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Post release patches to fix broken games – Can developers do more or are they here to stay?

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x1patch

When I started to put this piece together it was going to be a post about how miffed off I am with the constant stream of day or week one patches to fix broken games that have just hit the shop shelves. But the more and more I thought about the whole sorry situation, the more I realised that there are two sides to this story. Our side, the gamers, the consumers and the side of the developers, the folks that pour years of their lives into bringing the games we love to the market.

I have been gaming for a long time; my first console was a Sega Master System, it was given to me as a birthday present when I turned eight years old. The industry has changed a massive amount since those early years and I’m not just talking about the hardware here. For me the biggest difference to gaming has been the dawn of the Internet. It has linked gamers together from all over the world, it has changed how games are sold and advertised, but it has also changed how today’s games are made. The Internet has allowed for developers to provide DLC to extend the length of the games we enjoy, but also it has allowed developers to sell unfinished or even badly broken titles to us gamers, knowing that they can release a patch post-launch to fix the bugs.

This practice of post-launch patches, in my opinion, is becoming too common place in our industry. Before the Internet came to be, if you went out and bought yourself a game for your chosen machine from your local games store, you might have done a bit of research first, maybe like me you got yourself a games magazine every month to check out the latest news and to read that review of the game you wanted to purchase. The reason I wanted to read that review was very simple, if it got a pasting in the gaming press then I would change my mind and maybe pick up something else instead. You see, before the Net, if a game was broke it remained broken forever, there was no such thing as a downloadable patch to fix the bugs.

This idea of patching seems unique to our industry too, if you go out and buy yourself a new album, you don’t get home to find that tracks three and five are missing, that your new CD or whatever needs to be patched before you can get the full experience. The same goes for the films that you buy – they work straight out of the box. Like they should. If I buy a new game, I also expect that to work too, especially if I have just forked out over €70 on it. The growing trend of review embargoes until the game is released does not help matters either, it’s like the developers and publishers are trying to hide something from us gamers. I’m not a fan of that at all.

This ever increasing trend of post-release patches has had a pretty big effect on the games that I buy, as I will always read reviews of the titles that I’m interested in. When The Master Chief Collection was released back in 2014, I was really looking forward to getting my hands on it, as always I read review after review to see how 343 had got on putting this monster together. Unfortunately all the reviews said the same thing, great single player but multiplayer was just about unplayable if you were trying to play it in a party. I was gutted, Halo would need to be patched to fix the problems with the multiplayer. I only bought The Master Chief Collection a few months ago in a sale, I hardly ever touch it, none of my old Halo friends play it anymore.

Look, I’m not having a go at 343 here, they worked their ass off to get it finally sorted, but it is the example that stands out in my mind. They are most certainly not alone though. This idea of fixing games after release is rampant now, I seldom buy games on the day they come out and I certainly never ever pre-order anything anymore. The constant flow of broken titles has taken its toll on me. I have lost a little trust in the industry I love and that saddens me. Why is this happening more and more? Will it ever stop? Can developers do more to prevent this?

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And it’s when I started to think of the development side of things that I began to realise that maybe patches are not such an evil thing, maybe we are fortunate that our games can be fixed afterwards. You see, gamers are demanding creatures and we want more from our games; bigger worlds to explore, multi-layered stories to enjoy, cinematic cut scenes, fast and stable multiplayer. We are placing ever increasing pressure on developers to come up with new ways to blow our socks off. The games we play, especially AAA blockbusters, are incredibly complex to build and are becoming more and more massive as the years go by. I’m playing the Witcher 3 at the minute, the map is absolutely huge. It can’t be easy to put something like the Witcher 3 or GTA 5 together as the scale of both of them is mind boggling.

Developers are under other sorts of pressure too, sure they have us on their backs for a start, but they also have time pressures to deal with. Games are delayed all the time; you announce your new game, you say it will be released in 2 years time and then hope against hope that you will hit that deadline. More often that not these days, games are delayed, usually we get the announcement months and months even before the game is set to be released because the work involved in getting it finished had obviously been grossly underestimated from the word go, but sometimes titles are still released to the market in an unfinished state.

Developers are under constant pressure to get their new title to market from publishers too. They can’t delay a game forever, there is way too much money involved, too much money to be lost. Game companies are floated on various stock markets all around the globe, delays basically mean a loss in your share price and no one likes losing money. The cost of making a game in today’s world is also astronomical, some game budgets are hitting the $100m mark, with GTA 5 costing close to $270m to produce and promote. Publishers want to see a return on that kind of investment, they need the game out in the wild to start making some of that cash back, even if it is still obviously not ready.

We also have to take into account that the technology we play our favourite titles on is changing all the time. Sony has just released their PS4 Pro and the PSVR headset, Nintendo are set to release the Switch in March of next year and in about a year from now, Microsoft will release the Scorpio. Developers will have to get used to all this new tech in the coming year and if you are a multi-platform developer then you really have your work cut out for you. I’d imagine that most development houses are only now coming to terms with what the current PS4 and Xbox One hardware is truly capable of, but now the console gaming community is demanding 4K graphics so the focus shifts yet again for development teams on to the next new thing. There is zero time to stand still in this industry and something has got to give.

