Are game studios and video game developers getting lazy?

nascar21.jpg
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?
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About author
Damian Reed
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!

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Comments

B
This is a lazy editorial that misses the mark.
Developers working on games are some of the hardest working people in the industry.
Beware when you use the "lazy" adjective. It's pure gamer-speak, overused and abused. Your boss surely thinks you are lazy. Does it make it right ?
 
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Stereo
Ruy Horta said:
This is about realistic expectations.
Yes customers may have developed a unreasonable level of expectation, but again who can blame them?

If the market is saturated it is because there are too many companies producing mediocre products.
These companies are not forced to do so, some do so by design - the shovel ware lower tier seasonal race games on contract are a good example.
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If the customers have an unrealistic expectation for long enough, the devs will go elsewhere (rf2 team making top gear game, kunos making a sailboat sim)

You can't just say "they should make better games" and have the budget appear... AC was probably developed for less than $1 million, no matter how you divide that up you don't get 5 years of a large team of devs salaries.
 
Kyuubeey
Stereo said:
If the customers have an unrealistic expectation for long enough, the devs will go elsewhere (rf2 team making top gear game, kunos making a sailboat sim)

You can't just say "they should make better games" and have the budget appear... AC was probably developed for less than $1 million, no matter how you divide that up you don't get 5 years of a large team of devs salaries.
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I'm pretty sure Stefano broke off from Kunos. It's not like KS is making the boat sim.
 
ShredatorFIN
It's not always just publisher and investors.

For example, Battlefield 2042 had one extra year in development, they dropped the single player component, and had 3 studios working on the game. EA gave them 1 year extra time, compared to usual Battlefield game. And it still flopped hard. Bad leadership and decisions in the upper management of the studio (DICE) itself, I heard

Not that I have played Battlefield in years. But was kind of hard not to notice. Seems like many AAA games have become primarily a storefront for microtransactions (because for some reason I cannot fathom in the slightest, it has become profitable), and gameplay is an afterthought

Also Cyberpunk 2077 was in development 9 years. Wouldn't call it rushed by publisher. Maybe not even lazy, but something definitely went wrong somewhere. Too ambitious maybe

However, HC sim racing as a genre is not too affected by all this, since it's ran by indie studios who are still hardworking and focus on the essentials
 
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DaVeX↯
Damian Reed said:
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.
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How much of this is due to "rumored" MSG money on simracing.gp project or to real concerns about what you wrote and consequences?

RD is well known to be a toxic place overall so this U turn after posting an article like that sounds sospicious...specially if there were been even worse posts or articles in the past but no one worried about consequences...
 
S
Not planning to read all comments because this is just another click bait title for RD (feels like we have way too many of those). However, working in IT (not gaming, but general principles are similar) it's always the same problem - new stuff/features/DLCs sell while bug fixing gets forgotten or put on lower priority.
From managements perspective - what's the point of spending resources to fix minor issues if we could just work on new product/features? Unless it's totally broken (Nascar 21 might be this case) then new releases will always make more money. Sales teams reached their targets and got the bonus, on to the next one.
Regarding lazy part - I think biggest part is getting top level developers because it is such a niche. If you are top talent and not a simracing fan yourself then what exactly can these small companies offer? Eternal glory of (checks steam charts) 735 concurrent players of rF2? How exactly this pays for top talent?
 
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Durge Driven
I think is way over due discussion to be had about engines that could solve many issues

Leave out iRacing and Raceroom which have their own things going on with set structure

We spend countless thousands, 10's of thousands in some cases to strive for the last bit of realism we can afford / demand

Sorry ? so where does multiple engines and their philosophy stand with all that ?
Why shouldn't I be able to go from one sim studio to the next ( yes arcade titles included ) and use same graphics, settings, FFB, profiles, garage setups, in all of them

Of course would not be the same vehicles but everything else should/ would be uniform
as if you were driving all the cars in one sim per say

This is how I see the other studios could hit a home run against iR and RR

Best physics engine built in co-op ( greenlight I would buy it ) and licensed for those studios to use ( sell to others )
1. Give moments thought to the over head would be removed .....astronomical
2. Engine continually updated no different to UE4 built for sims not games

So each studio would release titles by series ( not same cars ) BTCC Nascar as well
You would get umpteen times more useful feedback

One studio could release track day sim same engine physics and buy only tracks and cars you wish ( no default content )
 
B
Of course they are lazy !

It's been 18 years ( EIGHTEEN ) since we saw a true Rally Simulator !

First there was Richard Burns Rally !

Then there was nothing !
 
rallysmo
YES, for about at least a decade, maybe more, for those blame the investors this isnt compleyty true, back then you can play an AAA game without problem, for instance any nfs, diablo, mario, gtr game, didnt need update fix
 
V
In many respects we've gone backwards. AI in particular was mastered back in the late 90's and early 2000's with games like NR2003, GP4, and the like, and nowadays half the modern sims have terrible AI that is completely unfun and lifeless to race against. Sims used to be complete packages with all the cars and tracks of one particular series, now they're hodgepodges of random cars and tracks. Outside of physics, there has been barely any improvement since Rfactor 1. Assetto Corsa has the physics but its AI is very bad and it's awful at actually simulating a MOTORSPORTS race instead of a GT/Forza-style simcade race. RF2 used to have great AI but it got broken and now it's basically got nothing going for it whatsoever. Project Cars 2 has tons of cars, tracks, and features, but the physics are a mess and the AI is once again bad. AMS2 spent half its development un****ing the Madness Engine's physics issues and it's yet another random hodgepodge of cars and tracks. ACC has the physics but the AI YET AGAIN is bad and it runs like absolute goddamn **** thanks to UE4.

iRacing of all things is a better offline experience than any of these sims and it's an online-only multiplayer sim that has AI as a side feature!

