid to do.
Yup. The only games I've bought in Early Access have been single-I indies by solo (or mostly solo) developers, where paying for proper QA is probably not feasible.
posted by May Kasahara at 2:46 PM on August 14, 2023 [3 favorites]
Yup. The only games I've bought in Early Access have been single-I indies by solo (or mostly solo) developers, where paying for proper QA is probably not feasible.
posted by May Kasahara at 2:46 PM on August 14, 2023 [3 favorites]
I just don't understand why this ONE product simply can't work like everything else
I've done business software development. I've done video game development. The latter is orders of magnitude more complex, pushes computers to their limits, costs less per unit, has a major sales lifespan of a few months at best, and even for things like sports games requires a huge investment for sequels.
Think how big a modern computer game is. How much data there is. How much has to happen in a few milliseconds. How many disciplines are involved with making one. How many different fucked up computer systems it has to run on (remember, pushing everything to the limit). How much freedom a player has to tweak and mess with it, in a software that encourages finding the limits. (Trust me, you can make excel unhappy if you start making extreme spreadsheets, the solution is Don't Do That.)
Games are hard. It's amazing how much they DO get done.
posted by aspo at 2:49 PM on August 14, 2023 [20 favorites]
I've done business software development. I've done video game development. The latter is orders of magnitude more complex, pushes computers to their limits, costs less per unit, has a major sales lifespan of a few months at best, and even for things like sports games requires a huge investment for sequels.
Think how big a modern computer game is. How much data there is. How much has to happen in a few milliseconds. How many disciplines are involved with making one. How many different fucked up computer systems it has to run on (remember, pushing everything to the limit). How much freedom a player has to tweak and mess with it, in a software that encourages finding the limits. (Trust me, you can make excel unhappy if you start making extreme spreadsheets, the solution is Don't Do That.)
Games are hard. It's amazing how much they DO get done.
posted by aspo at 2:49 PM on August 14, 2023 [20 favorites]
Also, even Baldur's Gate had save game breaking bugs at release, after all that early access. Yes they were fixed quickly, but that's pretty much the worst kind of bug you can have in a game like that.
posted by aspo at 2:51 PM on August 14, 2023 [6 favorites]
posted by aspo at 2:51 PM on August 14, 2023 [6 favorites]
I mean Sheffield all but comes out and says it: AAA studios are owned by shareholders who care about absolutely nothing other than maximizing return on their investment and they force devs to release buggy, unfinished games because every dollar spent on development and QA is a dollar that doesn't end up in the pocket of somebody whose only entitlement to that dollar is that they had enough dollars already to buy stock.
Sheffield has a background in both journalism and game development - he's currently a developer, and has to worry about the financing side of things as an indie. So the process he's describing applies to him, and it's not purely about maximizing return on investment: it's also about not losing your shirt.
The point is really in the title: "RPGs should be better!"is not journalism: no hard questions are asked, no answers are reported. It's just yelling.
posted by billjings at 3:13 PM on August 14, 2023 [3 favorites]
Sheffield has a background in both journalism and game development - he's currently a developer, and has to worry about the financing side of things as an indie. So the process he's describing applies to him, and it's not purely about maximizing return on investment: it's also about not losing your shirt.
The point is really in the title: "RPGs should be better!"is not journalism: no hard questions are asked, no answers are reported. It's just yelling.
posted by billjings at 3:13 PM on August 14, 2023 [3 favorites]
If games have pretence to be treated as pieces of art or literature—and by now it’s clear they do—then an editorial process is part of that artistic production. You’d be disappointed as a critic, and a reader, if you bought a novel full of typos, with an invitation to update to a second edition.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 3:33 PM on August 14, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 3:33 PM on August 14, 2023 [3 favorites]
Paying for a game during "early access" sounds a lot like paying to do QA, which is a job that people are normally paid to do.
I mean, yes and no? Like for sure I agree that one of the caveats of playing a game in early access is you are knowingly dipping into an unfinished product, and depending on how unfinished it is and what kind of game it is and what you want out of your play experience that could be setting yourself up for a frustrating and dispiriting time. Pretty much everyone I know who plays video games regularly has some personal barometer for whether and when to touch something pre-1.0, ranging from "case by case, depends on the game" to "absolutely not, ever, i've been burn too many times before."
But also, random players are terrible at QA and aren't expected by developers to on average produce anything more useful than an automated stacktrace report if the game crashes or logs an error. If the only QA you have is early access players, you don't have QA at all.
In practice players during early access are almost universally a fuzzing and fan feedback resource for developers—they'll play the game until/unless playing it is not fun or is too annoyingly broken, and then they'll stop playing, and that's the whole thing. A tiny segment of those players will probably be much more hands on, filing active bug reports, hanging out in the development discord, etc, but even those aren't QA, those are just superfans.
I play a fair number of games in early access, and wait on a lot more; the ones I do play early are by and large indie things that have a really compelling mechanic that's already substantially in place, so you can have fun with the thing the game is doing even if it's still buggier/uglier than its meant to be at release, or isn't content-complete. And I rarely regret those, because even in that mid-development state games can be a lot of fun if the core bit is there, and it can be genuinely interesting to play through it as it iterates and experience the development process in action.
Baldur's Gate 3 is kind of a remarkable exception as a big budget game that (a) did an Early Access release that (b) I was willing to dip into. And that comes down to me loving Larian's previous work and having friends who were also excited about kicking the tires early together. And we had a great time playing the chunk of the games first act that was there from day one of early access, and then replaying it a few times over time as they added more classes and tweaked stuff. We also have very good stupid memories of cinematic and rendering bugs that were absolutely goofy and broken, which, that's not a game feature per se but it was definitely a positive group experience to watch two NPC's bodies merge like a transporter accident during a serious conversation.
posted by cortex at 3:36 PM on August 14, 2023 [13 favorites]
I mean, yes and no? Like for sure I agree that one of the caveats of playing a game in early access is you are knowingly dipping into an unfinished product, and depending on how unfinished it is and what kind of game it is and what you want out of your play experience that could be setting yourself up for a frustrating and dispiriting time. Pretty much everyone I know who plays video games regularly has some personal barometer for whether and when to touch something pre-1.0, ranging from "case by case, depends on the game" to "absolutely not, ever, i've been burn too many times before."
But also, random players are terrible at QA and aren't expected by developers to on average produce anything more useful than an automated stacktrace report if the game crashes or logs an error. If the only QA you have is early access players, you don't have QA at all.
In practice players during early access are almost universally a fuzzing and fan feedback resource for developers—they'll play the game until/unless playing it is not fun or is too annoyingly broken, and then they'll stop playing, and that's the whole thing. A tiny segment of those players will probably be much more hands on, filing active bug reports, hanging out in the development discord, etc, but even those aren't QA, those are just superfans.
I play a fair number of games in early access, and wait on a lot more; the ones I do play early are by and large indie things that have a really compelling mechanic that's already substantially in place, so you can have fun with the thing the game is doing even if it's still buggier/uglier than its meant to be at release, or isn't content-complete. And I rarely regret those, because even in that mid-development state games can be a lot of fun if the core bit is there, and it can be genuinely interesting to play through it as it iterates and experience the development process in action.
Baldur's Gate 3 is kind of a remarkable exception as a big budget game that (a) did an Early Access release that (b) I was willing to dip into. And that comes down to me loving Larian's previous work and having friends who were also excited about kicking the tires early together. And we had a great time playing the chunk of the games first act that was there from day one of early access, and then replaying it a few times over time as they added more classes and tweaked stuff. We also have very good stupid memories of cinematic and rendering bugs that were absolutely goofy and broken, which, that's not a game feature per se but it was definitely a positive group experience to watch two NPC's bodies merge like a transporter accident during a serious conversation.
posted by cortex at 3:36 PM on August 14, 2023 [13 favorites]
If games have pretence to be treated as pieces of art or literature—and by now it’s clear they do—then an editorial process is part of that artistic production. You’d be disappointed as a critic, and a reader, if you bought a novel full of typos, with an invitation to update to a second edition.
It points to the difference in the medium, though—we absolutely see aspects of that play out in, if not novels generally, in other things like cinema. Director's cuts, workprints, deleted scenes, etc. are all part of the universe of consumption of films as creative works; the difference is that the locus of control over the release of a finished work is almost always far upstream of the consumer, and these works almost always enter a stasis at the point of initial publication out a mix of distributional controls, IP/contract constraints, and a cultural convention that of course it's done when it is released and couldn't go otherwise.
