Are game studios and video game developers getting lazy?

tr1v1um said:

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.

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Yup I'm always amazed how much money is spent to get cars and sponsors onto TV screens.....yet for a game which is more or less doing exctly the same thing the money goes the other way? It's free advertising!

As a person who's first console was Atari 2600 i have a three bullets opinion about why this happens (and will keep happening in the future):

• Game' s (industry) rapid technological development and wide spread through out the world.
• Power of the internet and the ability of correcting mistakes to games (and generally software).
• Big weight that a new title (or sequel title) receives from the massive community of gamers and the anticipation and expectations that are (logically) born.

With respect and love to the people that create for us, thank you.

Maybe because those who are accountable for the investment wants more sales? And for new stuffs to be quickly released to the market?

I saw the same thing with McLaren. Their cars have been an absolute nightmare in regards of reliability because McLaren needs cash and they need to sell cars by bucketloads just to keep their Bahrain investor happy.

Do you ever write something, only to look back later and think I could have done a better job?

I've done just that this morning.

Whilst I still stand by the sentiment that there are far too many games being launched that aren't fit for purpose, directing this at game developers was a mistake on my behalf. It's great that so many of you have jumped to their defence. To be honest, I did this to be provocative and in hindsight this community deserves better.

I've worked in and around the video game industry for a number of years and I know the pressures there are around releasing a new title. There are too many board members, executives, and investors involved in key decision making and those are the main contributors to games being released with so many issues.

The above concerns me greatly with so many publishers and tech giants buying up smaller game studios, I really do believe that we will see more games over the next few years that will be a complete car crashes on release.

I also want to clarify that I have no issue with day one fixes, hot fixes, and improvements. This article is direct solely at video game titles that should not have been launched in the state they were.

Video game developer with 25 years experience here (and some of those are well known racing titles). There are some very naive and uninformed opinions being expressed here, but I appreciate the frustrations.

To be clear, no video game developer (individual or studio) wants to make bad titles. All work very hard under often challenging circumstances (budget, timeline and technical constraints). By their nature, these projects are extremely complex and can't be compared to the examples given in the original post. The automotive industry spends billions in research and development before a factory is even tooled up. In film, teams of VFX artists spend months on a few seconds of footage and where possible they can make some compromises as you'll only see the sequence from one point of view.

The fragmentation of the platforms we're developing for has also introduced complexity. Fortunately off the shelf game engines allow cross platform support, but those working with proprietary tech (like Playground Games/Forza Horizon) have additional work to do to ensure the title functions on a wide array of hardware. It's not insignificant work.

On top of all of this, with each new generation of gaming platforms, the worlds we create get bigger in size in two ways: both in sheer scale and richness in detail. With the exception of leveraging outsourcing, internal development teams haven't really increased in scale to match the ambition. Part of that is a lack of available talent to fill the seats, part of it is a lack of effective tooling (though procedural generation is gaining more and more traction), and some of it is budgetary.

To wrap this up, game developers put a lot of love into the games that they make and sometimes these things are released with issues that might have been deemed not severe or frequent enough to break the build. It doesn't matter how big your QA teams are, the player base is way bigger with more varied hardware configurations (PC) and they'll find things that are broken the devs might have never seen.

We do our best.

I have a lot of compassion, but you know what they say about excuses…
That’s respectfully.

It's all about business and decisions from the top hierarchy... developers and artists are just pawns !! Simply, no game programmers or artists have a say in the game development pipeline...you just do what is required to do, and you are selected to do what they want to do, not the other way around...
So if you have two months to release a game, you do it no matter how crappy you know it will be because you had no choice, simple as that.

I'll keep it short and only mention the games I actually play and what I see as the my biggest gripes....

1- Raceroom: devs continue to be lazy to update and bring the game out of dx9, even dx10 would be an improvement and would still be 2 generations behind and the game is still not at version 1.0 after a decade., as well as no day-night cycle or even just night by itself and somehow it never rains in raceroom land but it did in race07. but it does have some great online door to door racing.

