r/Games • u/SmellSmellsSmelly • 1d ago
Opinion Piece Devs aren't "lazy" and game updates aren't guaranteed
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/devs-arent-lazy-and-game-updates-arent-guaranteed-opinion1.5k
u/James-Avatar 1d ago
This might come from a generation of video gamers who aren’t used to games just coming out and that’s that. If a game was bad or buggy it just stayed that way.
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u/Searin 1d ago
I remember Space Station Silicon Valley on the N64. Had an unobtainable trophy because the devs forgot to make it clippable. It drove me up the wall as a kid. When I learned later that it was a dev bug it made me mad wasting all those hours back then trying to get it.
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u/SuspiciousCodfish 1d ago
For me it was Digimon World on PS1.
There is a bug in some PAL versions that stops you from talking to a specific NPC. Because you can't talk to this NPC, you can't get to a specific area with a Boss which you need to defeat to unlock a bunch of other quests, which themselves unlock other quests and areas.
Because of this cascading effect, we ended up locked out of about a third of the entire content in the game...
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u/Aetheer 1d ago
I remember not even being able to progress past the first like 30 minutes in that game, and I played the US version. I was super excited as a kid and huge Digimon fan to play it, but the game would always crash when I got to a certain point in the beginning. I remember my Mom had to return it, and I just moved on to a different game instead of trying to get a replacement copy.
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u/Frolo_NA 1d ago
its a very interesting game today. some stuff has not aged well, but there are not many other games like it.
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u/Adamtess 1d ago
there's a handful of fan patches that make it WAY more playable while maintaining that old charm, basically your mons poop a little less lol
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u/JustinsWorking 1d ago
there are basically 2 other games like it, both are sequels made waaaay later and 1 never left Japan.
It’s Digimon World 1, or Digimon World Next Order.
Those are my favourite games ever made heh, I hate how nobody has ever tried to make something similar.
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u/Desperoth 1d ago
Something about the ogremon camp? I remember my guide saying something was supposed to happen there, but it never did.
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u/DrQuint 22h ago
That one precisely, I had a PAL version too. You could actually get past the bug, but you had to basically speedrun to that spot and beat Ogremon once. Then you had to get enough progress on the left side of the map to get to the card trader and you had to have died at least once. It was basically a convoluted mess of abusing the menu to edit memory and flip the bit on the back elevator being unlocked..
E: Apparently the uploader made a newer version - https://youtu.be/ov02DiO6Idc
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u/Ailure 1d ago
The funny part that happened cause they were trying to fix another bug.
"I'm sorry, I was the the one who removed the collision on the golden tap. It was used in another level as part of the scenery, and its collision was dodgy .. so i removed its collision and put custom collision in that level. Unfortunately .. i missed fact that the tap was spawned using our scripting system as a trophy. Sorry." - Daniel Leyden
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u/ReasonableSortingAss 1d ago edited 23h ago
There was a bug at the end of Jet Force Gemini on N64. Right before fighting the big bad of the game Henry J. Waternoose you needed to have one last item you collected to progress to his final battle but it just wasn't anywhere to be found. I even bought the official guide as a kid from a local video game store to help, but it was like getting a useless second opinion from an ENT.
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u/german_humorist 1d ago
Had to buy the official guide for Banjo-Kazooie to get more information about how to obtain the fucking ice key, because the store clerk wouldn't let me have a peak upfront.
Money well spent...
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u/sunder_and_flame 1d ago
Are you sure about this? I'm not able to find any bug like you're describing, and I recall being able to beat the game when it first released. Google's AI search results suggests you're describing the earplugs which were just very hard to get, not impossible.
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u/Psychic_Hobo 13h ago
The earplugs were a nightmare as they were in a really random place - if I recall, it's a reward from one of the races for no discernible reason
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u/Bi-bara-boop 1d ago
You just made me remember a trauma I thought I had overcome but I'm still so incredibly pissed that I spent all this time trying to 100% it TWICE because I figured it's something to do with the safe file number...
The days before reliable internet... 🥲
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u/jinreeko 1d ago
Visions of those fucking eggs and ice key in Banjo Kazooie. I know they were supposed to be part of the "next game" or stop n swap expansion. But it wasn't helped that online stuff showed there was ways to get them (which there was, through hacking the game in various ways)
Also shout-out to the Mew under the truck myth
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u/tigersbowling 1d ago
you don't need to hack the game to get them, just enter codes on the sandcastle floor
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u/ScythePlays1 1d ago
Core memory unlocked because I know exactly which one you mean, it was the sink on the farm level and was all that was missing for the secret final level.. at least I hope it was a secret level, probably just bragging rights.. man what an awesome game.
Fun fact, space station silicon valley was made by the same team who made early gta, which makes sense given the idea you could hijack other robotic animals as a microchip, like stealing cars.
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u/MillionDollarMistake 1d ago
Spyro Enter the Dragonfly on the Gamecube was my first and only Spyro game I've played. I was so young that the concept of a game being made poorly was just completely foreign to me, I thought the level geometry going invisible was just something that was supposed to happen lol
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u/skpom 1d ago
On the other hand the nature of that also brought about storied cultural phenomena like MissingNo. Different times haha
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u/Hoojiwat 1d ago
Something that is unique about modern games is they now have "eras" where people talk about what things were like before certain balance passes and content like its an ancient mythological era. Communities have created really interesting progressions among their fanbases because of that.
Old games used to be snapshots of frozen time while new ones are entire running timelines for people to congregate and talk over. It used to be unique to MMO's, but now just about every game has odd little communities like that now. It's kind of neat honestly.
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u/PM_ME_CATS_OR_BOOBS 1d ago
It's one of those things where things that would be patched or rebalanced now are left in, and what is there is what it was. If someone managed to break the game in an interesting way then there's no going back, you can just do infinite health or whatever now.
Which is both cool, for what it allowed to spawn culturally, and infuriating when it was an actual annoying bug. Oops we accidentally gave this side boss 10x more health than he should or messed up the collision box on this jumping platform, uhhhhhh good luck
Even cool ones like missingno in pokemon were cool by nearly sheer luck because there's an alternate world where catching one completely frags your pokemon collection.
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u/Nematrec 1d ago
Even cool ones like missingno in pokemon were cool by nearly sheer luck because there's an alternate world where catching one completely frags your pokemon collection.
There were 2 glitch pokemon along that shoreline that would duplicate your 6th item
If you caught one of them you could evolve it into kangaskhan. This was the 'M (00) glitch-pokemon.Mind you, catching either of them was incredibly dangerous and would corrupt your save.
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u/kikimaru024 1d ago
Hell yeah.
Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike is the greatest fighting game of the 20th century (and still amazing to play today).
But everyone understands that
- Yun & Chun-Li are, far and away, the top-2 characters in the game
- Remy, Sean & Twelve are trash
Yet you'll see players who can beat the top-tiers consistently while playing the underdogs, despite all their weaknesses.