Video games, for whatever reason, do not operate by that same constraint and convention—or, I should say, no longer do so; the advent of the Internet as means for post-release patches changed the world from when it had to be good when it went gold and got cut to disks or CDs or DVDs, because it was hard-to-impossible to reasonably distribute updates after the fact. Games weren't necessarily better tested in the 90s than they are now; they were just gonna stay broken if they shipped broken, and that was that.
If a movie comes out and its bad, it's gonna stay bad. If a novel comes out and it is pretty good but has some major plot problems, it's gonna have those forever. The effectively static and not-to-be-revised nature of canonical releases of some forms of art is a good incentive toward doing as much editorial work prior to release as possible, and that's not a bad thing, but it's also not the same thing as saying that a book that gets published with problems is stuck with those problems is an inherently good or noble or more genuinely artistic thing. It's just a practical fact of how that medium works in a commercial context. Contemporary video games has a plasticity to them not as available in most other media, for worse and for better. Bottom-line-chasing publishers and stakeholders abusing that plasticity is crappy, but that's an external issue to the plasticity itself which I think is one of the great strengths inherent to video games as a creative form.
posted by cortex at 3:48 PM on August 14, 2023 [13 favorites]
It points to the difference in the medium, though—we absolutely see aspects of that play out in, if not novels generally, in other things like cinema. Director's cuts, workprints, deleted scenes, etc. are all part of the universe of consumption of films as creative works; the difference is that the locus of control over the release of a finished work is almost always far upstream of the consumer, and these works almost always enter a stasis at the point of initial publication out a mix of distributional controls, IP/contract constraints, and a cultural convention that of course it's done when it is released and couldn't go otherwise.
Video games, for whatever reason, do not operate by that same constraint and convention—or, I should say, no longer do so; the advent of the Internet as means for post-release patches changed the world from when it had to be good when it went gold and got cut to disks or CDs or DVDs, because it was hard-to-impossible to reasonably distribute updates after the fact. Games weren't necessarily better tested in the 90s than they are now; they were just gonna stay broken if they shipped broken, and that was that.
If a movie comes out and its bad, it's gonna stay bad. If a novel comes out and it is pretty good but has some major plot problems, it's gonna have those forever. The effectively static and not-to-be-revised nature of canonical releases of some forms of art is a good incentive toward doing as much editorial work prior to release as possible, and that's not a bad thing, but it's also not the same thing as saying that a book that gets published with problems is stuck with those problems is an inherently good or noble or more genuinely artistic thing. It's just a practical fact of how that medium works in a commercial context. Contemporary video games has a plasticity to them not as available in most other media, for worse and for better. Bottom-line-chasing publishers and stakeholders abusing that plasticity is crappy, but that's an external issue to the plasticity itself which I think is one of the great strengths inherent to video games as a creative form.
posted by cortex at 3:48 PM on August 14, 2023 [13 favorites]
You’d be disappointed as a critic, and a reader, if you bought a novel full of typos, with an invitation to update to a second edition.
Or, conversely, perhaps devs would be willing to accept my AraGameBux as payment instead of local currency.
I promise AGB will be convertible into actual money Real Soon Now. Probably six months after the last stability patch, but I’m gonna pull a few all-nighters to see if I can connect to Reddit Moon crypto a bit sooner than that if we’re lucky.
posted by aramaic at 3:50 PM on August 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
Or, conversely, perhaps devs would be willing to accept my AraGameBux as payment instead of local currency.
I promise AGB will be convertible into actual money Real Soon Now. Probably six months after the last stability patch, but I’m gonna pull a few all-nighters to see if I can connect to Reddit Moon crypto a bit sooner than that if we’re lucky.
posted by aramaic at 3:50 PM on August 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
In the abstract, here’s a big part of it: Games release in imperfect states because devs either run out of money or the shareholders of their parent company mandate that a game must come out in a certain window (which devs have no control over). They run out of money trying to make the best game possible in the least amount of time. Devs rarely control their own budget and they are trying to make as much cool stuff as they can with the time they are allotted.
In short, for one reason or another, they are often forced to start selling the game in order to pay for the completion of the game. This has been done through DLC, patches, early access, and yes, even microstransactions for ages, because of rising expectations of triple-A, and because big studios are beholden to financial year results and reporting to their investors. Devs burn through their life force trying to make this happen and it’s upsetting to see this brought up with absolute incuriosity.
The long and the short of it for me though, is that these are business problems, they shouldn't be my problem. I sympathize with the workers that this can lead to shitty outcomes for them with deadlines, and actively dislike a lot of the work culture that apparently exists at gaming companies. But that doesn't mean I need to support or promote games that are broken on launch, or only work after 15 microtransactions. We can complain about that and hold the studios to better standards!
posted by Carillon at 3:51 PM on August 14, 2023 [3 favorites]
In short, for one reason or another, they are often forced to start selling the game in order to pay for the completion of the game. This has been done through DLC, patches, early access, and yes, even microstransactions for ages, because of rising expectations of triple-A, and because big studios are beholden to financial year results and reporting to their investors. Devs burn through their life force trying to make this happen and it’s upsetting to see this brought up with absolute incuriosity.
The long and the short of it for me though, is that these are business problems, they shouldn't be my problem. I sympathize with the workers that this can lead to shitty outcomes for them with deadlines, and actively dislike a lot of the work culture that apparently exists at gaming companies. But that doesn't mean I need to support or promote games that are broken on launch, or only work after 15 microtransactions. We can complain about that and hold the studios to better standards!
posted by Carillon at 3:51 PM on August 14, 2023 [3 favorites]
There's no good solution there; should Microsoft instead have forced all of the world's non-scientists to change how they handle dates?Sure there is: don’t irrecoverably modify data without user consent. If Excel had a prompt saying “Column L looks like a date, is it?” or if it stored the original value and always had a way to recover it, this would not be a problem. Unfortunately they didn’t think of that before shipping a lot of copies and chose not to fix it when creating the XLSX format because that was an exercise in pretending to be just open enough of a “standard” to get the regulators to drop it.
posted by adamsc at 4:06 PM on August 14, 2023 [8 favorites]
I just don't understand why this ONE product simply can't work like everything else
I've done business software development. I've done video game development. The latter is orders of magnitude more complex, pushes computers to their limits, costs less per unit, has a major sales lifespan of a few months at best, and even for things like sports games requires a huge investment for sequels.
Every shitty thing that gets rammed down consumers' throats under capitalism comes packaged with a just-so story about why this shitty thing is different, and the specific particulars of the market and the realities of production etc. mean that it actually has to be shitty for these very specific reasons and yes of course you deserve better than the crap those other crooks in those other businesses try to fob off on you, but gosh-darn-it, this is just how it has to be this time.
The thing that I don't get, and I really do say this with the utmost respect to you and the work that you do, is why in game development, workers so vigorously hew to the party line. I'm the first to tell you what a bunch of asshole crooks I work for, and if I just came off 6 months of "crunch time" I would be even more eager to.
Game Dev bosses are making billions of dollars selling broken rip-off products. They could make them better, but they choose not to because it would mean less profit. Acknowledging that is not an insult to the work that you and other skilled coders, artists, writers, and admin workers do.
posted by Krawczak at 4:25 PM on August 14, 2023 [10 favorites]
I've done business software development. I've done video game development. The latter is orders of magnitude more complex, pushes computers to their limits, costs less per unit, has a major sales lifespan of a few months at best, and even for things like sports games requires a huge investment for sequels.
Every shitty thing that gets rammed down consumers' throats under capitalism comes packaged with a just-so story about why this shitty thing is different, and the specific particulars of the market and the realities of production etc. mean that it actually has to be shitty for these very specific reasons and yes of course you deserve better than the crap those other crooks in those other businesses try to fob off on you, but gosh-darn-it, this is just how it has to be this time.
The thing that I don't get, and I really do say this with the utmost respect to you and the work that you do, is why in game development, workers so vigorously hew to the party line. I'm the first to tell you what a bunch of asshole crooks I work for, and if I just came off 6 months of "crunch time" I would be even more eager to.
Game Dev bosses are making billions of dollars selling broken rip-off products. They could make them better, but they choose not to because it would mean less profit. Acknowledging that is not an insult to the work that you and other skilled coders, artists, writers, and admin workers do.
posted by Krawczak at 4:25 PM on August 14, 2023 [10 favorites]
But if a game is entirely buggy on release then it's not a AAA game. I'd say it's an A game, at best.
