4 ms·

As frustrating as it is, not a whole lot of people in the video game industry really care about that, and for those that do, they can't really do that much abou

by jfim 6y ago

As frustrating as it is, not a whole lot of people in the video game industry really care about that, and for those that do, they can't really do that much about it. Once a game is sold, there's not much of an incentive to keep it alive other than making sure it's moderately playable so that they manage to sell expansion packs or downloadable content. A hypothetical "someone might overflow a buffer and run arbitrary code" bug is going to be pretty low on the list compared to "all the graphics are broken on the latest nvidia driver because our code base is held together by duct tape and wishful thinking." Even for the developers that do care about writing decent code (and a lot of them do care about making great games), after 60 hours or more a week of fixing random bugs on Barbie's Plastic Adventures, Call of Battlefield, or Mobile Lootbox Idle Clicker, there's not that much motivation left at the end of the day to work on these kinds of issues.

paulmd 6y ago
It’s pretty frustrating with games like TF2 that still generate significant amounts of revenue but can’t even get major security problems patched let alone basic bugs fixed. And I’m not talking about selling new copies, I’m talking about hundreds of millions of dollars a year in lootbox revenue.
- jfim 6y ago
  Games like DotA 2 that still get attention from Valve have all kinds of broken things. Bots were endemic in certain MMR brackets for a while (might still be, no idea), and they were pretty straightforward to detect. Multiple kinds of griefing were pretty much ignored, reporting players didn't do anything for a while, and so on. Even Rockstar had the issue about load times for GTA online, which had they even bothered to look into it, would've netted them dozens of millions of dollars. Until there's something absolutely catastrophic like a worm that spreads through a popular online game and formats hard drives/mines bitcoin/transfers all the hats to third parties, the industry will keep on doing the same thing as usual with no care. I wish it was different, but it's not, unfortunately. I definitely understand your frustration though.

by jfim 6y ago

paulmd 6y ago

It’s pretty frustrating with games like TF2 that still generate significant amounts of revenue but can’t even get major security problems patched let alone basic bugs fixed. And I’m not talking about selling new copies, I’m talking about hundreds of millions of dollars a year in lootbox revenue.

jfim 6y ago
Games like DotA 2 that still get attention from Valve have all kinds of broken things. Bots were endemic in certain MMR brackets for a while (might still be, no idea), and they were pretty straightforward to detect. Multiple kinds of griefing were pretty much ignored, reporting players didn't do anything for a while, and so on. Even Rockstar had the issue about load times for GTA online, which had they even bothered to look into it, would've netted them dozens of millions of dollars. Until there's something absolutely catastrophic like a worm that spreads through a popular online game and formats hard drives/mines bitcoin/transfers all the hats to third parties, the industry will keep on doing the same thing as usual with no care. I wish it was different, but it's not, unfortunately. I definitely understand your frustration though.