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Thanks for sharing this insight! In your experience: What is the biggest misunderstanding that customers (or critics) seem to have about the game development i

Thanks for sharing this insight! In your experience: What is the biggest misunderstanding that customers (or critics) seem to have about the game development industry?

Agentlien 8y ago
Wow, that's a really tough one. Turns out my answer became a really long one and touched on a number of things. The biggest one is probably that developers aren't hearing or understanding feedback. We're in the same forums, reading the same posts. When players have concerns, the developers have mostly raised the same concerns long before the game was shipped. But identifying a problem isn't enough. Sometimes fixing problems are very difficult or very expensive. Sometimes, thorough design and testing has shown that all the obvious improvements are actually worse in non-obvious ways. So developers do read the feedback. We just, for reasons I already touched on, mostly don't comment. On a similar topic, it seems a lot of players don't realise that we're not an army of drones in suits aiming to make money. Most of us, by quite a margin, are really passionate gamers who've decided we love games so much we want to make them our vocation and spend at least 40 hours a week on them. Every time I see a post about how "the developers" don't understand what "the players" want, I look around the office and see nothing but players, most of whom share the same feelings and concerns. Another big one, and this is something I realised that I myself was clueless of before joining game development, is how difficult it is to react quickly to feedback, fix bugs and add features. You often see players complaining that they've raised a concern weeks ago, and it still hasn't been addressed. Being allowed to release a game on consoles requires going through certification with the console manufacturer. This is a really big, costly endeavour which takes a lot of time and requires making sure you adhere to a staggering amount of rules.[0] This and other concerns regarding distributors and retailers mean what's on the physical disc needs to be in place months in advance, making it pretty old once the game is released. Add to that the fact that bringing out a game patch for PS4 or Xbox is very expensive[1] and requires you going through cert again, and you'll see why many developers try to schedule their patches way ahead of time. Obviously, you want to do rigorous internal testing to make sure you don't have to go back and forth with cert more than necessary. Which suddenly means you have a month-long gap between something being submitted for testing and the patch reaching your loyal paying customers. It's definitely painful, watching the angry comments flow in about an issue you solved weeks ago. Now, I'm not complaining about this. The cert rules and patch restrictions are almost always very logical and there to ensure high quality for the players. But they do come at a cost. [0] https://kotaku.com/so-how-long-do-sony-and-microsofts-approvals-processes-5080083 https://kotaku.com/so-how-long-do-sony-and-microsofts-approv... [1] https://kotaku.com/wait-it-costs-40-000-to-patch-a-console-game-5884842 https://kotaku.com/wait-it-costs-40-000-to-patch-a-console-g...
gambiting 8y ago
I'm not the original poster, but also work at another publisher similar in size to EA, and I'd say that the whole idea of complaining about day-1 patches from both gamers and critics makes no sense, especially in the era of "live" games which receive ongoing support all the time. Like, we're releasing a game this month, right? Do you know when we sent our master builds for submission? In December. It honestly takes nearly 4 months for the game to go from a finished build to a disc you can buy at a store near you. And the team working on this game is something like 600+ people. What are they going to do between closing the master build and March? They continue working on the game, of course. And the culmination of this work comes out as the day one patch. In fact, the day one patch was submitted and approved couple weeks ago, and the game isn't even out yet - we're now working on the second patch that's going to come out few weeks after release. I'd say in general a misunderstanding of how impossibly long things can take is an issue. Even if we wanted to create and publish an emergency patch for one of our games today, it would take at least 3-4 days before it would go live on PS4/X1. It's just how it is. Bug reports can take days to percolate through support, then to the right studio, then to the right team, then to the right person. Yes, it might be an "easy" fix of just changing a value or two in a text file, but between the customer support taking a report and us pushing a patch out it can take a week or two. And in general, it's quite frustrating that as a dev I sometimes see someone having an issue on a forum for our game and I know that I can't reply with advice, because if someone found out that I work for this company it could be misconstrued(as an example - I know that you can get around a particular error by using a VPN temporarily, but I can't be in a position where I'm advising people to download and use VPN software) - so instead I say nothing, and it bothers me that I could help someone but at the same time I can't.
- Agentlien 8y ago
  It's interesting to see that we both brought up the same thing about day 1 patches in our responses.
- onli 8y ago
  It's cool that you share your thoughts on this! I hope what I write below does not sound too aggressive. > It honestly takes nearly 4 months for the game to go from a finished build to a disc you can buy at a store near you. But we do not buy games in stores anymore. I do think you miss why day-1 patches are hated. It's not really about the patch, it's about the state of many AAA games on release, in that they are released with significant bugs. I understand why that happens - time is short, testing on PC with all the possible configurations is very hard - but when really basic things are broken as a customer you feel betrayed. It does not help when console ports have completely unusable UI on PC and games have always-on requirements that fail on game launch, etc. All this "vitrol" gets merged with day 1 patches and that's what this is about. At least partly, I think. > especially in the era of "live" games which receive ongoing support all the time That's kind of a funny thing to say in a thread about EA when they and others shut their multiplayer game servers down all the time to sell the next very similar installment of a franchise. In the current climate, this "live" service thing stinks like corporate speak for an ongoing stream of new micro transactions. We just had games getting micro transaction + lootboxes shortly after the reviews were over. Not a good precedent to set. > It's just how it is. Bug reports can take days to percolate through support, then to the right studio, then to the right team, then to the right person. That seems to be very common in large enterprises in general, but it is also very sad. I think having these crusted large-enterprisey structure on one side is a big factor of why gamers feel developer studios/publishers are disconnected from their reality. But there are means to combat this, Riot for example was very successful in reaching their base with their champion spotlight and nicas community shows while already having a huge number of players, at least that seemed to work well for a while. > But I can't be in a position where I'm advising people to download and use VPN software VPNs are not illegal. Is it that your EULAs forbid using one? That would be ridiculous. In a good company you should be able to give that advice.