It'd be like a Hollywood studio movie being released to theaters as a workprint, and promising the special effects and editing problems will be fixed in the next year or two.
Software is infinitely more complicated to QA than a film. The two really aren’t comparable at all (and most movies still don’t use much if any VFX, as a side point.)
posted by rhymedirective at 4:34 PM on August 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
It'd be like a Hollywood studio movie being released to theaters as a workprint, and promising the special effects and editing problems will be fixed in the next year or two.
Software is infinitely more complicated to QA than a film. The two really aren’t comparable at all (and most movies still don’t use much if any VFX, as a side point.)
posted by rhymedirective at 4:34 PM on August 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
I have a mental category called "Getting dating advice from Cary Grant." He actually gave advice, at least apocryphally, but since none of it was "be fucking Cary Grant" it usually left out the single most important thing. I could use Cary Grant's techniques but I probably won't have the same results!
Model your game dev practices on Baldur's Gate 3 is definitely in that category. People have pointed out why. I'd say, even as a player it's a lot different: You know this is going to sell a lot, so if you plop down $60 for an alpha and don't like the alpha, you're still walking away with a pre-order on a big AAA game you were excited about anyway that you know will be finished one day. Try it with an indie game and it may just peter out.
But that doesn't mean I need to support or promote games that are broken on launch, or only work after 15 microtransactions. We can complain about that and hold the studios to better standards!
"Hold the studios to better standards" is a sort of meaningless phrase.
If there's not funding, the funds won't get spent and the game will still get released buggy or not at all. Obviously you don't need to pay for it! I generally buy things years late or not at all. But if everyone did this, most of these games that eventually get fixed would have development stopped at the broken stage. I'm sort of free riding on the people sucked in by the early hype.
posted by mark k at 4:37 PM on August 14, 2023 [5 favorites]
Model your game dev practices on Baldur's Gate 3 is definitely in that category. People have pointed out why. I'd say, even as a player it's a lot different: You know this is going to sell a lot, so if you plop down $60 for an alpha and don't like the alpha, you're still walking away with a pre-order on a big AAA game you were excited about anyway that you know will be finished one day. Try it with an indie game and it may just peter out.
But that doesn't mean I need to support or promote games that are broken on launch, or only work after 15 microtransactions. We can complain about that and hold the studios to better standards!
"Hold the studios to better standards" is a sort of meaningless phrase.
If there's not funding, the funds won't get spent and the game will still get released buggy or not at all. Obviously you don't need to pay for it! I generally buy things years late or not at all. But if everyone did this, most of these games that eventually get fixed would have development stopped at the broken stage. I'm sort of free riding on the people sucked in by the early hype.
posted by mark k at 4:37 PM on August 14, 2023 [5 favorites]
If you aren't happy with the state of video games, don't buy them. Noone is "shoving them down your throat". But don't tell me every single company should be as good as the very best that have have spent decades to get the skills they have now. I'm trying to explain why "but business software does it" (which... they often don't) isn't a good analogy. And don't go with the "lazy devs" or "just getting rich" bullshit. Most companies are a failed game or two away from bankruptcy, and a failed game can happen for all sorts of reasons.
Am I trying to say game dev is perfect? Hell no. Are the companies perfect? Nope. But it's frustrating hearing people who have no idea what's involved act like they know best about how it works.
posted by aspo at 4:43 PM on August 14, 2023 [7 favorites]
Am I trying to say game dev is perfect? Hell no. Are the companies perfect? Nope. But it's frustrating hearing people who have no idea what's involved act like they know best about how it works.
posted by aspo at 4:43 PM on August 14, 2023 [7 favorites]
It'd be like a Hollywood studio movie being released to theaters as a workprint, and promising the special effects and editing problems will be fixed in the next year or two.
Universal famously issued an update to the film version of Cats six days after its release in theaters.
Universal famously issued an update to the film version of Cats six days after its release in theaters.
The film's original release contained numerous CGI errors and glitches, such as one scene in which Judi Dench's human hand, complete with her wedding ring, appears instead of Old Deuteronomy's cat paw. After poor reviews, Universal notified cinemas on opening day that an updated Digital Cinema Package with "some improved visual effects" would be available for download on 22 December, urging them to replace the current print as soon as possible. Studio executives and cinema owners said that the decision to release a modified version of a film already in wide release was "unheard of".posted by dephlogisticated at 4:51 PM on August 14, 2023 [8 favorites]
Also, what game is it that only works after 15 microtransactions?
posted by aspo at 4:52 PM on August 14, 2023
posted by aspo at 4:52 PM on August 14, 2023
The online RPG game that most blew me away for quality has been Mihoyo's Genshin Impact / Honkai Star Rail.
Flawless day 1 global simultaneous launch with no lag, bugs or downtime across 4 voiced dubs / dozens of text translated localizations in over 150 countries. #1 most watched game on Twitch on launch day.
$100 mil development and marketing budget, but is generating a steady $2 billion in revenues per year since launch.
(Compare this to Cyberpunk with an over $300 mil development and marketing budget and which launched as a hot mess, and that was even an offline game. I estimate revenues of $800 mil over 20 million copies sold)
Major patch cycle every 6 weeks involving addition of new explorable environments, quests, and other activities. Downtime for patch deployment is 6 hours, with a commitment for player compensation per hour of additional downtime. In the several years of playing their games I've not ever seen them have to pay out downtime compensation.... in fact I've not heard of any unexpected downtime of their online servers, ever.
Like, Genshin / Honkai Star Rail online servers are more stable than the banking system, which seem to have some several hour disastrous downtime in the news every few years where merchants can't accept payments.
Only minor bugs have been found (which personally I've never even detected on my own) - and they give out player compensation for every bug detected and fixed.
I mean, compare this to most online games with patch downtimes, where dev's seem to set a 6 hour deadline but sometimes end up taking the game offline for 12-24 hours due to "unexpected issues" or where games have huge queues in the first few days just to get in, or are generally just a buggy mess for the first few weeks. These two games from Mihoyo really set a new standard for me that has been extremely difficult for the rest of the industry to match.
posted by xdvesper at 4:53 PM on August 14, 2023 [3 favorites]
Flawless day 1 global simultaneous launch with no lag, bugs or downtime across 4 voiced dubs / dozens of text translated localizations in over 150 countries. #1 most watched game on Twitch on launch day.
$100 mil development and marketing budget, but is generating a steady $2 billion in revenues per year since launch.
(Compare this to Cyberpunk with an over $300 mil development and marketing budget and which launched as a hot mess, and that was even an offline game. I estimate revenues of $800 mil over 20 million copies sold)
Major patch cycle every 6 weeks involving addition of new explorable environments, quests, and other activities. Downtime for patch deployment is 6 hours, with a commitment for player compensation per hour of additional downtime. In the several years of playing their games I've not ever seen them have to pay out downtime compensation.... in fact I've not heard of any unexpected downtime of their online servers, ever.
Like, Genshin / Honkai Star Rail online servers are more stable than the banking system, which seem to have some several hour disastrous downtime in the news every few years where merchants can't accept payments.
Only minor bugs have been found (which personally I've never even detected on my own) - and they give out player compensation for every bug detected and fixed.
I mean, compare this to most online games with patch downtimes, where dev's seem to set a 6 hour deadline but sometimes end up taking the game offline for 12-24 hours due to "unexpected issues" or where games have huge queues in the first few days just to get in, or are generally just a buggy mess for the first few weeks. These two games from Mihoyo really set a new standard for me that has been extremely difficult for the rest of the industry to match.
posted by xdvesper at 4:53 PM on August 14, 2023 [3 favorites]
Re: Excel vs. Genetics, if anyone's curious: "Gene name errors are widespread in the scientific literature"
posted by nickzoic at 5:04 PM on August 14, 2023
posted by nickzoic at 5:04 PM on August 14, 2023
And they had to take the buttholes out as well...
Having written software for an approved medical device, perfection was a thing. It had to work right or someone could die. I never let go of that concept. And once we got the box talking to the computer, that was code I didn't mess with. Luckily, we took out the EKG functions, because that was just a lawsuit waiting to happen. So then it was just dealing with the data transmission to the electronic medical record system, and usually, that was the interface provider's issues, not ours. I quit that job because they wanted me to become an independent contractor, and that totally would have opened me up to personal liability. NOPE!
