Are game studios and video game developers getting lazy?

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In recent years there have been a number of games that have launched that have been broken on day one, that simply weren’t fit for purpose.

Nascar21: Ignition is a great example of this. Launched October 2021, Nascar21: Ignition was so full of bugs that it was unplayable. There are/were countless missing features, bugs, and crashes that made this launch a complete disaster.

But Nascar21 isn’t an enigma, there are many examples of games launching where they’ve been riddled with bugs. For instance I have been unable to play Forza Horizon 5 since launch, unless I want to play on Xbox. The PC version crashes constantly, fails to render properly with Nvidia graphics cards, and fails to save any custom wheel configurations. On launch, though listed as a supported wheelbase, it failed to recognise the Fanatec dd2.

This issue isn’t present in just racing games either, Cyberpunk 2077 was possibly the most hyped game of 2020 and it’s launch was almost a complete failure. PlayStation 4 and Xbox owners complained of ridiculously low frame rates; there were bugs, glitches, and all kinds of crashes.

This wouldn’t stand in any other industry.​

Imagine going to the cinema to see the latest Marvel movie and the effects were half done “don’t worry” say Disney “we’ll fix it for the streaming release”.

Or imagine buying a new car, only to find when you turn up to the showroom to collect it that the engine is missing.

There have been issues with video games since the launch of video games.​

Pretty much any piece of software ever written has an error in it somewhere, with games sometimes this can be very obvious. In the days before games could get patches and hotfixes, if a game launched with a bug or error, then it was something that you had to live with.

Eventually when patches and hotfixes could be implemented, we would often see day 1 fixes, which could be annoying. I remember buying Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare in 2007, rushing home to play it on my PS3 with eager anticipation only to find a download - which took over 8 hrs!!

Whether it was at this point that game studios realized they could launch unfinished games and push out updates and features after launch, I don’t know. I hope it isn’t as sinister as that.

Perhaps these cases of unfinished games are the result of sticking to launch dates (though Cyberpunk 2077 was pushed back), or a result of funding, or lack of resources. It could be that so many game studios are owned by larger companies and publishers, who have control over when games launch.

The latter could be more true than we might realize. Sea of Thieves launched in 2018, made by developers Rare. It was an OK game, where you and a few friends sailed around finding treasure and fighting other pirates. Almost two years after launch the game is almost unrecognizable and ex-employees of Rare have openly admitted that there was a great deal of pressure from Microsoft to release the game.

What do you think are the reasons why some of these games are launched in the states that they are?
About author
Damian Reed
PC geek, gamer, content creator, and passionate sim racer.
I live life a 1/4 mile at a time, it takes me ages to get anywhere!

Comments

I don't think it's purely a problem in the gaming industry. Look around - costumers are the testers for many products. The companies are just interested in sales figures, waranties are often not honored as they should be.

Partly we, the consumers, are to blame. We want everything and we want it now. Every buy just a couple of clicks away. And despite knowing the practices of the companies we still buy and buy. The other end is the business side. Companies are looking for good numbers, if they are listed at the stock market they are looking out for their share values. There is also a lot more competition. And CEOs want boni which are linked to sales/profit. Since I don't see the second part of the equation changing any time soon it's up to the consumers to change their habbits.

Quite honestly I think that there is a greater chance for a sandstorm at the northpole.
 
One thing that I dislike these days is that a lot of companies release unfinished content. How is it acceptable for them to wait for months to fix major problems in a video game? I'm also not interested in these early access products but at least they are honest about their condition. I wouldn't mind if the industry downgraded their graphics and focused on everything else instead. I often think about how many more cars we would have to drive if people weren't required to spend two years building a 3D model. It's undeniable that Assetto Corsa was abandoned. The Content Manager and the Custom Shaders Patch have introduced features that I would never have imagined that I would experience. It's also such a relief to finally be able to disable that ridiculous speed limiter in the pit lane.
 
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Premium
I agree with many who think this article is aiming it's cannons at the WRONG people.