Thanks for sharing this insight! In your experience: What is the biggest misunderstanding that customers (or critics) seem to have about the game development industry?

Agentlien 8y ago

Wow, that's a really tough one. Turns out my answer became a really long one and touched on a number of things. The biggest one is probably that developers aren't hearing or understanding feedback. We're in the same forums, reading the same posts. When players have concerns, the developers have mostly raised the same concerns long before the game was shipped. But identifying a problem isn't enough. Sometimes fixing problems are very difficult or very expensive. Sometimes, thorough design and testing has shown that all the obvious improvements are actually worse in non-obvious ways. So developers do read the feedback. We just, for reasons I already touched on, mostly don't comment. On a similar topic, it seems a lot of players don't realise that we're not an army of drones in suits aiming to make money. Most of us, by quite a margin, are really passionate gamers who've decided we love games so much we want to make them our vocation and spend at least 40 hours a week on them. Every time I see a post about how "the developers" don't understand what "the players" want, I look around the office and see nothing but players, most of whom share the same feelings and concerns. Another big one, and this is something I realised that I myself was clueless of before joining game development, is how difficult it is to react quickly to feedback, fix bugs and add features. You often see players complaining that they've raised a concern weeks ago, and it still hasn't been addressed. Being allowed to release a game on consoles requires going through certification with the console manufacturer. This is a really big, costly endeavour which takes a lot of time and requires making sure you adhere to a staggering amount of rules.[0] This and other concerns regarding distributors and retailers mean what's on the physical disc needs to be in place months in advance, making it pretty old once the game is released. Add to that the fact that bringing out a game patch for PS4 or Xbox is very expensive[1] and requires you going through cert again, and you'll see why many developers try to schedule their patches way ahead of time. Obviously, you want to do rigorous internal testing to make sure you don't have to go back and forth with cert more than necessary. Which suddenly means you have a month-long gap between something being submitted for testing and the patch reaching your loyal paying customers. It's definitely painful, watching the angry comments flow in about an issue you solved weeks ago. Now, I'm not complaining about this. The cert rules and patch restrictions are almost always very logical and there to ensure high quality for the players. But they do come at a cost. [0] https://kotaku.com/so-how-long-do-sony-and-microsofts-approvals-processes-5080083 https://kotaku.com/so-how-long-do-sony-and-microsofts-approv... [1] https://kotaku.com/wait-it-costs-40-000-to-patch-a-console-game-5884842 https://kotaku.com/wait-it-costs-40-000-to-patch-a-console-g...