And as stated above, games are just so complex. Can't really imagine how things like World of Warcraft ever worked properly. So much code, so much timing, so much infrastructure needed to make it work.
And someone posted a reference to the Owlbear orbital strike in I think the free thread, which is funny as hell.
But, corporate capitalism, am I right. If these coders and QA people weren't such sucky GenX slackers, things would be better!
posted by Windopaene at 5:11 PM on August 14, 2023 [3 favorites]
Having written software for an approved medical device, perfection was a thing. It had to work right or someone could die. I never let go of that concept. And once we got the box talking to the computer, that was code I didn't mess with. Luckily, we took out the EKG functions, because that was just a lawsuit waiting to happen. So then it was just dealing with the data transmission to the electronic medical record system, and usually, that was the interface provider's issues, not ours. I quit that job because they wanted me to become an independent contractor, and that totally would have opened me up to personal liability. NOPE!
And as stated above, games are just so complex. Can't really imagine how things like World of Warcraft ever worked properly. So much code, so much timing, so much infrastructure needed to make it work.
And someone posted a reference to the Owlbear orbital strike in I think the free thread, which is funny as hell.
But, corporate capitalism, am I right. If these coders and QA people weren't such sucky GenX slackers, things would be better!
posted by Windopaene at 5:11 PM on August 14, 2023 [3 favorites]
The two really aren’t comparable at all (and most movies still don’t use much if any VFX, as a side point.)
Not to derail too much, but what?!?
Ticket To Paradise (2022), a romantic comedy starring George Clooney and Julia Roberts, literally inspired by Howard Hawks movies of the 1940s. The most recent movie I could find with the least obvious need for VFX. No action, no history, no superheroes, nothing fantastic.
It has 60 VFX shots from just this one vendor. Which is more VFX shots than Industrial Light & Magic did for Jurassic Park.
posted by Superilla at 5:24 PM on August 14, 2023 [5 favorites]
Not to derail too much, but what?!?
Ticket To Paradise (2022), a romantic comedy starring George Clooney and Julia Roberts, literally inspired by Howard Hawks movies of the 1940s. The most recent movie I could find with the least obvious need for VFX. No action, no history, no superheroes, nothing fantastic.
It has 60 VFX shots from just this one vendor. Which is more VFX shots than Industrial Light & Magic did for Jurassic Park.
posted by Superilla at 5:24 PM on August 14, 2023 [5 favorites]
gently, pre-emptively pushing back against players taking that excitement [about Baldur's Gate 3] and using it to apply criticism or a "raised standard" to RPGs going forward”
Pff, it’s no Planescape: Torment.
posted by Artw at 5:29 PM on August 14, 2023 [7 favorites]
Pff, it’s no Planescape: Torment.
posted by Artw at 5:29 PM on August 14, 2023 [7 favorites]
Not to derail too much, but what?!?
I’ve been getting about 4 hours of sleep a night for 3 weeks; what I meant is that most movies ever made don’t include much VFX.
posted by rhymedirective at 5:40 PM on August 14, 2023
I’ve been getting about 4 hours of sleep a night for 3 weeks; what I meant is that most movies ever made don’t include much VFX.
posted by rhymedirective at 5:40 PM on August 14, 2023
FWIW having made a software or two in my time, albeit in a much less flashy and close to the metal field, I can say that immediately upon launch of such a software you will almost immediately have cause to say “a user is trying to run it on a what??” and “a user tried to do what???” and immediately be scrambling to fix whatever weird thing comes out of that.
posted by Artw at 5:59 PM on August 14, 2023 [6 favorites]
posted by Artw at 5:59 PM on August 14, 2023 [6 favorites]
If business software were released as buggy as some AAA games are, those companies would go bankrupt.
Business software, especially the low volume stuff, is incredibly buggy. Even stuff that is life critical is littered with WTF sort of errors.
Mass market games are like 1000x better because bugs can kill the release and the investment (no support contracts), while business software people will keep plugging away at it and building workarounds to get things done since just not using it is often not an option.
posted by jmauro at 5:59 PM on August 14, 2023 [3 favorites]
Business software, especially the low volume stuff, is incredibly buggy. Even stuff that is life critical is littered with WTF sort of errors.
Mass market games are like 1000x better because bugs can kill the release and the investment (no support contracts), while business software people will keep plugging away at it and building workarounds to get things done since just not using it is often not an option.
posted by jmauro at 5:59 PM on August 14, 2023 [3 favorites]
The thing that I don't get, and I really do say this with the utmost respect to you and the work that you do, is why in game development, workers so vigorously hew to the party line. I'm the first to tell you what a bunch of asshole crooks I work for, and if I just came off 6 months of "crunch time" I would be even more eager to.
There are a lot of former-video game devs who left the industry and don't defend it.
posted by ryoshu at 6:06 PM on August 14, 2023 [8 favorites]
There are a lot of former-video game devs who left the industry and don't defend it.
posted by ryoshu at 6:06 PM on August 14, 2023 [8 favorites]
Yeah, that's 100% survivor bias and I say that as a guy who left the games industry. If you last more than a few years it's because you got in with a good team early or you're bought in on the dream job myth and you're terrified of burning bridges.
posted by Reyturner at 6:17 PM on August 14, 2023 [6 favorites]
posted by Reyturner at 6:17 PM on August 14, 2023 [6 favorites]
Aren't the "gamers" themselves to blame? They bitch and moan about these shitty release practices but then buy the shitty releases in droves anyway, generating staggering profits for these companies. Why would the publishers give a shit about stopping these practices if they make bank regardless? If people really are fed up with buggy releases, stop buying any AAA games until they can show they're being released in a complete form.
posted by star gentle uterus at 6:21 PM on August 14, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by star gentle uterus at 6:21 PM on August 14, 2023 [1 favorite]
If people really are fed up with buggy releases, stop buying any AAA games until they can show they're being released in a complete form.
This is literally the fear presented by the first article that started the chain that resulted in this post. It's a developer pleading for people to not do this, to accept the status quo, for fear of market collapse.
posted by hippybear at 6:24 PM on August 14, 2023 [1 favorite]
This is literally the fear presented by the first article that started the chain that resulted in this post. It's a developer pleading for people to not do this, to accept the status quo, for fear of market collapse.
posted by hippybear at 6:24 PM on August 14, 2023 [1 favorite]
Right, and that's ridiculous.
Let the market collapse if it can't put out decent products. Carillon is right upthread:
The long and the short of it for me though, is that these are business problems, they shouldn't be my problem.
Sorry to hear about the conditions these games are developed under, but I also don't and shouldn't care. Either the game is buggy crap or it's not, and it's absurd to put responsibility on the end consumers to keep propping things up.
Maybe these awful conditions persist in large part because gamers support the status quo. Maybe a market collapse is exactly the kick in the ass the industry needs to reform when the money dries up.
posted by star gentle uterus at 6:29 PM on August 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
Let the market collapse if it can't put out decent products. Carillon is right upthread:
The long and the short of it for me though, is that these are business problems, they shouldn't be my problem.
Sorry to hear about the conditions these games are developed under, but I also don't and shouldn't care. Either the game is buggy crap or it's not, and it's absurd to put responsibility on the end consumers to keep propping things up.
Maybe these awful conditions persist in large part because gamers support the status quo. Maybe a market collapse is exactly the kick in the ass the industry needs to reform when the money dries up.
posted by star gentle uterus at 6:29 PM on August 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
Sorry to hear about the conditions these games are developed under, but I also don't and shouldn't care.
A little class solidarity might help with that.
posted by mhoye at 6:58 PM on August 14, 2023 [3 favorites]
A little class solidarity might help with that.
posted by mhoye at 6:58 PM on August 14, 2023 [3 favorites]
Right, right, we should vote with our dollars and let the invisible hand of the market guide our collective fate, and everything will work out. We're just not consumering properly, that's why the products offered to us suck.
If I just didn't buy any product that is shittier than it has to be because of billionaire profits, I'd live in a cave. I'm not a "gamer," I play probably 30-50 hours of video games a year, on average. I don't have a dog in this fight beyond wanting the products that I pay good money for to flippin' work, and I won't let CEOs or their running dogs gaslight me into thinking this is a crazy desire.
posted by Krawczak at 6:59 PM on August 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
If I just didn't buy any product that is shittier than it has to be because of billionaire profits, I'd live in a cave. I'm not a "gamer," I play probably 30-50 hours of video games a year, on average. I don't have a dog in this fight beyond wanting the products that I pay good money for to flippin' work, and I won't let CEOs or their running dogs gaslight me into thinking this is a crazy desire.
posted by Krawczak at 6:59 PM on August 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
A little class solidarity might help with that.