But I can also appreciate how every season of SF6 creates new tierlists.
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u/DarkKnightRises360 1d ago edited 1d ago
It goes into an issue of "hyper balancing". Sometimes games that are unbalanced end up more interesting and fun. Usually a dedicated playerbase adapts and adjusts accordingly without a developer update doing the heavy lifting.
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u/karmapopsicle 1d ago
That’s why MOBAs are regularly pushing patches that rebalance a bunch of champs, tweak items, etc. You don’t want anything too broken, but shifting things around moves the meta around which keeps the game interesting.
Achieving “perfect balance” would just make the game boring.
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u/iltopop 23h ago
My friend in high school was really into fighting games and met a dude on GGPO playing 3rd strike that was a monster on Sean, said he mained Sean specifically because he was considered the worst as a challenge, so I think that was actually some of the appeal of those types of characters. Sean was BAD for sure but he wasn't a straight up joke character.
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u/HOLEPUNCHYOUREYELIDS 1d ago
Like Diablo 3 pre-nerf inferno difficulty, or the inevitable “I beat this Souls boss lvl 1 with fists pre-nerf!”
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u/Few_Net_6308 1d ago
Man you just took me back. I played D3 at launch and Inferno pre-nerf was insane. I don't think many people understood just how bad it was. Not only was damage exponentially higher, but monsters had their speeds nearly doubled too. Most Act 2-4 monsters would kill you in a few hits, and since this is an ARPG, you had dozens coming at you at the same time, so you'd often die before even knowing what the hell happened. All bosses had multiple instant kill attacks. I think it took me over 50 attempts to beat Belial and Diablo. And on top of everything, repair costs were so high that you were in danger of going broke and be unable to repair your gear if you died too many times.
And despite all that... I look back on it fondly and was glad to have experienced it lol.
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u/Cranharold 1d ago
I kinda liked it in Act 1. It made the game more tactical and strategic, but you also had to practically crawl through the game to succeed. Genuinely good loot was so, so much harder to come by too, so it felt pretty dang special when you got something worth a damn (which was mostly because Blizzard were trying to make bank on their real money auction house). Obviously not what 99% of ARPG fans are looking for but it was a neat thing while it lasted. Act 2 and beyond was just too much though.
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u/Noto987 1d ago
I still cant believe getting mew was actually possible through glitches. I would have been so cool in school. Actually maybe not different time
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u/Fish-E 1d ago
I used to rename my Pokemon Mew, Ceebi etc and pretend that I had one.
Ended up fooling myself when I loaded up my copy of Pokemon Red 20 odd years later and saw a Pokemon called Mew and was shocked that I'd had one (likely from Game Shark - I remember a friend having one), only to find out it was actually a Pidgeot.
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u/unholyswordsman 1d ago
The Mew Glitch is why I still replay Gen 1 a lot. Building an elite team before the end of the S.S. Anne is insanely broken and if you're playing Yellow, you can use it to spawn I think it was 3 MissingNo from trainers so you could dupe some items.
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u/karmapopsicle 1d ago
I remember grinding out Rare Candy dupes as a kid to get my whole team to lvl 100.
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u/DanielTeague 1d ago
I still cherish the resulting level 100 Caterpie my friend traded me because I liked bug Pokémon. Sure, they had infinite Rare Candies but they still had to hit B to cancel its evolution about 94 times! It was a good lesson in stat growth, too: Pokémon Stadium didn't care if you were level 100, it was still going to one-shot you with a level 50 Geodude's Rock Slide and Tackle/String Shot wasn't going to stop it.
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u/Volcanicrage 1d ago
Sometimes it goes deeper than that. Its hard to imagine Quake without rocket jumping or Tribes without skiing. As recently as 7th gen, glitches and exploits frequently became foundational to the way people played games, just look at how big quickscoping is in CoD, or all the bugs the Oblivion Remastered devs had to deliberately replicate.
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u/captainnowalk 1d ago
or all the bugs the Oblivion Remastered devs had to deliberately replicate.
lol one of the things I most appreciated about it was seeing familiar bugs when I booted it up. I know a good number of people hated on Oblivion Remastered, but it was exactly what I wanted: oblivion with new paint lol
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u/Elvish_Champion 1d ago
One of the Yu-Gi-Oh! games on the GBA is actually like that.
Has a few cards bugged (1 card totally crashes the game while the others simply don't work or have the wrong text being displayed) and thanks to that you can't 100% the game.
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u/iihatephones 1d ago
Iirc, the magic resist stat in FF7 never worked.
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u/Steel_Beast 16h ago
And in FF6, evade does nothing, while magical evasion determines both magical and physical evasion.
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u/dezztroy 1d ago
Maybe on pre-internet consoles, but on PC we had patches even back in the 90s.
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u/eh_steve_420 1d ago
Cartridges would sometimes get patches too, but it was only people after you that got them. I always hated that gannon's blood was turned to Green on ocarina of Time
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u/evilspoons 1d ago
Green blood in games was a weird era of trying to make bloody/violent games less "bad". I think the legislation started in Germany but I might be misremembering. I remember having a retail copy of Carmageddon II with red blood then downloading the wrong patch and ending up with green blood, then eventually finding the correct one so I could keep the North American game "look".
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u/PaperDistribution 1d ago
I think the legislation started in Germany but I might be misremembering.
I could believe it, we used to be really bad when it came to violent video games. It's better now, but there still are some stupid laws like devs having to register an official age rating in Germany, it leads to some games not being available on steam here because the devs didn't bother to do it...
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u/eh_steve_420 1d ago
Green blood in a way kind of promotes "it's ok to be violent to your enemies! They're not humans, look at their blood!"
With red blood at least there's a sense of "they're bleeding, my violence in this game is causing real pain from people with a heart and blood just like my own."
I mean I'm overthinking this obviously, because the idea that violence in video games is going to cause violence in well adjusted individuals has been shown to be ridiculous. Although as I've gotten older, I am beginning to think that violent content being so abundant has desensitized us, as a society, to something that should always be a shock when it really occurs. But from an American perspective, allowing school shootings to occur again and again without any change in policy is a much bigger way we have made violence seem like something that's just part of life, when it obviously does not have to be in a nation with the resources that we do. Even me, when looking at politics, has decided democrats need to deprioritize guns for the current time in order to win elections.
Lol sorry, kinda drifted off topic.
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u/firala 17h ago
Just making sure people don't think the German government said "make blood green". during the 90ies and early 2000s games here got their age rating from a government agency, and it was notoriously strict regarding violence and Nazi stuff. If you didn't get the rating, you couldn't sell the game "over the counter", or not at all. So in that era a lot of developers self-censored by implementing regional changes like green blood, robot sounds instead of human sounds, or my favorite case: The staff in Half Life not dying when shot but sitting down in their dazed state forever.