I'm tired. Tired of sims that are just absolutely incoherent mishmashes of content, with a huge amount of issues that are so baked-in they are unfixable by modding. Sims that have the same issues from ten years ago no one wanted fix.

Papyrus and Geoff Crammond actually gave a damn and sold you a product with care and polish put into it. I haven't seen anything like that in the sim world in over a decade. Why do I own a wheel from 2015 if the best experience is sims from 2002?
 
D
Anyone that has been or talked to people in the industry of making a game knows that there's rarely such a thing as a lazy dev, 9/10 cases its limited dev time/resources, and in the last case is a dev forced to work with crap tools or pre-existing crap code. Devs when making games know very VERY early on if they are working on a pile of **** and if it will fail or succeed, but they have no way to pull magic when they have business suit people breathing in their necks with a deadline.
 
Patrik Marek
JonnyCombat said:
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.
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ha! I think this is ultimately what it comes down to as well !
why spend more money on something if people are ok with it

if people stop buying, go through with refunds, then you know you have more work on your hands

as far as the pressure from the investors / game publisher I wonder if it's similar to movies where the studio has a certain amount of films they have to release through year, so that they don't lose their spots in cinema ( well , covid have definitely thrown a wrench into that ! ) , so it's better for them to release average movies, then waiting on the most amazing thing out there , and that's why they put money into "safer" choices, which ultimately is something that lot of people on the forums / internet complain about, but the general public doesn't care and pays for the tickets / blurays / streaming anyhow

the final say and power is at the end still with the customers

sure, you could argue that because simracing is smaller marker, you should support your developer bit more , otherwise this market can get even smaller

if it was so easy, everyone would do it

and one more thing, and please don't take this personally
I think that the idea of having one engine to rule them all is bad idea , every game would be the same and what would be to point to develop more games ?
as an example, GT3 are a big thing now ( eventough we might not agree) , so in that logic there would be 1 GT3 game, and no-other game would be relased with that content , so there won't be anything different to offer , nothing to push one developer to come up with new ideas , new implementations

let alone that if you had one rule them all game engine, with best everything, having support to all hardware, having all kinds of physics ( planes, cars, ships, FPS, Third person shooter ) imagine how buggy that would be ?? even if we only consider cars ( euro truck simulator , vs racing simulator vs karts ) it's all so differnet that having universal engine would basically be suppoting all but only on less then an average level, with more than average amount of bugs

to the contrary, if you make a one series game - such as ACC did - you have a chance to create something really good, focused, polished, in reasonable amount of time and not too bugged
of course in case of ACC the "issue" was that they were using not their own engine, which means that there are limitations of what you can do , unless you rewrite the entire enigne haha
 
RichardHessels
Stereo said:
If the customers have an unrealistic expectation for long enough, the devs will go elsewhere (rf2 team making top gear game, kunos making a sailboat sim)

You can't just say "they should make better games" and have the budget appear... AC was probably developed for less than $1 million, no matter how you divide that up you don't get 5 years of a large team of devs salaries.
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It's all not true what you say.
S397 did not work on the top Gear game.
They licensed their physics tech.
Rest is done by a separate Amazon studio.
Kunos did not make a sailingsim.
AC development was probably a lot more.
The licensing of the tracks and cars was way more expensive.
There are tracks asking up to 100.000 euro for a license. Mind you, that just for using their appearance.
A laserscan needs to be bought or made. Than it still needs to be developed.
 
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S
Not gonna be destrutive here, not worth it.
I just hope the OP writer would not blame it on the sim engineers/codies but rather the executives to give in to investor pressure to sell unfinished jobs.
Of course, this is easy to say in a market with gamers who are much more impatient and with many options to seek other avenues (for other half-baked solutions that is as trends goes these times).

I share @Vedaras observations regarding 1st hand experience of Geoff Crammond and Papyrus products in the mid 90ies (and up to SimBin with GTR2 and ISI with rF1). No half baked solutons, but quality from the gun. But I think this is very much thanks to focussing on one or very few series.

In fact Kunos have this possibility to go with AC2:
Concentrating on 1, max 3 series. Making 2nd to none sim engine.
But still keeping in mind making the sim very modding managable indeed. Today I often even don't have to finetune AIW myself, but can often just look up the internet for a modder doing it better than me.

Nota bene:
Quite frankly, however I don't think Kunos will go with 'a half-baked AC2' for release anyway :sneaky:
 
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ScrewCaptain27
Yes, yes they are. Look at Codemasters. Do they have a valid reason to still use outdated track models from 2012 in their F1 games? No.
 
kart1
even the "journalists" of RD become polemicists or go to this site... it's looking for buzz like a simple tiktoker...
 
FernandoAFM
Part of the issue is that some racing fans will buy the new yearly release just because it’s “new” or because their league forces them to. I have a friend who buys F1 and Nascar on day 1 just so he’s updated, without ever criticizing them or demanding substantial updates. I am glad that makes my friend happy, but on the other hand, we end up with mostly the same game every year.
 

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