MetaFilter normally: This industry is exploiting its workers by forcing them to turn out inferior products under terrible conditions, we should not support this.
MetaFilter, this thread: We must continue to support an industry doing the above, that is class solidarity.
posted by star gentle uterus at 7:06 PM on August 14, 2023 [8 favorites]
MetaFilter normally: This industry is exploiting its workers by forcing them to turn out inferior products under terrible conditions, we should not support this.
MetaFilter, this thread: We must continue to support an industry doing the above, that is class solidarity.
posted by star gentle uterus at 7:06 PM on August 14, 2023 [8 favorites]
I don't have a dog in this fight beyond wanting the products that I pay good money for to flippin' work
Sure, but I gently suggest that to just keep doing what's currently being done and hoping that somehow things will change will not result in your stated desire.
It truly is bizarre that MetaFilter is usually pretty big on the power of boycotts and other consumer collective actions, but apparently this is unthinkable madness when it comes to their video games.
posted by star gentle uterus at 7:08 PM on August 14, 2023 [1 favorite]
Sure, but I gently suggest that to just keep doing what's currently being done and hoping that somehow things will change will not result in your stated desire.
It truly is bizarre that MetaFilter is usually pretty big on the power of boycotts and other consumer collective actions, but apparently this is unthinkable madness when it comes to their video games.
posted by star gentle uterus at 7:08 PM on August 14, 2023 [1 favorite]
It truly is bizarre that MetaFilter is usually pretty big on the power of boycotts and other consumer collective actions, but apparently this is unthinkable madness when it comes to their video games.
I'm having a hard time reconciling this argument with your position that you shouldn't have to care about the conditions of workers.
posted by mhoye at 7:11 PM on August 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
I'm having a hard time reconciling this argument with your position that you shouldn't have to care about the conditions of workers.
posted by mhoye at 7:11 PM on August 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
The online RPG game that most blew me away for quality has been Mihoyo's Genshin Impact / Honkai Star Rail.
You do realize that you are lauding a gatcha game, right? The genre that is the poster child for abusive microtransactions (though to be fair, they are one of the better companies in that space with regards to that.) Also, before you laud them for their voice work, do realize that they've been stiffing their voice talent. So yeah, I have a problem with an assessment that takes a superficial look at the consumer experience without actually looking at what's happening underneath.
This comes back to an excellent point that cortex made earlier, which is that abusive industry practices are orthogonal to the difficulty of making games. Remember, one of the companies most famous for polish in gaming was fucking Blizzard Entertainment, and we all know now how much of an abusive dumpster fire the company was behind the curtains.
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:58 PM on August 14, 2023 [8 favorites]
You do realize that you are lauding a gatcha game, right? The genre that is the poster child for abusive microtransactions (though to be fair, they are one of the better companies in that space with regards to that.) Also, before you laud them for their voice work, do realize that they've been stiffing their voice talent. So yeah, I have a problem with an assessment that takes a superficial look at the consumer experience without actually looking at what's happening underneath.
This comes back to an excellent point that cortex made earlier, which is that abusive industry practices are orthogonal to the difficulty of making games. Remember, one of the companies most famous for polish in gaming was fucking Blizzard Entertainment, and we all know now how much of an abusive dumpster fire the company was behind the curtains.
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:58 PM on August 14, 2023 [8 favorites]
So... Never did AAA, but did plenty of game dev. Done plenty of corporate/business software as well. The best I can tell:
1) Video games are the most immersive media experiences we have (natch). It was immersive when they were text adventures, they are immersive as they become BG3. Love books. Love music. Love live theater and movies and plays and watching people playing in parks. Video games are an order of magnitude more engaging. Depending.
2) People are passionate about making things. And some people - abusive people - are greedy to take advantage of the people who are passionate about making things. So you get industries famous for the abuse. It differs in context if not content.
3) People will identify with the things they love. The things they engage with, and the things they create.
Choose to participate. Choose to produce. Choose to engage as you will. As long as you will.
BG3 is amazing. Hope the devs are okay.
posted by ryoshu at 8:11 PM on August 14, 2023
1) Video games are the most immersive media experiences we have (natch). It was immersive when they were text adventures, they are immersive as they become BG3. Love books. Love music. Love live theater and movies and plays and watching people playing in parks. Video games are an order of magnitude more engaging. Depending.
2) People are passionate about making things. And some people - abusive people - are greedy to take advantage of the people who are passionate about making things. So you get industries famous for the abuse. It differs in context if not content.
3) People will identify with the things they love. The things they engage with, and the things they create.
Choose to participate. Choose to produce. Choose to engage as you will. As long as you will.
BG3 is amazing. Hope the devs are okay.
posted by ryoshu at 8:11 PM on August 14, 2023
Paying for a game during "early access" sounds a lot like paying to do QA, which is a job that people are normally paid to do.
The article makes a good point about this but doesn’t fully extend it in the other direction - in the same way that early access means BGIII was not actually brand new at launch, it seems it’s become the norm for games to be implicitly early access. If you are okay with some bugs, you buy them at launch. If you are not, you wait.
posted by atoxyl at 8:40 PM on August 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
The article makes a good point about this but doesn’t fully extend it in the other direction - in the same way that early access means BGIII was not actually brand new at launch, it seems it’s become the norm for games to be implicitly early access. If you are okay with some bugs, you buy them at launch. If you are not, you wait.
posted by atoxyl at 8:40 PM on August 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
Echoing cortex, I played a lot of the BG3 early access with friends and the bugginess and ease of misclicking into a lethal encounter (again and again) somehow made for an incredible gaming experience. (I also remember fondly a bug in the Frozen Throne where shift clicking a tome let you use its ability multiple times, so people would send a Bladerunner across the map and spam clicks as he ran towards the tome for +1000 agility.) That being said, I'm sure psychologically I was happier knowing it was early access than having paid the same amount for a fully released game.
posted by little onion at 8:55 PM on August 14, 2023
posted by little onion at 8:55 PM on August 14, 2023
NoxAeternum - in the link you provided, they make a statement that the issue is with the recording studio, not Hoyoverse / Mihoyo.
The VA in question also confirms that Hoyoverse is not at fault and that they immediately stepped in to resolve the issue once they found out.
If anything this speaks to how responsive the studio has been. I heard that they basically pressured the recording studio into making payments immediately otherwise they would be dropped from any future work.
On the gacha derail, I actually like games with microtransactions because they are less luck-based than Western RPG games.
For example in Destiny 2, at launch, I wanted the Sins of the Past rocket launcher from the first raid. It was literally just luck - I raided every week and never got it. My luck is bad I guess. Even if I wanted to pay money for it, there was no option to.
In Genshin or Star Rail? Takes 160 pulls to guarantee any character you want. You could hit that number in about 1 week of play at launch (with the boost of free pulls you get playing through the story) or, later on, you could get that in about 2 months of saving from regular activities. No randomness involved at all. And hey, if you want to pay money for it instead of saving for 2 months, you can too!
While playing Destiny 2 or some other Western games felt like just a total casino. I just feel less frustrated by Asian gacha games in general, and I have a strong commitment to never ever buying their premium currency in the game and just challenging myself to get by with the resources available. Same thing I felt when comparing Lost Ark versus World of Warcraft, where in LA you just made steady progress each week towards levelling up your gear while in WOW you just had to hope you hit the jackpot for rare raid loot.
posted by xdvesper at 9:52 PM on August 14, 2023
The VA in question also confirms that Hoyoverse is not at fault and that they immediately stepped in to resolve the issue once they found out.
If anything this speaks to how responsive the studio has been. I heard that they basically pressured the recording studio into making payments immediately otherwise they would be dropped from any future work.
On the gacha derail, I actually like games with microtransactions because they are less luck-based than Western RPG games.
For example in Destiny 2, at launch, I wanted the Sins of the Past rocket launcher from the first raid. It was literally just luck - I raided every week and never got it. My luck is bad I guess. Even if I wanted to pay money for it, there was no option to.
In Genshin or Star Rail? Takes 160 pulls to guarantee any character you want. You could hit that number in about 1 week of play at launch (with the boost of free pulls you get playing through the story) or, later on, you could get that in about 2 months of saving from regular activities. No randomness involved at all. And hey, if you want to pay money for it instead of saving for 2 months, you can too!