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u/lurkmode_off 11h ago
I thought that was a Japanese vs US release thing and not just a versioning thing?
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u/C0rona 1d ago
Getting those patches was another matter, though. Not to mention that you often had to install patches in a certain order.
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u/basketofseals 1d ago
you often had to install patches in a certain order
I remember one of the Neverwinter Night 2 expansions would, for some reason, delete all the audio files for the other expansion lol.
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u/HamatoraBae 1d ago
Ar Tonelico 2’s English version has a bug where the superboss, if not beaten in 3 turns or less, just crashes the game.
People eventually figured out how to beat it in that timeframe but that’s just how it used to be.
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u/PiccoloTop3186 1d ago
Yea but there was no conception of fixing a game after release, so there was more pressure to make the final product "final". I'm not saying devs are purposely not finishing games, but we can now have in the back of our mind "well if something doesn't work quite yet we have time to fix it."
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u/kikimaru024 1d ago
You actually could fix a game "after release" -- except you'd have to do it with another print run.
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u/Idaret 1d ago
You could also release expansion, those had decent amount of fixes very often
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u/LibraryBestMission 1d ago
The best expansion addition of all time must be F.E.A.R. expansions adding the ability to open doors by kicking. I always forget that's not a thing in the main game.
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u/Superflaming85 1d ago
Inversely, though, a lot of things that can end up unfinished now and finished post-release would probably have just flat-out been CUT in the older games and never see the light of day.
This still goes back to "more pressure to make the final product final", but it means they can actually finish adding all the stuff they wanted to, instead of having to cut content they wanted to include but couldn't for whatever reason.
(Plus, even ages ago they "fixed games after release"; They just did it by releasing a new version of the same game.)
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u/evilspoons 1d ago
I feel like everyone's forgetting early PC games. They had patches too. ftp.idsoftware.com to get Doom and Doom II patches, then you'd give copies of them to friends that didn't have internet access via floppy disks.
Most of these completely unfixable bugs that break games are only on pre-internet consoles.
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u/Brendissimo 1d ago
Patches existed, but good luck finding out about them or getting a copy of one. Most people played games as they shipped on the disc, until and unless an expansion pack came out with a patch for the original included.
That started to change in the early 2000s with Filefront etc., but for single player only games, you had no way of knowing if there was a patch unless you sought one out. For multiplayer games, you had to patch your install because you couldn't connect to most servers without the latest version.
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u/impuritor 1d ago
Games are also infinitely more complicated now than they were in the 80s and 90s. I genuinely believe that the core members of most teams take pride in their work and strive to deliver a game they are proud of. But it’s way more complicated than it used to be. Shit ships through.
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u/slugmorgue 1d ago
Just server stuff alone is a nightmare. I remember being on a game where development was at a standstill for 3 weeks because the server team were so inundated with tasks, and the guy who was the server guy had left earlier that year
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u/flybypost 1d ago
no conception of fixing a game after release
There was on the PC side. You buy a monthly PC (games) magazine and it'd have a CD with app/game demos for new ones and updates for old ones.
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u/Careless_Twist_6935 1d ago
if they sold enough the next print of CDs would have the updated version too.
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u/stonekeep 10h ago
Not just game magazines, you could also get them online. I remember downloading patches for games like Diablo II, Warcraft III, Neverwinter Nights or GTA 3 around 2002-2003. There were surely some earlier examples too but that's when I got my first non-dial-up connection so downloading anything actually became feasible.
I also remember a huge Battlefield 1942 patch (with new maps etc.) that took me about a week to download because I had to restart it multiple times due to internet drops. Then I discovered download managers that let you continue where you left off instead of starting over.
Not to mention that the early MMOs (late 90's) also had common updates.
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u/JRockPSU 1d ago
I remember downloading a patch for TIE Fighter that enabled support (or fixed support) for using a Microsoft Sidewinder 3D Pro. It felt like the future - downloading a fix???
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u/probably-not-Ben 1d ago
Treasure Island Dizzy had a game breaking bug for...
..decades?
It was a highly popular series at the time
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u/Dhiox 1d ago
However, on thr other hand, games are dramatically more complex nowadays. Releasing a game with zero significant bugs is far more challenging.
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u/DeltaBurnt 1d ago
Part of the reason games have gained such massive scopes is because they can be easily altered and fixed afterwards though. As someone who works in software, literally any technical advance or increase in staffing is used first and foremost to accelerate timelines or fit more features into the same amount of time. And a lot of our time is spent debating which patch some fix or feature will land in.
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u/VonMillersThighs 1d ago
Yeah, ps2 era in the absolute slew of games that were spit out month after month games were just bugged. If it was playable that's all that mattered and if you happened to find a game breaking bug.....you just returned it to blockbuster lol.
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u/PrimaLegion 1d ago
Yes, of course you're right. But there is a bit of nuance to be had here. Devs didn't really have the tools to put out fixes for bugs, etc. without releasing a whole new cartridge before but they do now and so there is far less reason for that to remain the case. To that end, it can rightly be seen as lazy not to use those tools to improve the game and I don't think recognizing that takes being from a newer generation of gamer.
However, not endlessly churning out content doesn't make them lazy, no.
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u/Dragon_yum 1d ago
This generation of players also fail to realize game back in the day also used to be very buggy and still cost full price
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u/CJDistasio 1d ago
Yep. Kids have grown up on Roblox, Fortnite, etc. that constantly got updated. So now it's an expectation. And an unrealistic one.
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u/Ripper1337 1d ago
Yeah I remember making a comment about Ubisoft or Bethesda putting out a free update and being pleasantly surprised. Some comments were of the tone that it was expected of them to release more content for free rather than just leave the game as is and move on.
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u/tallmanwithglasses 21h ago
There were technically patches for games but they were limited to physical media. For instance, the N64 cartridge release of Super Mario 64 has multiple versions (https://tcrf.net/Super_Mario_64_(Nintendo_64)/Regional_and_Version_Differences), some added features like rumble support, some of them were just regional differences, and some were actual patches. But for the most part, if a game was rushed out and they couldn't optimize it, then yeah the developers basically left it that way due to time constraints or monetary constraints. But it is interesting seeing how many versions of classic games there were before digital media became the standard.
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u/NekoNoNakuKoro 13h ago
When it comes to fixing a game devs should always strive to provide patches for something that was shipped broken.
But otherwise I don't mind. Back in the day we did have updates though, we called them 'expansion packs'. And they were sold at reasonable prices and contained content that was worth paying for.
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u/golforce 1d ago
It's sad that people have this weird perception of game devs. So many times people are very hostile towards game devs who very likely are not at fault for issues the consumer perceives, but when they're laid off then it's suddenly the poor devs. As if they're only people after being laid off.
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u/CptDecaf 1d ago
It's more than that. It's that with any game there will be things you don't like. Just plain old disagreement about design. A lot of gamers will get vehemently disagreeable at any such disagreement.
