5 ms·

There have been plenty of hugely successful and highly regarded titles that were filled with bugs and crashed a lot I think it's false, and a huge mistake. The

There have been plenty of hugely successful and highly regarded titles that were filled with bugs and crashed a lot I think it's false, and a huge mistake. There is rare cases, but not plenty. Video games (I mean video games for core gamers) are products that demand first and above all quality to be successful. There is rather plenty of common games with a huge quality which become hits (Kingdom Rush for example or Starcraft which was finally kind of common in its time). One of the rules in the delovepment process at Blizzard is that they ship a game when it has less than 100 known bugs. Also, I would add that, it seems that, ID software did not make a successful games since Doom. Quake wasn't a commercial success, Quake2, Quake3, Doom3 and Rage neither (that's why ID software has been bought for only $100M). After all, ID Software lost one of its core value co-founder a long time ago (John Romero) who was responsible of the gameplay of ID's games... Quality in video games are everything, that's really my opinion. It's also really an edge for every indy developper which want to start a company in this sector, cases are countless.

bgaluszka 14y ago
> Anyway, nobody here, is still playing one of these games - starcraft for example, is a game still played. Well, I wouldn't say nobody. I, for one, play/watch Quakeworld and Quakelive on a regular basis.
- FredBrach 14y ago
  Ok you're right. I've deleted that. I say right because we could discuss hours about what nobody means. Oh just a question, so did you bought quake?
  - bgaluszka 14y ago
    I bought them and won them on tournaments so I own few of those :)
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
Impossible 14y ago
"Quake wasn't a commercial success, Quake2, Quake3, Doom3 and Rage neither (that's why ID software has been bought)" Do you have actual sales numbers to back that up or is this based on anecdotal evidence, or is it just because you didn't like the games as much :)? Publicly available internet numbers show that Doom 3 sold 3.5 million, and even Rage sold 2.31 million, making Doom 3 extremely profitable and probably putting Rage a little higher than break even given the long development time and much larger team size. Two of the Quake games are listed on wikipedia's top selling PC games and sold 1.7 and 1 million. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_PC_video_games http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_PC_video_g...) Although none of these numbers are 100% accurate unless they are wildly off I wouldn't call any of id's games except Rage unsuccessful.
- klodolph 14y ago
  Don't forget licensing. On the top-selling games are other games which are based on the Quake/id Tech source code: 3 Half-Life games, 2 Counter-Strike games, and American McGee's Alice. I'm sure only a small percentage of Half-Life 2 code can still be traced to its Quake roots, but it's still some impressive technology. (Alice is a little more obviously derived from Q3A.)
  - FredBrach 14y ago
    You forget the Call of Duty engine which is, if I'm not wrong, still made of Quake engine code... Sure, others made trully successful games with their technology. Others, like Valve, actually did the video games history since the 2000's. ID not. I'm sorry for that, but it seems to be true.
    - klodolph 14y ago
      You seem to be arguing that id Software's games since around 2000 haven't been very good... but I'm not sure why, since nobody here is really disagreeing with you on that point. The argument here is that lots of successful games are buggy, and id Software's games aren't buggy. Trying to run BioShock on my computer is a nightmare (you have to mess with compatibility settings, and even then you get no sound at all). When I played Fallout 3 it crashed about once every few hours of play time, and that was late 2012 with no add-ons -- 4 years after the game's release you'd expect patches to address things. Bethesda has a kind of reputation for releasing buggy games, it seems.
klodolph 14y ago
I used to organize LAN parties (up to 30 people); Quake 3 and other id Software titles were the most stable titles we played. They ran on a wide variety of hardware configurations without crashes or glitches. We'd often try playing a new game, spend 45 minutes trying to get it to work, and throw our hands in the air saying "Well, let's play Q3A because we know it works on everyone's computer." Half-Life and mods were in the same category, but Half-Life was developed using the Quake engine as a starting point. Okay, yes, Blizzard games are nice and stable and polished too. But have you been reading the Starcraft development articles recently? They've been talking about how much of a nightmare the entire experience was, with major bugs until just before launch. From what I gather, one of the senior developers was running around fixing bugs across the entire code base, and personally reviewed and fixed up an astonishingly large percentage of Starcraft code. One can wonder: if they were using static analysis, could they have shipped the same game earlier?
- FredBrach 14y ago
  My point wasn't that ID Software made buggy games. My point is I think that they don't know since a while what a trully successful video game is made of.
malbs 14y ago
What, in your opinion, constitutes a commercial success? Quake was/is one of the best games of it's genre, ever. It sold 1.7 million copies, as a shareware release. Doom 3 sold 3.5 million copies. It wasn't a commercial success? Not to mention the games that were built on top of id technology, games like Half Life, Call of Duty, et al
- FredBrach 14y ago
  Be sure that those games are in my heart too. But these numbers doesn't correspond to trully highly succesful games. That's why ID has been sold for only $100M. For a comparaison, Riot Games has been sold for $400M with only one game (League of Legend) [1]. Also, Minecraft[2] sold 7+ millions of java copies. It's more than x2 copies than Doom3 on "one platform". [1] http://www.develop-online.net/news/36960/Tencent-pays-400m-for-Riot-Games-buyout http://www.develop-online.net/news/36960/Tencent-pays-400m-f... [2] http://www.minecraft.net/ http://www.minecraft.net/