While playing Destiny 2 or some other Western games felt like just a total casino. I just feel less frustrated by Asian gacha games in general, and I have a strong commitment to never ever buying their premium currency in the game and just challenging myself to get by with the resources available. Same thing I felt when comparing Lost Ark versus World of Warcraft, where in LA you just made steady progress each week towards levelling up your gear while in WOW you just had to hope you hit the jackpot for rare raid loot.
posted by xdvesper at 9:52 PM on August 14, 2023
Same thing I felt when comparing Lost Ark versus World of Warcraft, where in LA you just made steady progress each week towards levelling up your gear while in WOW you just had to hope you hit the jackpot for rare raid loot.
This is because WoW has shitty leadership that actually thinks deterministic systems are good game design (and whose attitude has been infectious in the West.)
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:02 PM on August 14, 2023
This is because WoW has shitty leadership that actually thinks deterministic systems are good game design (and whose attitude has been infectious in the West.)
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:02 PM on August 14, 2023
My thoughts on this are nuanced conflicted not fully formed because I don't care about AAA action RPGs that aren't FFXIV, and play more open-source indie roguelikes and tactics games, but I did sum up the 2017 version of those thoughts as a twitter bot that's a stereotypical gamer demanding more features every 3 hours:
GameDesignXpert on Nitter (x)
More information on BotWiki; Tracery source code on CBDQ
Tellingly, of all my bots it's the one mistaken for a human being most often. People have had entire conversations with varying degrees of amusement or anger at it.
It's been defunct since Melon Husk killed Cheap Bots, Done Quick!, and I've yet to migrate it onto botsin.space to join its siblings, but apparently the lessons from it haven't been learned. In the meantime, hitting the 🔄 button on the CBDQ page lets you see fresh tweets from it.
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 11:05 PM on August 14, 2023 [1 favorite]
GameDesignXpert on Nitter (x)
More information on BotWiki; Tracery source code on CBDQ
Tellingly, of all my bots it's the one mistaken for a human being most often. People have had entire conversations with varying degrees of amusement or anger at it.
It's been defunct since Melon Husk killed Cheap Bots, Done Quick!, and I've yet to migrate it onto botsin.space to join its siblings, but apparently the lessons from it haven't been learned. In the meantime, hitting the 🔄 button on the CBDQ page lets you see fresh tweets from it.
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 11:05 PM on August 14, 2023 [1 favorite]
There's no good solution there; should Microsoft instead have forced all of the world's non-scientists to change how they handle dates?
The good solution is for people to select their cells, hit "format" and select the data type they are putting into the cells from the menu, rather than letting Excel do its best guess. Excel's best guess will indeed always be wrong for some people some of the time at a minimum, but you can just like, tell Excel that you're feeding it a bunch of strings, not dates, before you paste in your gene names or whatever. Hell, you can even do it after you've noticed Excel's best guess being wrong.
posted by Dysk at 11:17 PM on August 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
The good solution is for people to select their cells, hit "format" and select the data type they are putting into the cells from the menu, rather than letting Excel do its best guess. Excel's best guess will indeed always be wrong for some people some of the time at a minimum, but you can just like, tell Excel that you're feeding it a bunch of strings, not dates, before you paste in your gene names or whatever. Hell, you can even do it after you've noticed Excel's best guess being wrong.
posted by Dysk at 11:17 PM on August 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
Paying for a game during "early access" sounds a lot like paying to do QA, which is a job that people are normally paid to do.
Masahiro Sakurai (Smash Bros. lead) has a recent video that coincidentally talks about this: for certain games, the combinatorial explosion of testing everything becomes prohibitive. For these kinds of games, early access has been seen as a solution - Supergiant Games, for instance, credits Hades' excellent balance to its lengthy early access period. What makes the question so fraught is that, absolutely, you're asking people to pay for a thing that you acknowledge is broken and bad, with only the promise that it'll improve over time; but also, there have been enough success stories with the model that it's hard to dismiss it outright, particularly from smaller developers. The line between 'sharecropping' and 'co-creation' can be pretty blurry.
posted by Merus at 1:15 AM on August 15, 2023 [1 favorite]
Masahiro Sakurai (Smash Bros. lead) has a recent video that coincidentally talks about this: for certain games, the combinatorial explosion of testing everything becomes prohibitive. For these kinds of games, early access has been seen as a solution - Supergiant Games, for instance, credits Hades' excellent balance to its lengthy early access period. What makes the question so fraught is that, absolutely, you're asking people to pay for a thing that you acknowledge is broken and bad, with only the promise that it'll improve over time; but also, there have been enough success stories with the model that it's hard to dismiss it outright, particularly from smaller developers. The line between 'sharecropping' and 'co-creation' can be pretty blurry.
posted by Merus at 1:15 AM on August 15, 2023 [1 favorite]
Paying for a game during "early access" sounds a lot like paying to do QA, which is a job that people are normally paid to do.
I've not worked in games for a decade and change and while I do agree that QA should be more automated (and respected), there's just no way to compare releasing a game (even in early access) and staffing up a QA team and giving them time and resource to achieve the same results.
The team behind Baldur's Gate 3 put out a message after the opening weekend that the players put in a collective 1225 years of playing the game in the first weekend. I appreciate it's a game launch, not early access etc. etc. but the magnitude of scale of a dedicated QA team and game being out for just a few days is immense.
posted by slimepuppy at 3:17 AM on August 15, 2023 [1 favorite]
I've not worked in games for a decade and change and while I do agree that QA should be more automated (and respected), there's just no way to compare releasing a game (even in early access) and staffing up a QA team and giving them time and resource to achieve the same results.
The team behind Baldur's Gate 3 put out a message after the opening weekend that the players put in a collective 1225 years of playing the game in the first weekend. I appreciate it's a game launch, not early access etc. etc. but the magnitude of scale of a dedicated QA team and game being out for just a few days is immense.
posted by slimepuppy at 3:17 AM on August 15, 2023 [1 favorite]
From up near the top: If business software were released as buggy as some AAA games are, those companies would go bankrupt.
As a user of Bentley CAD products, oh, how I wish, how I wish this were the case.
posted by mellow seas at 7:15 AM on August 15, 2023 [2 favorites]
As a user of Bentley CAD products, oh, how I wish, how I wish this were the case.
posted by mellow seas at 7:15 AM on August 15, 2023 [2 favorites]
Yeah the truth about business software is you aren't allowed to rage-quit it without literally quitting your job. Business software is so much more ass than video games because its got a locked-in playerbase. I'd love to see Atlassian get Jira and Confluence up on Steam just so we could see what bad reviews really look like, and that's a AAA contender that actually has to deal with a degree of public perception. The custom in-house data entry tools I use every day are the worst Souls-like ever.
posted by cortex at 7:41 AM on August 15, 2023 [5 favorites]
posted by cortex at 7:41 AM on August 15, 2023 [5 favorites]
As a user of Bentley CAD products, oh, how I wish, how I wish this were the case.
As a user of Avid products, I laughed at this one. Not business software exactly but still.
posted by Evstar at 7:51 AM on August 15, 2023
As a user of Avid products, I laughed at this one. Not business software exactly but still.
posted by Evstar at 7:51 AM on August 15, 2023
It's funny that the IGN video holds up Elden Ring as an example of a AAA studio "doing it right," because Elden Ring was still pretty buggy on release, if less so than a typical Bethesda open-world RPG. Just go look at that game's speedruns, which, like most speedruns, show what a rickety mess a beautiful and well made computer game really is. More importantly, shortly before Elden Ring's release, From Software had to deal with a totally catastrophic remote-code-execution bug on the PC ports of its older games by shutting down all their multiplayer servers for months, disabling critical features of the single-player games thanks to the idiosyncratic way the Souls games handle multiplayer play.
Even the older games that no one is thinking about can suffer from terrible bugs, even from studios with abundant time, labor power, and money, and it's fortunate for everyone involved that From Software did have the time, labor, and money to fix the problem and prevent hackers from bricking your computer or holding it for ransom. The battle against unintended program behavior never really ends until the company moves on and people stop playing.
If I just didn't buy any product that is shittier than it has to be because of billionaire profits, I'd live in a cave. I'm not a "gamer," I play probably 30-50 hours of video games a year, on average. I don't have a dog in this fight beyond wanting the products that I pay good money for to flippin' work, and I won't let CEOs or their running dogs gaslight me into thinking this is a crazy desire.