2-rFactor2: devs to lazy to add a option to create a custom championship and leave it to the player to tweak AI ini files for a better single player experience. Full course yellows and 3-4 laps under caution wth and I don't even want to start on the AI pit/tire madness. Worst in-car dashes in the business, just take the gt3 911 out and point made. They do have some great tracks and virtual LeMans right Max.

3-ACC: devs to lazy to implement a realistic damage model because and I quote "would require a lot of work, and it's not what players really want", also the AI is still pretty much a follow the leader braindead train; Don't believe me just watch the post race highlights and all the non-overtaking overtaking nothing highlights. And still the worst game optimization but.. It does gt3 best

4-iRacing: devs to lazy to fix the 3 foot netcode issue, glass grass and a few more but still the online king,. for racing and toxicity.

5-F1 series: devs to lazy to add mouse support, VR support or proper triple screen support. Still somehow it has arguable the best career mode. The truest of true sim-cades and players racing while sitting on top of the car.

6-AMS2: devs still haven't fixed the AI using the same car skin as the player in custom championships as far as I know, but this dev team which is probably the smallest of the ones on this list still continue to keep improving this title and showing Ian Bell what a dev team that actually care about a game and title can bring out of the madness engine.

Now let me state that I enjoy all the games mentioned above quite a bit, some more than others and the F1 series is probably the least played of all by a long, long way (don't think I've fired it up in over a year or so ago), also these dev teams bring a lot of heat on themselves when they can't handle even the slightest of criticism or backlash for the crap they say they fixed but in reality never did, sometimes making issues worse. I really don't think they really care or could be bothered because...

as someone else also pointed out, a lot of the blame has to be on the players (myself included) who continue to buy "shiny new content" in hopes that our support will somehow get a return of a finally finished product or at best some long standing issues finally fixed but probably not...
it's a never ending teeter totter

and I'll continue to play these games and love the fun and frustrations, usually at the same time. btw I still have some classics on my HDD; GP legends, nr2k3, gtr2, rbr, race07, rF1, f1c but they too have shortcomings, but it's nice to go back from time to time to see how far we've come but yet still missing some of the magic that made these games great.

so much for keeping it short

Yes they are, people were talking about Cyberf*ck 2077 being the ultimate game and everything, yet GTA IV beats that game in even the smallest of details, game devs have stopped caring about quality, they only want to milk gamers out of their money.

Yeah its usually the publishers who set the time limit. Dont know why but there it is. With games it seems its ok to stress the developers and have them push out unfinished games. Again, dont know why. Do it to cars and rockets too. Stress the engineers and push the products out ahead of time!

Well, Raceroom is a very good game but one only has to look at the content of Race 07, GTR2 to see how lazy the devs are. They have many 'classes' of car consisting of just one car! Two different BMWs seem exactly the same. And of course there are so many cut and paste WTCR iterations year on year, the Civic being a prime eg. They release one or two half-baked tracks once every blue moon. They even release tracks they had before with, say, three layouts of which only two are playable - and sell it as three layouts.

Here a prime example of lazy dev. No offense to anyone, but some lazy devs are just better than others.

Terrible title

Developers can only be burnout

I think publishers and devs know full well that they don’t need to put in the extra effort, people will buy it regardless.

If people are buying your game when you put in minimum effort, why would a company spend more than the minimum.

The problem lies with the players accepting it.

guidofoc said:

Here a prime example of lazy dev. No offense to anyone, but some lazy devs are just better than others.
View attachment 543724

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I thought of the same person, he even has a shirt about it!

MJQT said:

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.

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Absolutely agreed, not only would that be a more fun and immersive experience but also it would be highly accessible to everybody as PC specs wouldn't be an issue

Never attribute to malice or even laziness what can be attributed to short term money grabbing. Or in some cases incompetence.

Software and games is a different from hardware that you can sell an unfinished product and fix it later. You can not do anything like that with a real thing. With software there basically is no too early. If you can sell it people will buy it.