gambiting 8y ago

I'm not the original poster, but also work at another publisher similar in size to EA, and I'd say that the whole idea of complaining about day-1 patches from both gamers and critics makes no sense, especially in the era of "live" games which receive ongoing support all the time. Like, we're releasing a game this month, right? Do you know when we sent our master builds for submission? In December. It honestly takes nearly 4 months for the game to go from a finished build to a disc you can buy at a store near you. And the team working on this game is something like 600+ people. What are they going to do between closing the master build and March? They continue working on the game, of course. And the culmination of this work comes out as the day one patch. In fact, the day one patch was submitted and approved couple weeks ago, and the game isn't even out yet - we're now working on the second patch that's going to come out few weeks after release. I'd say in general a misunderstanding of how impossibly long things can take is an issue. Even if we wanted to create and publish an emergency patch for one of our games today, it would take at least 3-4 days before it would go live on PS4/X1. It's just how it is. Bug reports can take days to percolate through support, then to the right studio, then to the right team, then to the right person. Yes, it might be an "easy" fix of just changing a value or two in a text file, but between the customer support taking a report and us pushing a patch out it can take a week or two. And in general, it's quite frustrating that as a dev I sometimes see someone having an issue on a forum for our game and I know that I can't reply with advice, because if someone found out that I work for this company it could be misconstrued(as an example - I know that you can get around a particular error by using a VPN temporarily, but I can't be in a position where I'm advising people to download and use VPN software) - so instead I say nothing, and it bothers me that I could help someone but at the same time I can't.

Agentlien 8y ago
It's interesting to see that we both brought up the same thing about day 1 patches in our responses.
onli 8y ago
It's cool that you share your thoughts on this! I hope what I write below does not sound too aggressive. > It honestly takes nearly 4 months for the game to go from a finished build to a disc you can buy at a store near you. But we do not buy games in stores anymore. I do think you miss why day-1 patches are hated. It's not really about the patch, it's about the state of many AAA games on release, in that they are released with significant bugs. I understand why that happens - time is short, testing on PC with all the possible configurations is very hard - but when really basic things are broken as a customer you feel betrayed. It does not help when console ports have completely unusable UI on PC and games have always-on requirements that fail on game launch, etc. All this "vitrol" gets merged with day 1 patches and that's what this is about. At least partly, I think. > especially in the era of "live" games which receive ongoing support all the time That's kind of a funny thing to say in a thread about EA when they and others shut their multiplayer game servers down all the time to sell the next very similar installment of a franchise. In the current climate, this "live" service thing stinks like corporate speak for an ongoing stream of new micro transactions. We just had games getting micro transaction + lootboxes shortly after the reviews were over. Not a good precedent to set. > It's just how it is. Bug reports can take days to percolate through support, then to the right studio, then to the right team, then to the right person. That seems to be very common in large enterprises in general, but it is also very sad. I think having these crusted large-enterprisey structure on one side is a big factor of why gamers feel developer studios/publishers are disconnected from their reality. But there are means to combat this, Riot for example was very successful in reaching their base with their champion spotlight and nicas community shows while already having a huge number of players, at least that seemed to work well for a while. > But I can't be in a position where I'm advising people to download and use VPN software VPNs are not illegal. Is it that your EULAs forbid using one? That would be ridiculous. In a good company you should be able to give that advice.