Going back to the observation about speedrunning Elden Ring, someone who only plays 30-50 hours of video games a year probably doesn't recognize how buggy your typical game is or can be if pushed in the right way. Expecting completely perfect, bug-free play on release to the general market, or even years later, is, in fact, unreasonable, especially when the products in question do mostly work as intended, and the exceptions, like the latest Battlefield game, are roundly criticized and made fun of for their shoddy workmanship. Games that are outright broken and unplayable aren't that common, and it's even less common for them to remain so now that developers can send patches through purchasing clients like Steam and GOG.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 8:48 AM on August 15, 2023 [2 favorites]
Even the older games that no one is thinking about can suffer from terrible bugs, even from studios with abundant time, labor power, and money, and it's fortunate for everyone involved that From Software did have the time, labor, and money to fix the problem and prevent hackers from bricking your computer or holding it for ransom. The battle against unintended program behavior never really ends until the company moves on and people stop playing.
If I just didn't buy any product that is shittier than it has to be because of billionaire profits, I'd live in a cave. I'm not a "gamer," I play probably 30-50 hours of video games a year, on average. I don't have a dog in this fight beyond wanting the products that I pay good money for to flippin' work, and I won't let CEOs or their running dogs gaslight me into thinking this is a crazy desire.
Going back to the observation about speedrunning Elden Ring, someone who only plays 30-50 hours of video games a year probably doesn't recognize how buggy your typical game is or can be if pushed in the right way. Expecting completely perfect, bug-free play on release to the general market, or even years later, is, in fact, unreasonable, especially when the products in question do mostly work as intended, and the exceptions, like the latest Battlefield game, are roundly criticized and made fun of for their shoddy workmanship. Games that are outright broken and unplayable aren't that common, and it's even less common for them to remain so now that developers can send patches through purchasing clients like Steam and GOG.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 8:48 AM on August 15, 2023 [2 favorites]
I've... Seen things... You people wouldn't believe.
Competing APIs in TensorFlow following the "simplification" of eager mode. Botched client-side database updates on millions of phones. I've seen backfills of logs analysis that took days to complete. All those blunders will be lost in time... Like kanji in a Matrix screensaver.
posted by kaibutsu at 8:49 AM on August 15, 2023 [3 favorites]
Competing APIs in TensorFlow following the "simplification" of eager mode. Botched client-side database updates on millions of phones. I've seen backfills of logs analysis that took days to complete. All those blunders will be lost in time... Like kanji in a Matrix screensaver.
posted by kaibutsu at 8:49 AM on August 15, 2023 [3 favorites]
I'm not a "gamer" but I do play video games occasionally (verrry occasionally), and I'm perpetually baffled by the way people seem to talk and think about the games industry in a just completely different way than other industries.A couple asides: the linguistic conflation of owners/managers versus workers is also very much a thing in agriculture. Farm owners are just called "farmers", and the people that actually work in the fields are... not called.
For one thing, what is going on with the equivocation of the word "developers" to conflate workers and management? Like, people make criticisms that quite obviously (to me) target management, but the responses to those criticisms seem to be righteously defending the actual coders themselves.
Also, the intermediation between developer-workers and players is not just done by developer-companies; there's also publishers in the mix (especially in the zone between indies and AAA). Each level of that intermediation is another place for people to transmit or anticipate market-driven pressures to those they have some gatekeeping or control over.
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 8:55 AM on August 15, 2023 [2 favorites]
If business software were released as buggy as some AAA games are, those companies would go bankrupt.
Eh, I was continually shocked for the first decade of my career in IT at how buggy brand name "enterprise" software is, and how it's just accepted as the way things are. When they all have problems, and switching to a new ERP costs millions/billions, a few major bugs aren't going to bankrupt SAP or Oracle or Peoplsoft.
posted by mrgoldenbrown at 9:42 AM on August 15, 2023 [4 favorites]
Eh, I was continually shocked for the first decade of my career in IT at how buggy brand name "enterprise" software is, and how it's just accepted as the way things are. When they all have problems, and switching to a new ERP costs millions/billions, a few major bugs aren't going to bankrupt SAP or Oracle or Peoplsoft.
posted by mrgoldenbrown at 9:42 AM on August 15, 2023 [4 favorites]
If the only QA you have is early access players, you don't have QA at all.
yeah, corpos under capitalism don't value or understand the value of QA testing whatsoever. I say this as QA in a big tech company.
most tech firms are going these days with shift left efforts which means you reduce or completely get rid of a QA department in favor of developers 'focusing on quality' ie relying heavily on unit/integration automated testing and user input/feedback with little to no manual tests
is this a good practice? no - like you said, you don't have QA at all if this is the philosophy you rely on. QAs, QEs, and TEs do a lot of dedicated, hands-on work that requires a lot of context and which is inclusive of automations and internal tooling that enables better, more thorough testing and coverage. but will that extra bit of quality keep someone from purchasing a video game? no, because not even disastrous launches full of bugs like Cyberpunk or Pokemon kept people from purchasing the game, only possibly from finishing it. so when devs have to push deadlines back, the first thing that goes even if you have good QA is time for regression tests. for me that means cutting out testing in Firefox and Edge since that only represents ~10% of our use cases. of course 10% of our users is still something in the mid five figures but who cares, really, when 90% of the revenue is looked after?
I'm sure BG3 had QA testers - any game that is that complex released with a minimum of bugs could not have been without extensive, painstaking testing of so many instances. I'm also sure that three years of a public beta also surfaced a ton of info that could also have been caught by adding on more QA testers but the business proposition of 1) having people pay you so that you can then 2) collect data on their play and 3) eliminate the need for QA resources is just a business prospect that fits all too well with how corps think. you can think the world of Larian but we live under capitalism and they'll operate like any other firm when it comes to the extraction of surplus value for their founders and owners
posted by paimapi at 11:23 AM on August 15, 2023 [1 favorite]
yeah, corpos under capitalism don't value or understand the value of QA testing whatsoever. I say this as QA in a big tech company.
most tech firms are going these days with shift left efforts which means you reduce or completely get rid of a QA department in favor of developers 'focusing on quality' ie relying heavily on unit/integration automated testing and user input/feedback with little to no manual tests
is this a good practice? no - like you said, you don't have QA at all if this is the philosophy you rely on. QAs, QEs, and TEs do a lot of dedicated, hands-on work that requires a lot of context and which is inclusive of automations and internal tooling that enables better, more thorough testing and coverage. but will that extra bit of quality keep someone from purchasing a video game? no, because not even disastrous launches full of bugs like Cyberpunk or Pokemon kept people from purchasing the game, only possibly from finishing it. so when devs have to push deadlines back, the first thing that goes even if you have good QA is time for regression tests. for me that means cutting out testing in Firefox and Edge since that only represents ~10% of our use cases. of course 10% of our users is still something in the mid five figures but who cares, really, when 90% of the revenue is looked after?
I'm sure BG3 had QA testers - any game that is that complex released with a minimum of bugs could not have been without extensive, painstaking testing of so many instances. I'm also sure that three years of a public beta also surfaced a ton of info that could also have been caught by adding on more QA testers but the business proposition of 1) having people pay you so that you can then 2) collect data on their play and 3) eliminate the need for QA resources is just a business prospect that fits all too well with how corps think. you can think the world of Larian but we live under capitalism and they'll operate like any other firm when it comes to the extraction of surplus value for their founders and owners
posted by paimapi at 11:23 AM on August 15, 2023 [1 favorite]
from the Yelling is Not Journalism article, there's a throwaway line about FromSoft:
FromSoftware - their past success has led them to be given a blank check, and a “ready when it’s ready” attitude. Most studios are not given these sorts of timelines, and this only comes after multiple massive successes.
which is a bit... underdeveloped. FromSoft has released multiple huge, highly polished games almost every single year since they've existed
they are also known to underpay and to have long periods of crunch though, from what I understand, the act of staying at your desk for 12+ hours a day is a normalized thing in Japan (Nintendo is, of course, included in this)
some select quotes about FromSoft and Japanese work culture in general:
"The general industry in Japan is not that crazy compared to my experience in other fields. Japan has a lot of holidays [and] there is a rule that [From Software] staff shouldn't stay later than 10pm, and 90% of the time, staff won't stay later than 9pm."