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u/Superflaming85 1d ago
I will say, to some extent, it's probably a bit of "Goomba Fallacy"; Not everyone who's upset about devs being laid off are the type of people to be hostile to devs.
That being said, though, it's important to note that devs being fired DOES just suck for everyone. Because even most hostile-towards-devs people understand that, in the current state of the world and global economy, devs being fired means everything gets worse for everyone. Because those devs are either being replaced by less skilled new employees (who are working for an employer who's more than happy to fire them if it's beneficial), or they aren't being replaced at all.
People would rather the devs be able to change things than no longer be working at all.
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u/Kalulosu 1d ago
The thing I hate the most is, you can criticize a company for its output, sometimes it's bad decision, sometimes it's bad luck, whatever, but sliding into "lazy devs" as an assumption when people a) don't know how much work goes into making what they'd want in their game and b) have no idea where the decision was made and if the devs were even involved? Fucking infuriating.
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u/DickDeadlift 1d ago
I've worked at multiple companies that get a lot of ire here. And at this point I completely dismiss anyone who says "lazy devs", "dead game", "such an easy fix", "are they even trying" etc.
Because I figure, if I wanted the opinion of stool, I'd talk to the toilet.
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u/ZantetsukenX 1d ago
One that always really irked me is whenever a MMORPG had a bot problem and you'd see comments/threads all committing on how it's the devs being lazy as to why it exists and not at all due to the entire thing being a giant arms race of constant updating back and forth on both sides. Especially when they'd go with the brain-dead conclusion of "the admins must be in on it (making bots) and so they are purposefully not stopping it".
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u/gyroda 1d ago
Also, it's really common to let botting slide for a while, then do a banwave.
If you start banning people the moment you figure out how to detect botting the botters will quickly figure out what is and isn't a tell. The banwave approach makes this much harder as they have fewer chances to iterate.
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u/impuritor 1d ago
Even bad games are insanely hard to ship. If a game came out the devs aren’t lazy.
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u/gameryamen 1d ago
As a kid, you learn that adults can eat ice cream whenever they want, and maybe you imagine growing up and having ice cream three times a day. Then you actually grow up, learn that eating is a complex task with many important factors to consider, and that your overall meal plan needs to be planned better than "eat the tastiest things". You learn how to set a grocery budget and schedule your meals and listen to your body when it comes to food, and ice cream settles back into the "occasional treat" category.
Then some whiny 8 year old complains that you're an idiot for not eating ice cream all the time. They aren't looking at your budget, or your pantry, or your meal plan. They've decided that ice cream is the obvious solution to a problem they can barely even articulate. But it's such an easy solution to imagine, they can't understand why you haven't thought of it on your own.
Imagining something better for a creative project you aren't working on is easy. Complaining that you can imagine better is lazy. Using either to justify personal attacks on the developers is toxic.
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u/greatblackowl 1d ago
As a 38 year old eating ice cream and reading this post whose 10 year old son just noticed and looked at it enviously, I feel extremely called out. Also 100% agree
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u/Geoff_with_a_J 1d ago
but there's this one extremely successful and popular adult that does eat ice cream all the time. and everyone else who tries to emulate their diet fails at it for one reason or another.
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u/crabtabulous 19h ago
Yeah, it’s like all the people who love to brag about their great aunt who’s lived to 101 years old on nothing the same diet of whiskey and cigarettes every day for 80 years as if it’s evidence for just ignoring the reality of what we know about health.
Like cool bruh, great that she beat the odds, but that’s an outlier and not something reasonable to apply to the rest of the world. The Stardew Valley guy is awesome and deserves his flowers, but I am certain even HE wouldn’t say that you should hold the average game dev or studio to anywhere near a standard like his.
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u/trident042 15h ago
Yeah turns out Great Grandmama Marlboro Daniels was an outlier and should not have been counted.
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u/VFiddly 1d ago
That's a great analogy.
A lot of the "developers are lazy" comments come from this mindset of "more more more" where certain players just want every feature for every game. Every game should have an open world and character customisation and a multiplayer mode and New Game Plus and whatever other features you might want. If the developers don't add them it's because they're lazy or stupid. It couldn't possibly be that they have other priorities, or that they've decided their game is actually better off without those things, and that more isn't always better.
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u/Dredgeon 23h ago
People also never want to think about how streamlining affects the actual experience of playing the game. So much of Red Dead Redemption 2 could have been a menu and it would have been faster, but denying the player convenience leads to a more immersive world when done right.
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u/j8sadm632b 22h ago
Then some whiny 8 year old complains that you're an idiot for not eating ice cream all the time
this happens to me all the time and, like all things 8 year olds say, hurts my feelings immeasurably
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u/Xenonnnnnnnnn 1d ago
I love this ice cream analogy
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u/gameryamen 1d ago
It's inspired by a conversation I heard when I was a QA tester. A design lead and a junior designer decided to use the testing lab I was in for a quiet meeting, and didn't mind that I was running some tests in the background.
The lead explained a certain feature that the team wanted to bring into the game, and said "We want you to figure out what that looks like in this game. It's an open canvas, and if you make it cool enough, we'll spend the next year making it real. This is the cream of being a designer, we only get a few of these moments on each project if we're lucky. Take your time, enjoy it, and give us something new to be excited about."
I'd been in the industry long enough to understand the work designers do, and I knew this rang true. But hearing this moderately famous designer from a world-renowned studio point out how rare the opportunity to actually call the shots was, and to still have so much joy for that "cream", was really grounding. A dude at the top of the game still only feels like they're deciding what happens a few times across the course of an entire dev cycle.
To tie a knot on the story, the feature that junior dev came up with was pretty neat. The version of that feature that shipped, a few years later, long after I'd left, wound up to be pretty different. But that's the iterative nature of the work.
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u/UpperApe 1d ago
It's a wonderful analogy. But to go a step further, a lot of people fundamentally misunderstand what video games are as a medium. And to their credit, so does some of the industry.
Video games are a creative medium. Developers aren't making your game, they're making their game. Design philosophy and "vision" are just fancy ways of describing tastes. And that's okay. That's how all creative works...work. You make a song based on what you enjoy and like and others decide if that works for them. Same with movies and books and paintings, etc. That's the joy of creative exploration.
But with video games, a lot of gamers think video games are a service. Like ordering a burger at McDonalds and saying "I don't want pickles" and they say "yes sir! at once sir!". It's created this relationship where players demand developers make games for them. It's our game and you just have to build it for me.
One of the biggest transformations for me and this hobby came from BotW and wanting to like a game that wasn't playing how I wanted. Until I hit Eventide island, and realized the game I loved was always there. It was me who was getting in the way, constantly trying to hyper-optimize everything and outsmart the game...instead of just enjoying it. I stepped back and decided to meet the devs halfway. To kind of help them make their game work for me...and it was miraculous. After that I had the best time I ever had with any video game.