When you consider the number of man hours that go into producing a new game and the financial outlay that means X amount of copies have to be sold, along with the pressure from us the gamers, the fans; is it really any surprise that some games come out and then need to be patched almost immediately so that they work properly?

Look, minor bug fixes are one thing, developers can miss things, but completely broken games coming out without any warning attached from developers and publishers and embargoes on reviewing these games until release day, is still unforgivable in my eyes. That is just taking the fans for a bunch of mugs. But as fans, we do have choices, we do not have to buy a game on day one, we do not have to pre-order any games if we choose not to. We can read up on titles that we want to buy and get informed if said title has massive flaws, we don’t have to buy that game until it is 100% right and thanks to post-release patches for both minor and major flaws, we can kind of have our cake and eat it. Developers want to fix their broken game and we don’t need to buy it until they do.

As I said at the start, the industry has changed a lot since I first picked up a controller, but in the modern world of games, maybe patches are just part of this modern world and are here to stay. Maybe they are a necessary evil and will continue to play a major role in how we game today, but maybe, just maybe, the whole industry could take a long, deep breath instead of constantly racing forward. With two new, but two very different consoles set for release next year, I think the race forward continues at pace.

Do you think these patches are necessary in todays gaming world, or do you believe that developers can do a whole lot more to make sure the games they bring out work from the word go? Feel free to post your own thoughts on the matter in the comments below.

PinkFluid
PinkFluidhttp://pinkfluidlive.com
I've being playing consoles since I was 7 years old - back in 1987. My first machine was an Sega Master System, for the life of me I can't remember where I got it from but from the first time I played it I was hooked on gaming and the industry itself. My favorite types of games are Action Adventure titles, but I'm also a huge fan of FPS, and football games. Here at TheXboxHub, I will be sharing my views, thoughts and opinions on all things Xbox.

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HAppY_KrAToS
HAppY_KrAToS
7 years ago

I don’t agree with a few things the author said.

I, as a gamer, shouldn’t care, think, worry about the developer, the publisher, deadlines, etc.

I’m not getting for free. I am paying full price for it. Worse, no matter if i like it or not, i already paid for it. Even worse, if i buy a digital game, and 5 mimutes later, i stop playing it, no way i can get a refund, or sell it to someone.
i finally decided to pick skyrim for ps4, at 30 bucks, hoping i would love it, like i did with fallout 4 or the witcher 3. After 2 hours of gaming, i couldn’t stand those ultra ugly textures, low polygon characters, stiff animations, etc etc. I was hoping the ps4 would get some textures updates… but no. Everything was awful, making my eyes bleed. Great story or not, I’m not going to invest 300-500 hours of my precious time, when i have other hundeds games to play on ps3 or ps4, on a ugly game, with graphics worse than a ps2 game. It’s really that bad and ugly. And so i lose 30 bucks, as i can’t sell the game, or get a refund.

It’s not normal to buy a totally broken game, and have to down’oad a 10gb patch during 1 or 3 days, just to make a boxed game PLAYABLE.

Worse, today, games are built around mcrotransactions and other ingame apps. Everything is done so we have no choice but buying credits and magic coins with real money, in order to upgrade our character or get the best weapons, without having to play 400 hours and 8’000 matches, races, etc.

Worse, not normal, corrct, to have embargoes until 24h before the game release, thus making it impossible for gamers to read enough negative reviews and avoid buying a bad game.

Worse, are the big websites, full of ads, that will still give 9.5 scores to flawed games, or games full of micro transactions, day one patches, day one dlcs, with awful loot boxes where gamers get 99.99% of items not suitable for the characters they actually use, etc etc. These games should start with 7 and 6/10 scores, if they are full of anti gamers shiit, like micro transactions, etc.

Author, you think about those devs giving all they can, to release their game… do you think they think about you, one single second, or about that poor guy who’s gonna spend 1’000 bucks per month on ingame apps and loot boxes, while his kids can’t even go out to a theater once a month? All these companies and devs want is your cash. I had a master system, even a spectrum 2048, msx…
Those times are gone. Devs woukd strive to make the best games as possible.
Today, they think about hiw much % of the main game they will serve as dlcs, or how many thousands items gamers ight be able to purchase, skins, colors, moves, emotes, voices, weapons, weapon parts, etc, all X dozens characters… a la overwatch.

This is the only fking industry where buyers are taken for idiots. In any other domain, this couldn’t exist. Like you said, buying a cd and having 2 tracks missing, scratched, etc, or you would have to pay extra cash to listen to those 2 tracks. ..

No, only in video games we get treated like shiiit.

pinkfluidlive
Reply to  HAppY_KrAToS
7 years ago

First of all, thanks for taking the time to comment. Maybe you are correct, maybe dev companies and publishers just don’t care but, as gamers, we can always choose not to buy their titles or DLC. Never forget, in this industry, we the players are the bottom line

YOUDIEMOFO
YOUDIEMOFO
7 years ago

There is no excuse for a broken game on a console even today. These day one patches that hold you up from experiences your game immediately on day one are the biggest jokes ever.

I’m still playing games that crash on me on my PS4 and these I do believe are not getting patched any more. Another reason I’ll hold off purchasing any game from now on until it is clearly stated that there are ZERO issues with that title. Maybe even take my chances on PC from now on with my exotic setup I seem to be getting better “support/playability” in games when compared to that of the consoles buggy stature.

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