And we have seen many developers take advantage of that. Early access games with massive amounts of content and polish being absent with tons of bugs issues even with core gameplay. In games you can also hide behind tags like alpha, beta or just use version numbering below 1.0 and you have people defending your product like crazy. Shouting you should not review it because it is not yet called by 1.0 or finished or whatever nonsense.

A review should be all about answering couple of simple questions. Is it good, is it fun, is it worth the money? If you can buy it then you can answer those questions. People also want answers to those questions. Not giving answer because of purely marketing bs reasons is wrong. Yet there are people who are working against their own interests when they are trying to prevent reviews being released unless the version number is above some number. Even if the whole numbering system is totally arbitrary and completely meaningless.

A review is out of date pretty quickly anyways. A review about version 1.0 could be totally outdated when version 1.1 adds moddable toe nail sharpeners and interactive plasma spoon trading system. Holding back review because it might be out of date is one of the worst anti consumer tricks that happens constantly in gaming. It is literally misleading the customer knowing the game won't review well in its current form but at the same time selling the game with those dreams and hopes. It just might be good some day.

Also I think it is worth mentioning that in the end the developers are not lazy. Not at all. Any game that is being released too early the development team has probably been crunching it for months to get it ready. They have been given an unrealistic date and they are worked basically 24/7 in some cases to get it as finished as possible. Sometimes you have third parties that fail to reach their targets that cause serious delays on your end. I would not put all blame on publishers and producers either. Some developers are hopeless with money and schedules. Certain star citizen lead developer has a history of missed deadlines and blown out budgets for example. His latest game is delayed like decades. Bad management and feature creep have killed many games where the publisher has been left no good options.

Sometimes it is just a mess and everybody involved are at fault. As a customer it is not that difficult to avoid those games. Just don't preorder. Watch other people play it. Make informed decisions. I have sympathy for a mother or father of young child who buys the latest bug ridden mess of a game y because the kid is screaming their lungs out at every opportunity. But if you make such bad decision for yourself then you got exactly what you deserved.

Ruy Horta said:

In short yes, it is about cost and returns.

So better release early to pay bills, yet sell less copies because your product is unfinished or light in content?

Indie development can involve money just like a premium game from a big brand publisher, the difference is about being an independent developer - a single guy in his spare to a full studio. Running out of steam can happen with big studio projects, especially if a project is mismanaged. Big game projects by big studios have been cancelled while being developed, or released in an unfinished or even broken state.

Indie or published does not guarantee quality nor failure.
It is more about funding, stakeholders and marketing.

if you can’t make a good game based on your budget and projected time you are in the wrong business.
if it is about shovel ware, it is quantity over quality.

The actual problem may be the gaming industry itself, with a lot of little studios shoveling out games to feed the mobile market. Cheap, low quality freemium model.

I sympathize with those who work in that environment, but we are talking about racing sims in 2022.

EDIT: …and no it is not laziness, it is complacency - the acceptance of lowering standards.

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The economics for simracing are much more challenging than you depict. It's definitely not a cash cow business. Prices for simulators are generally much lower than more arcadish yearly games and require years of development on top of costs of licensing.
Only rich publishers can afford to deliver a potentially fully finished game. Even then it's no bed of roses.
This is not to excuse certain games that were released in a ridiculous state, but saying "they must put total quality before quantity and delay release until it's done" equals putting out of the market the overwhelmingly biggest part of the products. It's not realistic either, especially in the real simracing market (not arcade or simcade as MSG is positioning themselves in) that is mostly run by small developers.

... now on Pre-order? Never !
Devs and investors seems to always want you to fork out your wallet, for un-finished, buggy, un-playable games. Boycot or my money back, usually works.

The issue is not the developers, they pour their heart and soul into these games, the issue, is shareholders pushing publishers/studios to meet their agreed upon ROI's and SLA's.

each and every damn time. and that's a thing in a lot of IT/Computerized/Automated industries.

and each time, it's the creatives, engineers and end-users who get screwed over by it, sadly, it's never the ones at the actual helm (which are usually not even the company's leaders but the company's investors and their financial backers, just like with government; the latter only do what they can/want to do with the resources they're given)