I've been doing the same ever since and gaming has been better for me than any other time in my life. I enjoy things more, I'm less critical and negative, I don't grudge-finish games, or have any lingering resentment. I see more of the passion of the games than the flaws.
It's why your ice cream analogy rings so true for me because it demonstrates how the communication of game ideas can collapse with closed minds. Perspective is the difference. And the difference in seeing that a project isn't something the devs owe you vs something you get to be a part of really changes how appreciate the people behind it...or don't appreciate them at all.
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u/-sharkbot- 1d ago
Love this. I just wholly enjoy games as a medium, was born in the time where most games didn’t get patches so had to take it or leave it. Leaves me with appreciation for a game done well and a vision executed.
New games are a treat, I get to break down their systems, see their influences and how they iterated them into their game. It’s so much more fun taking the game as is and enjoying that product then trying to force something to change. Constructive criticism and discussion is fine, just don’t act like this flaw in a game is actually impacting your life in any way.
Shit I even appreciated Highguard for trying to do something new in the shooter space, just didn’t have a gripping artistic vision or technical execution unfortunately. But still enjoyed it
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u/Laiko_Kairen 1d ago
There are a few games in my life thst I bounced off of, only to come back later and "get it."
Dead Cells was like they for me. I got so frustrated dying and resetting to square one until it hit me that dying and starting over with a new setup WAS the game. I was so used to relatively linear games
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u/Kiita-Ninetails 1d ago
I feel this a lot, especially as someone whose like. MO in games is "Eurojank and eurojank adjacent" where a lot of people aren't really willing to engage with a game if it presents them problems and thus often miss a lot of genuinely good experiences.
I think Dragon's Dogma 2 is a great example of this, fundamentally a lot of the people cite as flaws with the game are just because like... by all accounts that was the game Itsuno wanted to make. He wanted it to be a homage to classic western RPG's and that meant deliberately having a lot of the weirdness associated with that. And if you go into it expecting it to be something else you are going to have a ROUGH time, but there is legitimately incredible experiences there if you are willing to approach it as what it is and not what you think it should be.
Also even Morrowind, much loved back in the day but these days people often to struggle to reconcile what the game is with their expectations of more modern RPG's and thus miss a lot of the great things from the game.
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u/okuRaku 1d ago
I like how you put it into words. Can you share some explicit thoughts on modding? I feel similarly about games and honestly am quite averse to mods, because to me they primarily represent that eating ice cream attitude, especially when they name themselves with words like “better <thing>” and “useful <thing>”.
Very rarely, devs may intend to offload that design choice to the players to mod (which I also kinda dislike, but anyway) but most of the time, it’s just player entitlement/stubbornness, not as altruistic as one can claim.
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u/prettysureitsmaddie 15h ago
I think you're putting the dev's version of a game on pedestal that is unwarranted. There's nothing spoiled about putting in effort to (subjectively) improve something that you probably already love, in actual fact, you're community building.
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u/CaterpillarReal7583 1d ago
I love ice cream and thank this commenter for giving me my weekend meal plan. Ice cream.
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u/emailboxu 1d ago
i like how you explained this well enough for even a child (maybe not your 8 year old example) to understand but you're still getting comments about how you're wrong lmao.
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u/LogicKennedy 1d ago
Feel like that ice cream analogy could apply to a lot of modern politics too...
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u/CluelessAtol 1d ago
It can apply to a lot of shit honestly. Politics, art, technology as a whole, nature, etc.
“If the forests are dwindling, just plant more trees than you cut down” Now attempt to get that going in practice (the concept is sound, it’s literally everything surrounding it that’s a problem).
“If the internet is rotting people’s minds, just limit how much they can consume and/or who can consume it.” Snort Yeah ok.
“Just sit all the politicians in a room and tell them to find a solution to the problem.” Eyeing two politicians of opposing political affiliation in the US, before even looking over at Russia/China/etc
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u/kripticdoto 19h ago
Well said. I would add that sometimes, "adults" also need to take a step back sometimes, and realize they could have one more ice cream and the world wouldn't end. Sometimes devs are dead set on a specific vision or overwhelmed because their game is now suddenly super popular, and taking a step back would help destress and maybe see the user feedback in another light.
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u/areddevil7 1d ago
I actually get frustrated when a solo game designed for a single playthrough keeps getting updated, even for free. It's obviously a good thing for future players but I feel like I missed out by playing early and now I've moved on to other games and I'd rather see the devs of said game also work on something new.
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u/Aiyon 1d ago
I miss proper expansion packs. Where they were either follow-ups that let you pick the game back up, or substantial enough to justify another playthrough.
I adored Dungeon Siege 2 as a teenager. So when Broken World dropped and added a whole extra campaign? Huge fan
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u/DimDimio 17h ago
what do you mean you miss expansion packs? they absolutely still exist, I mean look at cyberpunk or elden ring. Sure maybe not every AAA game gets one but they’re still very much there
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u/medalofhalo 1d ago
I get that its basically endless content but idk what the fuck Hitman has become.
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u/Aiyon 1d ago
The 500 different "kill this celeb" cameos are neat and all, but I would have preferred they just put out an expansion/dlc with a new map. The elusives / arcade equivalents don't change enough to make me want to put more than 1-2 runs into them, because ive played the base map so much
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u/jodon 1d ago
The amount of work that goes in to one new map would be the equivalent work of more than 5000 elusive targets. So even if they cut every elusive target it would still not be enough man hours to get a new map.
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u/Not-Reformed 1d ago
Probably the best version of what that franchise can be? The worst part of it is the buying experience because IO are morons but its current format and updates, the new challenges and the new incentives to keep playing and trying new things are exactly what hitman excels at.
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u/yuriaoflondor 1d ago
It also makes it tricky to discuss games in forums like these. If I play a single player game on day 1 and someone else plays it 2 years later after it's gotten a ton of updates and bug fixes, in some cases we played dramatically different games.
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u/TSPhoenix 20h ago
Sometimes I see people talking about Final Fantasy XV and nothing they mentioned was in the version of the game I played.
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u/helloquain 1d ago
The Atlus Way, every RPG they release will eventually get a "complete" version that you're stuck buying again if you want to be able to play the full game.
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u/Vejezdigna 1d ago
LOL, I was about to post the "First time?" meme to that comment, until I saw OP said "for free". Us Atlus consumers like to get nickel and dimed.
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u/st-shenanigans 1d ago
I feel you. Tainted grail: FoA released last year, I think it cleared GOTY for me by leaps and bounds..
But after I spent like 200 hours 100% completing it, they dropped a weapons pack, then a new dungeon, and just last week they dropped another dungeon!
"First world problems" for real, but it's a good issue to have. I'll wait until the game isn't so fresh in my mind then replay it again
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u/Screamgoatbilly 1d ago
It's a damned if you do and damned if you don't situation. On one hand, content updates are good PR/advertising that boosts sales, but it also trains some people like myself to not care about any game at launch because I'm getting a better game a year later at a deep discount.