If a company doesn't value QA and doesn't have a team of people testing the code as it is written.

If a company decides that it needs to release a product no matter what condition it is in.

If a company decides to put their developers on a death march for an unreasonable deadline or changes the goals without giving enough time to adjust.

If a company doesn't have the organization to integrate the work of a team of developers and manage where they spend their time.

The released product will not be good.

Unless you are dealing with a one or two man shop, there are management issues to contend with. Management should give clear goals, have strong QA feedback mechanisms, and empower their developers to do a great job.

Obviously you need to have the talent to write the software as well. A properly managed group of untalented developers won't get anywhere either. This is a clear weakest link situation requiring that all the important parts of the company are working well together.
 
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Probably it is "too" complicated to make games these days in the targeted time frame. Back in the very old days games were made by a few people in a couple of months and no one expected them to be more than (hopefully) fun games.
Today they are very complex (but the development tools available today should help) and I think we expect very much of them because they look so good. Perhaps we also accepted more glitches when games were more simple?
The favorite games here have been in development and been improved for several years.
 
Random thoughts:

  • The opportunity to patch games after release has dramatically altered the industry. Most other media do not afford its producers such a possibility. Internet-era games have mostly had the same problem, and that covers a gigantic swathe of video gaming history, it's not a new phenomenon.
  • Laziness doesn't seem to be the an element in any of the cases mentioned. Poor management and unrealistic expectations seem to be more plausible explanations.
  • If properly explained, incomplete software is, if anything, a boon to the final product. If used properly, Steam's early access status is a formidable tool. If we take AMS2 as a case study, I think it's absolutely the case that they needed revenue, and bad, when they launched. Was the game finished? Oh, not remotely. It should still have been in early access, IMO, but it was definitely playable and it was fine. Still, no matter what we think about the game itself, I doubt anyone would question Reiza's commitment to improving their product and experience, they've done a tremendous amount since release. If they had waited until a feature-complete release, it still wouldn't be out, and it wouldn't have made financial sense to develop the game.
  • The price of games (on PC, anyway) has never been lower. Steam sales, Humble Bundles, Epic free games and other such opportunities means we can get games at a ludicrously low price. I remember paying $47.99 Canadian for Eidos' Formula One Racing in 1999 - equivalent to $76 today. Assetto Corsa can be had for under $5 today, and even the most recent, most in-depth sims like ACC and AMS2 can be had for a third of that. It's a tough industry, and without a huge payout at the end, some tricks are necessary, especially for smaller publishers that don't have a steady revenue stream from previous games.
I agree with the analysis, but the problem is there some games that are immature but in a reasonably playable state when they are released (like AMS2 you mentioned) and others that are so far across the line of readiness that releasing them is borderline a scam. Add to this that some of these games are yearly iterations (or close to yearly) and that adds more doubts that some publishers are just taking the money and running without delivering especially when price at launch is almost $100 like in N21 case..
 
Premium
You could ask the same question of any industry. Web sites for instance. Spelling errors in articles. Poor grammar. Not reporting facts. Are they all due to laziness?
 
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I know what you're saying, and you're right, I think. Especially given the apparent preferences of the community in sim racing nowadays.

But, here's what's funny -- I'd personally happily trade off "complexity" for a simpler yet more full-featured, well-optimized experience. I'd take GTR2 quality lighting, a fairly simple empirical tire model, and less than 20 million polygon 3D models (or whatever) for the sake of more time spent on optimizing car behaviour, AI behaviour, and just in general a better dialed-in, feature-complete, non-buggy gameplay experience.
Personally, same thing... GTR2 looks fine, 20k poly models are more than enough to make it obvious which car you're in, which at the end of the day is all you need. But people can't judge physics realism, they can tell which game has the fancier graphics. And unless you build limits into the game engine, people will just import 500k triangle GT7 showroom models anyway. And then say the dev is incompetetn for not doing that in the first place.
 