Those employees can expect, according to data on Career Connection, an average yearly salary of ¥3.41 million (equivalent to just shy of $25,000) – significantly less than the ¥5.2 million ($38,000) employees at the comparably sized Atlus
posted by paimapi at 11:50 AM on August 15, 2023 [2 favorites]
FromSoftware - their past success has led them to be given a blank check, and a “ready when it’s ready” attitude. Most studios are not given these sorts of timelines, and this only comes after multiple massive successes.
which is a bit... underdeveloped. FromSoft has released multiple huge, highly polished games almost every single year since they've existed
they are also known to underpay and to have long periods of crunch though, from what I understand, the act of staying at your desk for 12+ hours a day is a normalized thing in Japan (Nintendo is, of course, included in this)
some select quotes about FromSoft and Japanese work culture in general:
"The general industry in Japan is not that crazy compared to my experience in other fields. Japan has a lot of holidays [and] there is a rule that [From Software] staff shouldn't stay later than 10pm, and 90% of the time, staff won't stay later than 9pm."
Those employees can expect, according to data on Career Connection, an average yearly salary of ¥3.41 million (equivalent to just shy of $25,000) – significantly less than the ¥5.2 million ($38,000) employees at the comparably sized Atlus
posted by paimapi at 11:50 AM on August 15, 2023 [2 favorites]
Yeah the truth about business software is you aren't allowed to rage-quit it without literally quitting your job. Business software is so much more ass than video games because its got a locked-in playerbase.
So true, and the exact reason Bentley's software would be incredibly difficult to dislodge from the transportation industry. 48 state DOTs use it, which means all the consultants in those states use it, which means it's what all the engineers are familiar with, and so it goes...
Games come out buggy, but at least they're an amazing deal - $60-$100 for something that will entertain you for possibly hundreds of hours, versus $15 for a two hour movie. A company like Bentley will charge $10,000 a year for a license, refuse to put documentation online, and continually release new versions (with a commensurate price increase) before they've even come close to fixing all the problems with the last one.
posted by mellow seas at 3:36 PM on August 15, 2023 [1 favorite]
So true, and the exact reason Bentley's software would be incredibly difficult to dislodge from the transportation industry. 48 state DOTs use it, which means all the consultants in those states use it, which means it's what all the engineers are familiar with, and so it goes...
Games come out buggy, but at least they're an amazing deal - $60-$100 for something that will entertain you for possibly hundreds of hours, versus $15 for a two hour movie. A company like Bentley will charge $10,000 a year for a license, refuse to put documentation online, and continually release new versions (with a commensurate price increase) before they've even come close to fixing all the problems with the last one.
posted by mellow seas at 3:36 PM on August 15, 2023 [1 favorite]
I play video games, but I don't really follow video games, so I'm guessing I might be missing some necessary context here, but:
I started reading the article. Pretty much immediately, it links to the video that the article is regarding, so I switched over to that and watched it first, before going back to read the remainder (the vast majority) of the article. The article seemed very odd to me in a certain way: Did the yelly dude ever claim he was doing journalism here? If so, I missed it.
He was pretty clearly doing commentary, but that's not the same thing (nor is it necessarily even intended to be). And regardless of the merits or lack thereof of yelling with respect to journalism, yelling is... fine?... in commentary. You may not like it stylistically, but people who are mad do commentary too, and I don't think it's incumbent upon them to try to hide it.
posted by Flunkie at 4:30 PM on August 15, 2023
I started reading the article. Pretty much immediately, it links to the video that the article is regarding, so I switched over to that and watched it first, before going back to read the remainder (the vast majority) of the article. The article seemed very odd to me in a certain way: Did the yelly dude ever claim he was doing journalism here? If so, I missed it.
He was pretty clearly doing commentary, but that's not the same thing (nor is it necessarily even intended to be). And regardless of the merits or lack thereof of yelling with respect to journalism, yelling is... fine?... in commentary. You may not like it stylistically, but people who are mad do commentary too, and I don't think it's incumbent upon them to try to hide it.
posted by Flunkie at 4:30 PM on August 15, 2023
The yelly dude in the video is done by a paid employee of IGN, a pretty big name in game journalism. It's not "news" or "reporting," but commentary is a form of journalism too. It's not a free pass.
I agree it would be a weird way to phrase a complaint against a rando venting on youtube, but perfectly valid lodged against IGN.
posted by mark k at 8:39 AM on August 16, 2023 [1 favorite]
I agree it would be a weird way to phrase a complaint against a rando venting on youtube, but perfectly valid lodged against IGN.
posted by mark k at 8:39 AM on August 16, 2023 [1 favorite]
yeah, corpos under capitalism don't value or understand the value of QA testing whatsoever. I say this as QA in a big tech company.
We are all devops now.
posted by Artw at 8:42 AM on August 16, 2023 [1 favorite]
We are all devops now.
posted by Artw at 8:42 AM on August 16, 2023 [1 favorite]
I mean, except in his early career and on rare occasions thereafter, nobody would confuse what Andy Rooney did with "journalism" every week for decades on one of the biggest journalistic TV shows in the USA.
posted by Flunkie at 9:30 AM on August 16, 2023
posted by Flunkie at 9:30 AM on August 16, 2023
Which is a valid thing to complain about, no? Especially if he picked as a topic one evening, not the labels of shampoo bottles, but the something the journalists on the show covered like nursing home staffing.
It's perfectly fine to be amused by a guy yelling and think it's fine for IGN to have non-journalistic content consistent of yelly bits, it's also fine for a game developer to complain about low standards if IGN goes that direction. (I personally am on the game dev's side, but it's a matter of personal preference.)
posted by mark k at 1:08 PM on August 16, 2023 [1 favorite]
It's perfectly fine to be amused by a guy yelling and think it's fine for IGN to have non-journalistic content consistent of yelly bits, it's also fine for a game developer to complain about low standards if IGN goes that direction. (I personally am on the game dev's side, but it's a matter of personal preference.)
posted by mark k at 1:08 PM on August 16, 2023 [1 favorite]
You mean it's valid to complain that Andy Rooney was on a generally journalistic show but didn't (often) do journalism?
Of course it's "valid". It's valid to complain about whatever you want to complain about. To me, though, it also seems pretty silly. Especially to dedicate an article to not simply complaining about Andy Rooney not really doing "journalism", but more specifically to complaining about how you personally are -- unlike Andy Rooney -- a real journalist and you would've done -- unlike Andy Rooney -- real journalism about the phenomenon of dryers eating lone socks and here's how Andy Rooney should've done real journalism about the phenomenon of dryers eating lone socks and egad, Andy Rooney even admits he doesn't know where the missing socks go, he admits it, for shame for shame! Where has CBS's journalistic integrity gone? Walter Cronkite is spinning in his grave!
Like I said, I could easily be missing context here, but I am guessing that IGN probably has never solemnly pledged to be 100% straight-laced journalism all the time, no opinion and no commentary ever; I'm also guessing that it's probably not uncommon for them to publish opinion or commentary. And in any case I don't see what's so horrible about having opinion or commentary, even if much of what they do is ostensibly neither.
posted by Flunkie at 2:34 PM on August 16, 2023
Of course it's "valid". It's valid to complain about whatever you want to complain about. To me, though, it also seems pretty silly. Especially to dedicate an article to not simply complaining about Andy Rooney not really doing "journalism", but more specifically to complaining about how you personally are -- unlike Andy Rooney -- a real journalist and you would've done -- unlike Andy Rooney -- real journalism about the phenomenon of dryers eating lone socks and here's how Andy Rooney should've done real journalism about the phenomenon of dryers eating lone socks and egad, Andy Rooney even admits he doesn't know where the missing socks go, he admits it, for shame for shame! Where has CBS's journalistic integrity gone? Walter Cronkite is spinning in his grave!
Like I said, I could easily be missing context here, but I am guessing that IGN probably has never solemnly pledged to be 100% straight-laced journalism all the time, no opinion and no commentary ever; I'm also guessing that it's probably not uncommon for them to publish opinion or commentary. And in any case I don't see what's so horrible about having opinion or commentary, even if much of what they do is ostensibly neither.
posted by Flunkie at 2:34 PM on August 16, 2023
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If business software were released as buggy as some AAA games are, those companies would go bankrupt. I think I know of three people who quit even trying to play the newest Pokemon games on their Switches because it was basically unfinished.
posted by hippybear at 1:42 PM on August 14, 2023 [26 favorites]