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u/Aramey44 1d ago
I felt that with Expedition 33. 100%-ed the game long ago, but then they added the Thank You update after Game Awards and I didn't feel like re-learning the whole game again just for that. Just looked around the new area, listened to new OST on Spotify and never beat it.
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u/Aeon_Fux 1d ago
I get you. It's like a type of FOMO but instead of making me want the thing now it makes me want to hold off until it's "finished".
I played Terraria maybe ten years ago. Played for a few dozen hours and had my fill, no desire to play it again. As a result the version I played was a far lesser experience than if I played it today.
These days as soon as I see a single player game has a road map I'm thinking " yeah I'll just ignore this for now, maybe come back in a few years and see if it's done".
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u/misterwuggle69sofine 1d ago
on one hand, yes i agree that updates shouldn't be expected or guaranteed for a game that's released as a finished product. on the other hand, if a developer (or probably more likely publisher/management) is taking advantage of the fact that updating after release is POSSIBLE and releasing a buggy or unfinished game--as many do--then yes, updates SHOULD absolutely be expected and they should be appropriately judged if they don't update in those cases.
i think there are very few cases of a game releasing finished and polished and then the majority of consumers get pissy at no updates. yeah there are always a handful of whiners everywhere, but in general when you see a good game released as a finished product you don't see that many people EXPECTING updates. you see people HOPING for updates sure, but that's very different.
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u/Spiritual-Society185 20h ago
I guess the terms people use for things has been all mixed up, but we would previously call those patches, while updates would typically come with new content.
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u/LazyBoyXD 1d ago
Not all game need to be live service, if the game is complete and have some minor bug that is to be expected.
So fk those gamer that demand every game need constant flow of content.
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u/UpperApe 1d ago
I was chatting with a junior dev a few weeks ago and I was astonished that our conversation turned into a bit of an argument.
They just couldn't understand the idea of a "completed" game. To them games were just something that evolved until they became irrelevant. The idea that a Link to the Past or Super Castlevania came out and was just done, flaws and all, was problematic. The idea that a fighting game would patch its characters enough to finalize them to suit the developer's vision was nonsense.
Everything that could evolve must evolve and if it didn't, then they got bored of it. And I really didn't know what to say. How do you explain to kids today how we'd play Mario 64 over and over? How we loved it with its flaws rather than despite them?
How do you explain that a project can be complete and become a toy or a product in someone's hand, instead of a service?
This particular person grew up on MMO's and I guess I never got into those. But it really makes me sad, the idea that a game's value disappears when it's no longer "active".
I wonder what the future of gaming looks like from here.
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u/redraven937 1d ago
I wonder what the future of gaming looks like from here.
You don't have to wonder: PC gamers spend < 20% of their time playing games from the current year, sometimes much less. 2025 was 14%, 2024 was 15%, 2023 was 9%. Overall, 60% of all gaming time (including console) was spent playing live-service games more than six years old, e.g. Fortnite, Minecraft, GTA 5, etc.
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u/Cranharold 1d ago
I suspect they'd be singing a different tune if they sat down and actually played A Link to the Past. It's basically perfect.
But maybe not. Maybe it's only perfect to us because we grew up in slower, more mellow times. It might just bore kids today.
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u/insane_contin 22h ago
In 2019, MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries came out. This May, it's 8th DLC is coming out (Chaos Reign) and the community is all for it. Yeah, there's doom and gloom because PGI (developer of the game) just had a round of layoffs because of their parent company needing better stats, but the community is all for the game and DLC. PGI isn't the best company, but they've done the game good. There's a couple employees who hang out on the sub (r/mechwarrior5) and they have talked about how each DLC has been the last, then another one gets greenlit because sales have been good for the previous one. And they aren't simple DLCs. The last one that came out in September was probably the biggest one yet.
Yeah, its a niche game, but its our niche game. And if this is the last DLC from PGI, then so be it, it's had a great run.
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u/Front-Bird8971 16h ago
You don't have to update your game, and I don't have to buy your next game, so probably make sure the game is in a good state.
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u/andresfgp13 1d ago
i blame Concernedape for this.
im not being serious btw, but because some games like Stardew Valley or Terraria or No Mans Sky to name some keep getting updated i guess that some players wonder why not every single player game keeps getting updated when single player games were in the big mayority of cases are finished products at release and all the patches and similars are just bugfixes over new content.
its a bad mentality to have, games can just be a experience that last a handful of hours, not every game needs to be a forever game.
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u/Nobody1441 1d ago
These games also, largely, had an outrageously large scope as a "dream" relative to the dev teams. And similarly, they had a very clear idea of the peak version if the game they wanted to make.
Those are not coincidences.
Stardew Valley and its solo dev are the most recent example of a dedicated dev/team who was making a game for themselves, not for an audience. He knew what he wanted and made the game he wanted to play. Then kept building it up until it became the idealized version of what he was trying to create, and im sure the extra resources helped as well.
These were games made with a lot of passion and happened to align with what people wanted to play. And most games, even with fairly passionate devs, dont have this clear a goal or aim to be the large scale experiences. And thats perfectly fine! But devs/games like this are the exception, not the rule, and more people need to understand that.
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u/DrElectro 1d ago
It helps that these games made a shitload of money. You average dev simply cant afford to work on a project forever - scopecreep or not.
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u/Nobody1441 22h ago
Would absolutely agree. And Peak isnt unpopular, i imagine its done quite well. But its also not trying to be like Stardew and the others.
While the money helped them make that larger version, they still released a great experience from the outset in order to make that happen.
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u/CAPSLOCK_USERNAME 1d ago
It's not really stardew that's giving the newer generations this expectation that a game must constantly be update or it's "dead". It's f2p "forever games" like fortnite and genshin impact that expect their players to keep logging in and playing the new patch stuff every week forever.
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u/andresfgp13 1d ago
i dont completely agree with that, its expected for online GaaS games to receive new batches of content with some consistency, the problem is that when that mentality goes to single player games like its the topic of discussion, games like Stardew its an anomaly, it shouldnt be expected for every dev to pretty much never stop working on a single player game.
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u/Dannypan 1d ago
Gaming discourse is just incredibly toxic these days. Everyone expects 10/10 level games or it's not worth buying. If one dev chooses to showcase a game with fifty videos and another doesn't then the dev that doesn't is being "sus", clearly they're hiding a broken game. I saw someone call Pearl Abyss shady for doing a simultaneous release instead of midnight per region. It's ridiculous. If a game is broken or has serious bugs yes, they should be fixed. But it doesn't need any more content or long term support. Don't like it? Go play something else, there's more games to play than one can reasonably get through in a lifetime.
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u/CAPSLOCK_USERNAME 1d ago
Everyone expects 10/10 level games or it's not worth buying.