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Or,maybe, players became too demanding and/or "toxic" and the rise and growth of social networks had a huge impact on the process.

And talking about simracing specific, I think it's easily one of the (if not "the") worst community when it comes to expect something from a game.

Devs: "We are releasing A"
Your average self-proclaimed simracer: "yes but I want B-C-D,ultrarealistic driving physics ,and of course Nordschleife with 300 weather variations even though I still can't make past the first chicane in Monza. Give me all of that or for me it's a no-buy with some good old fashioned amount of shitstorm on all your social channels".

Something you can (unfortunately) experience in a daily basis right here and wherever simracing is the main topic.
 
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I know what you're saying, and you're right, I think. Especially given the apparent preferences of the community in sim racing nowadays.

But, here's what's funny -- I'd personally happily trade off "complexity" for a simpler yet more full-featured, well-optimized experience. I'd take GTR2 quality lighting, a fairly simple empirical tire model, and less than 20 million polygon 3D models (or whatever) for the sake of more time spent on optimizing car behaviour, AI behaviour, and just in general a better dialed-in, feature-complete, non-buggy gameplay experience.
You just described AMS1.
 
It's just another bad practice that is encouraged through the evils of capitalism... Exploitation of the consumer base...

These companies have the mindset of making money first, because that's ultimately what keeps them being able to do what they want to do, making their art...

The door to the current mess was set ajar with those day 1 releases on PS3, and pushed wide open by the open BETA crowd on PC when production companies fully realized that the consumer base was willing to pour money into hope...

Planned obsolescence is another one of these bad practices that capitalism encourages... The 2 are very similar as the consumer base cannot do anything about it except buy the latest phone for the latest features or support a game developer by buying a game early to hope to see the finished product being what they want... Or you can choose to wait it out and miss out on the new features and latest graphics just like the phones...

The rFactor scenario rings truest here... When ISI released the BETA version of rF2 a lot of people jumped on board only being unable to compete online or offline with it due to the myriad of bugs it was released with... Leaving most with little choice but to return to rF1 and hope that rF2 gets there... A decade later and it's gone backwards as the chase for money has seen 2 other development teams restart the BETA process to milk money out of the consumer base by making changes and announcing hope for the future...

The best art doesn't live under the pressure to chase money as the artist releases a finished product only when they are happy with it... The artist is allowed to care about their art and the quality of it... The chase for money has always cheapened art no matter the field... Video games as one of the youngest forms of art was never going to be immune to it... The level it has got to though is very disgusting...

That's what is encouraged under capitalism... Chase the quickest and easiest payday, the long road to create great art is just not acceptable... You need to eat today... You can always promise more hope for tomorrow...
 
I know what you're saying, and you're right, I think. Especially given the apparent preferences of the community in sim racing nowadays.

But, here's what's funny -- I'd personally happily trade off "complexity" for a simpler yet more full-featured, well-optimized experience. I'd take GTR2 quality lighting, a fairly simple empirical tire model, and less than 20 million polygon 3D models (or whatever) for the sake of more time spent on optimizing car behaviour, AI behaviour, and just in general a better dialed-in, feature-complete, non-buggy gameplay experience.
I think alot of people are looking at older games a bit too much with their rose tinted glasses. I won't lie, I love older games and still enjoy them from time to time, but it doesn't take a software development degree to understand and see that the development of games has become alot more complex compared to the GTR2 or GPL days. And I would also question if games were really more feature complete or non-buggy than they are now. I would say the bug/feature rate is propably very similar. Another point that get's overlooked quite often are the lisencing costs. Ofcourse, you can try to go the CS 1.6 way and develop a mod with unlisenced weapons and sell millions of copies. But I would argue that it doesn't work like that for racing sims, where people want to race laserscanned cars on laserscanned tracks with laserscanned physics and hear laserscanned sounds, even if they are just moving in a virtual world with a bunch of polygons over a pile of polygons. No prancing horse = no buy, even if it is just a bunch of pixels in a menu. And some people here would be pretty amazed at how much some track companies and car manufacturers are asking for to have their cars or tracks in a game. You could get a real car and race it on a real racetrack for that money.
 