bgaluszka 14y ago

> Anyway, nobody here, is still playing one of these games - starcraft for example, is a game still played. Well, I wouldn't say nobody. I, for one, play/watch Quakeworld and Quakelive on a regular basis.

FredBrach 14y ago
Ok you're right. I've deleted that. I say right because we could discuss hours about what nobody means. Oh just a question, so did you bought quake?
- bgaluszka 14y ago
  I bought them and won them on tournaments so I own few of those :)
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]

Impossible 14y ago

"Quake wasn't a commercial success, Quake2, Quake3, Doom3 and Rage neither (that's why ID software has been bought)" Do you have actual sales numbers to back that up or is this based on anecdotal evidence, or is it just because you didn't like the games as much :)? Publicly available internet numbers show that Doom 3 sold 3.5 million, and even Rage sold 2.31 million, making Doom 3 extremely profitable and probably putting Rage a little higher than break even given the long development time and much larger team size. Two of the Quake games are listed on wikipedia's top selling PC games and sold 1.7 and 1 million. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_PC_video_games http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_PC_video_g...) Although none of these numbers are 100% accurate unless they are wildly off I wouldn't call any of id's games except Rage unsuccessful.

klodolph 14y ago
Don't forget licensing. On the top-selling games are other games which are based on the Quake/id Tech source code: 3 Half-Life games, 2 Counter-Strike games, and American McGee's Alice. I'm sure only a small percentage of Half-Life 2 code can still be traced to its Quake roots, but it's still some impressive technology. (Alice is a little more obviously derived from Q3A.)
- FredBrach 14y ago
  You forget the Call of Duty engine which is, if I'm not wrong, still made of Quake engine code... Sure, others made trully successful games with their technology. Others, like Valve, actually did the video games history since the 2000's. ID not. I'm sorry for that, but it seems to be true.
  - klodolph 14y ago
    You seem to be arguing that id Software's games since around 2000 haven't been very good... but I'm not sure why, since nobody here is really disagreeing with you on that point. The argument here is that lots of successful games are buggy, and id Software's games aren't buggy. Trying to run BioShock on my computer is a nightmare (you have to mess with compatibility settings, and even then you get no sound at all). When I played Fallout 3 it crashed about once every few hours of play time, and that was late 2012 with no add-ons -- 4 years after the game's release you'd expect patches to address things. Bethesda has a kind of reputation for releasing buggy games, it seems.

klodolph 14y ago

I used to organize LAN parties (up to 30 people); Quake 3 and other id Software titles were the most stable titles we played. They ran on a wide variety of hardware configurations without crashes or glitches. We'd often try playing a new game, spend 45 minutes trying to get it to work, and throw our hands in the air saying "Well, let's play Q3A because we know it works on everyone's computer." Half-Life and mods were in the same category, but Half-Life was developed using the Quake engine as a starting point. Okay, yes, Blizzard games are nice and stable and polished too. But have you been reading the Starcraft development articles recently? They've been talking about how much of a nightmare the entire experience was, with major bugs until just before launch. From what I gather, one of the senior developers was running around fixing bugs across the entire code base, and personally reviewed and fixed up an astonishingly large percentage of Starcraft code. One can wonder: if they were using static analysis, could they have shipped the same game earlier?

FredBrach 14y ago
My point wasn't that ID Software made buggy games. My point is I think that they don't know since a while what a trully successful video game is made of.

malbs 14y ago

What, in your opinion, constitutes a commercial success? Quake was/is one of the best games of it's genre, ever. It sold 1.7 million copies, as a shareware release. Doom 3 sold 3.5 million copies. It wasn't a commercial success? Not to mention the games that were built on top of id technology, games like Half Life, Call of Duty, et al

FredBrach 14y ago
Be sure that those games are in my heart too. But these numbers doesn't correspond to trully highly succesful games. That's why ID has been sold for only $100M. For a comparaison, Riot Games has been sold for $400M with only one game (League of Legend) [1]. Also, Minecraft[2] sold 7+ millions of java copies. It's more than x2 copies than Doom3 on "one platform". [1] http://www.develop-online.net/news/36960/Tencent-pays-400m-for-Riot-Games-buyout http://www.develop-online.net/news/36960/Tencent-pays-400m-f... [2] http://www.minecraft.net/ http://www.minecraft.net/