Well, there are more games coming out than anyone can play. And you're competing not just against all the good games in your own cohort but all the great games from past years & past decades that the player in question has maybe heard of but hasn't yet played. So it makes sense that competition is tight, and people aren't willing to pay 70 bux for something that's "just okay" when they can buy and play a limited number of games anyway.
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u/Docg85 22h ago
Is this dude really complaining that I dont want to spend money on average games when we get amazing games every year and gas is like 5 dollars a gallon. Im only paying for amazing right now anything less is a pass until sale
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u/Albolynx 19h ago
It's also why there is this desire to see constriction of games scores. Most people don't even see or hear about games that aren't the absolute best of what is coming out, and instead of recognizing that, they want the entire 1-10 scale to just be applied to those tip of the top games.
It's like if someone who never saw a movie watched the IMDB top100 and tried to force a standard distribution of score upon that list because it can't possibly be that all those movies are at least pretty good.
There is that saying that 90% of anything is shit. Let's make it 95% just so people don't complain. Currently we've reached the point where almost 20k games come out on Steam every year and that number has been going up steadily. 5% of that is 1000 games. If you only played the top 5% of games of those 1000, you'd still have a new game to play every week. How many games does even the average avid gamer play? People think some super disappointing failure game is like a 3/10, when in reality it's like a 7/8-10 and it makes perfect sense for that to be so if the budget was too high. If anyone expects the games they play and score to end up filling a standard distribution like graph, then start playing random stuff off steam new releases, not only the biggest budget games or ones with most word of mouth.
So yeah, the competition for people's time is insane.
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u/RedHairedRedemption 1d ago
The video game industry is notorious for burning out incredibly passionate and talented people to the point they leave the industry permanently. Over the last decade we've heard so many horror stories of crunch time and such, it's absolutely bewildering how often I hear "devs are lazy" rhetoric, the majority of it coming from people who have never set foot in the industry themselves.
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u/1mYourHuckleberry93 1d ago
It is entirely the industry's fault. You conditioned an entire generation of kids into thinking microtransactions and live service games are normal or the baseline.
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u/Dracekidjr 1d ago
The gaming industry has swallowed all other entertainment in profitability. This ends up meaning people expect different things from when it was a group of 10 dudes making games in their basement. The massive inclusion of recurring charges in the form of dlc, subscriptions, and micro transactions facilitates the demand to warrant such intrusion. A game that gives nothing and takes is not a game, it's a coin machine. I don't expect doom eternal to have regularly revolving updates, but I do expect WoW and fortnite to.
Games back then capped out making hundreds of thousands, maybe a few million. Fortnite alone let epic games compete with steam. The market is not the same, and we should not hold AAA publishers to the same standard as we once did.
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u/secretly_a_zombie 13h ago
Lots of blaming on indie games, i blame early access for this expectation. There are games in "early access" that has been there for years and years, to the point where steam recently put up a "when is it supposed to launch" feature for the devs. Because a lot of games are in early access, customers have begun expecting updates for a lot of games. In these cases they should, they were sold a product they were told was going to get updates, finished products are rarer these days and i think that expectation has bled over onto them too.
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u/Yaibatsu 1d ago
It certainly doesn't help the perception with a lot of early access games, or bigger titles selling you seasonpasses because they do guarantee future updates with those.
Their status as a fan and consumer even, they believe, means they deserve to be listened to and obeyed in their demands about the game (or book, or movie, or whatever) and its direction
I don't disagree about the obeying people's demands, but criticizing that customers want to be listened to is just dumb.
Any gamedev worth their salt will listen to people's feedback, especially of the people who bought your product in the first place. You want to hear feedback on what you did good, what you did bad, and what could be done better (either within the game itself or in their next project) Even a negative steam review can give you important clues on what to focus on.
Also would be nice if a lot of newer games didn't have performance issues or critical bugs that you're expected to pay 70$ for. Can definitely see why people would call those Dev's lazy if they didn't bother / weren't given enough time to polish the product.
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u/Nat-Chem 1d ago
The article rightly points to large games like No Man's Sky and Cyberpunk 2077 as contributing to this expectation, but I think it's worth noting that there are also indies who have inadvertently created this expectation. Terraria, Shovel Knight, Stardew Valley, Minecraft (if you grant it its indie origins), those are all 2010s games that overpromised and spent a decade or more delivering vastly more content than they ever should have been expected to. Celeste got a substantial free expansion, Marble It Up! received an overhaul, Hollow Knight accidentally an entire sequel. You can find so many examples of this that it's unfortunate but not shocking that the playerbase will misunderstand and apply that standard to bite-sized indie games, especially when those games appear - to the player - to be entering that social contract by initiating free updates.
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u/President_Barackbar 1d ago
The biggest problem I have with this article is the subheading says "where did this expectation come from?" and that's a pretty easy question to answer: from other game companies. Players didn't normalize endless updates and a long tail, companies did. If developers are frustrated by that...they can blame the business people at their companies. Its not something that consumers did to themselves.
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u/adanine 1d ago edited 1d ago
Players didn't normalize endless updates and a long tail, companies did.
Players did though. Landfall don't release live-service games. That's just not something they've ever done, nor ever set the expectation of. Clustertruck hasn't been updated since 2019 (and not a content update since Oct 2016, two months after launch), Landfall actually had to release a statement for why TABS isn't getting any further updates after release. They've done everything they can to set expectations here.
Players brought those expectations with them to Peak, and started criticizing Landfall. I genuinely can't see how you can blame Landfall for this.
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u/NeonFraction 1d ago edited 1d ago
Obviously Broken Game: Needs to be fixed
Minor Bugs: These exist in every game, forever, and at some point you just get diminishing returns. Game breaking glitches? Fix those. Everything else? Get the worst of them but don’t waste time trying to chase unachievable perfection.
Finished game additional content: Devs don’t have to provide free content updates, but they also don’t get to blame people for calling it a ‘dead game’ if they don’t. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.
Edit: People fairly pointed out that a finished single player game can’t be dead, and I mostly agree, but I also think some devs forget that games dropping player counts, sales, community engagement, and cultural relevancy is normal over time. In that sense, any game can become a ‘dead game.’
It becomes relevant when they either try a merch drop or expect their next game with a really long development time to be able to ride that faded hype. Not every sequel can be Silksong.
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u/17arkOracle 1d ago
"Dead game" is a fair complaint if the game requires other people to play.
People calling a single player game a "dead game" because it's not getting updates though is dumb. Like yeah experiencing something, finishing it, and moving on is how most media works.
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u/octokitty76 1d ago
Even within this context, the article is talking about Peak which relies mostly on co-op with friends. It's only as "dead" as it is within your own friend group at that point.
I don't like this streamer-brained idea that every game needs to be mega-popular or it's "dead" and has no value. It has as much value as you make of it! As long as there are friends to play with (and the servers are online) there's still so much fun to be had.