I think there are two main contributing factors here.
  • Companies push games out ever earlier.
  • Players/Customers expect update and bug fixes.
I think the these factors feed each other. Players want bug fixes and even content updates (new features for free). Once down that path I think it sets up games to be released earlier than they maybe should, knowing that future updates are expected so it can be patched later. I think also think there might be a perception thing going on there with customers. If company X is fixing bugs people perceive company X to care about them and quality etc. That feeds back to the company, giving them the belief they can ship early and it might actually be in their favour, providing they walk on the the right side of bug criticality / player annoyance.
Combine that with the boardroom desire to get their product bringing in revenue ASAP and we're moving further into the territory we already find ourselves.
 
Premium
I think the blame should be on the people who put the release date in stone and would commit to it no matter how buggy the game is. There are plenty of games all throughout the industry that can be cited as examples.

As a player, I want games to be bug free. The last thing I want is a title bricking my hardware because upper management would not budge and give the developers all the time, they need to finish a title.
 
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I think alot of people are looking at older games a bit too much with their rose tinted glasses. I won't lie, I love older games and still enjoy them from time to time, but it doesn't take a software development degree to understand and see that the development of games has become alot more complex compared to the GTR2 or GPL days.
Of course things nowadays are done in a more complex way... but I would ask (being devil's advocate) if that additional complexity is really necessary or desirable? Does it give us better gameplay, or more complexity devs or modders can't tame? I don't know the answer, but I think it's a question worth thinking about.

And I would also question if games were really more feature complete or non-buggy than they are now. I would say the bug/feature rate is propably very similar.
There are bugs, yes, of course. Some serious -- take the ISImotor AI slipstreaming bug. But also, consider this. In the early 2000s, between Grand Prix 4, NR2003, rFactor, and GTR2, we already had highly driveable car physics, 24h day night cycle, a full season (or more) of cars and tracks, AI that (esp. for NR2003) are brilliant at racing wheel-to-wheel (as opposed to hotlapping), AI designed to do pit strategy calculations and so on to allow the player to race over long distances, great netcode in ISImotor sims allowing contact (like AMS1, R3E, and rF2 do nowadays). And where are we nowadays, nearly 20 years later? Any top of the line "sim racing" title I can think of is missing one or more of these features. Yikes.

Another point that get's overlooked quite often are the lisencing costs. Ofcourse, you can try to go the CS 1.6 way and develop a mod with unlisenced weapons and sell millions of copies. But I would argue that it doesn't work like that for racing sims, where people want to race laserscanned cars on laserscanned tracks with laserscanned physics and hear laserscanned sounds, even if they are just moving in a virtual world with a bunch of polygons over a pile of polygons. No prancing horse = no buy, even if it is just a bunch of pixels in a menu. And some people here would be pretty amazed at how much some track companies and car manufacturers are asking for to have their cars or tracks in a game. You could get a real car and race it on a real racetrack for that money.
Licensing costs are big, you're right. But again, my question would be this: do we need the official licenses? I'd say... maybe not. Look at how brilliant the non-licensed cars are in rF2 (e.g. the "Stock Cars") or in AMS 1 or 2 (like the "Super V8" or "Formula _____"). Then the community can add skins and AI names for the immersion.
 
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I think "live service" has been the downfall of gaming in general. Publishers have abused the fact that they plan to support games post launch. They feel more comfortable launching games well before they are ready. Launch is treated more like the start line than the finish line anymore, and the users are the ones who suffer. I think Nascar Ignition is guilty of this to a degree, among other issues lol. Looking outside sim racing though, even AAA franchises like EA's Battlefield and hell even Call of Duty is a mess at launch anymore. Between Ignition and Battlefield, I will never, ever preorder a game again.
 

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