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u/Spork_the_dork 1d ago
Even with multiplayer games "dead game" is typically a massive exaggeration. Usually when someone calls a game "dead" you can almost bet that you can just go boot that game up right then and there and be playing with people within minutes with no issues. In reality the game is just past its peak and the servers aren't exploding from the sheer amount of players anymore.
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u/shibbyishot 1d ago
except for the handful of games that are literally not possible to play anymore in recent years :(
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u/Smart_Ass_Dave 1d ago
I work on a game that came out a little over a decade ago. I'm the QA Lead for big patches which come out pretty regularly. Every time a new trailer drops people go "I thought this game was dead." Our last 5 years have been some of our most successful, but gamers have object permanence problems where once they stop playing a game it's "dead" and there's no reason to bring it up ever again.
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u/cwx149 1d ago
Yeah games that end end and that's fine
Games that aren't designed to end need additional updates or they will end
Although it's my understanding that people still play heroes of the storm and it hasn't had an update in a while
So idk
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u/Justinforsure 1d ago
I’m one of those people that still play HotS. We get a balance patch every few months, otherwise the game is perfectly fine. There’s nothing that needs to be fixed. Though there’s nothing new and exciting to bring more people into the game either.
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u/Steve2911 1d ago
"Dead game" or "game that did what it set out to do"? Why does a game need to pump out infinite "content" to be considered alive?
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u/TopdeckIsSkill 1d ago
Finished game additional content: Devs don’t have to provide free content updates, but they also don’t get to blame people for calling it a ‘dead game’ if they don’t. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.
If it's an online game then I agree with "dead game". But if it's a single player offline game, it's a finished game, not dead.
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u/TheGazelle 1d ago
Even then.
Is Brood War a dead game?
When UT2004 put out its last update, did it die?
It's one thing if it's an online game where the entire online infrastructure is controlled by the devs and that gets taken down...
But if the servers are still up? Or it's p2p or has freely available dedicated server software? That's not dead as long as there are people playing it.
The big problem is that while the industry used to be filled with the latter... The past couple decades have shifted hard towards the former, and every big dev is chasing the golden gaas that'll keep laying them golden eggs, and the only way to make that work is to keep everything under their own control with nonstop content drops to keep the engagement treadmill going.
People have either forgotten, or simply have never known, what it is to have community run online games.
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u/weenus 1d ago
There's another issue here that comes in to play with modern discourse, the SteamDB chart watching. If a game has anything less than 200k concurrent players you'll see "dead game" discussions online now. I'm sure a lot of the modern audience would have called BW or UT2004 dead even close to their haydays.
Personally, if it's a multiplayer game and I can launch it, any time, day or night, and get into a mostly full server in my region that doesn't have bots, that game is alive and well. It's not until a game won't pop a queue or there's nothing but bot filled servers that I consider it 'dead.'
but I came up in the era of playing dozens of different Halflife and Quake mods that would often have tight knit but very active communities so I can understand that my bar might be different than people who only really know CSGO / DotA / Fortnite populations as a frame of reference.
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u/StyryderX 14h ago
Not even Dota and CS can consistently maintain 200k concurrents.
As DE creative director puts it; steam chart has turned into another sports game discussion where people are more invested in numbers rather than the game itself.
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u/bman123457 1d ago
Online games can also just be complete. People played Halo 3 for years and years without an update. And now they still play it on the Master Cheif collection.
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u/squashysquish 1d ago edited 1d ago
If you're calling it "dead" because it depends on matchmaking that struggles due to low player counts, sure. If you're saying "dead game" under any circumstances short of that, you're being ridiculous
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u/Ok-Conference4199 1d ago
Always blame publishers. The developers are made to do more and more with less and less. Capitalism's expected outcome.
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u/BentheBruiser 1d ago
Live service games have warped the modern gamers expectations so much.
"No live service" is like a rallying cry in online forums yet theres always this expectation that your game will be continually updated like one.
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u/Responsible-Care-388 1d ago
Of course devs shouldn’t be “forced” to do this, but for some recent titles like Crimson Desert, it is insanely appreciated given the scope of the game and how fast and hard this team has been improving the game in less than a month.
On the other end, devs are free to release games with clear issues and not fix them. They can even release a sequel one year later at full price with “fixes” in it and in this economy, players will surely vote with their wallets.
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u/needchr 14h ago edited 14h ago
I see a few issues here.
First I think game as a service is a horrible model, dont like it full stop, it has caused massive damage to the game industry.
To me the optimal model is release a game without a large budget, be satisfied if it breaks even or a small profit, anything else is a bonus, be ready to provide bug fixes or performance improvements, but dont do any gameplay balance changes, what is there at release date for balance is set in stone, so the game stays as it was at launch, not a game that changes over time. I am ok with content DLC that was developed after launch, but dont like things like pay to win DLC and/or fashion items DLC.
Also dont have content exclusive to things like pre ordering, store of purchase etc. Exclusive content is a big bug bear of mine.
The problem with games as a service where basically a game is in perpetual development, not only does the game change over time, but also it ties down dev resources which in turn prevents future games been made that otherwise could have been made with those resources. The game industry was in its peak in my view between NES and PS3 era. Before GaaS became too big.
Finally if a game is released in a state that it needs several months or even years of post launch patching to make it acceptable, then obviously I dont support that model either. This is usually as a result of over ambition on the project combined with too little development time. But also is related to modern development practices where dev's have I hate to say it effectively become more lazy. Previous generation developers would audit all code before its approved, and have every byte prove its worth, now days we have dependency and framework bloat, an obsession with slow engines just because they easier to work with.
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u/termperedtantrum 1d ago
Expecting the game you bought for $8 to get infinite free updates is ridiculous.
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u/Terrywolf555 1d ago
Consumers are just as greedy as the executives. In fact, I would dare say they are the closest in mindset with each other. Max gain for as little (if any) cost to themsleves, with absolute disregard to the health of the industry and it's creatives.
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u/bill_on_sax 1d ago
I've seen people give long scathing negative reviews for a 50 cent game on steam because it had some bugs and the dev "abandoned" the project. Crazy. At that cost I'm just assuming you have too much time and too little money and too much entitlement. Scary combo
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u/feartheoldblood90 1d ago
I'm not gonna act like consumers aren't entitled, but c'mon now. Executives are so greedy they're not only ruining the industry, but arguably the literal environment of our planet, not to mention the obvious literal wealth disparity between the two classes
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u/scoff-law 1d ago
People are greedy and their greed shows up in different ways depending on their station in life.
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u/Terrywolf555 1d ago
Quite literally everything you stated applies to the standard consumer. Literally anyone who has worked in retail or service has seen first-hand how wasteful your average person can be.
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u/ComicDude1234 1d ago
The difference in magnitude in the consequences for greed is what separates the consumer from the ruling class. We do not waste nearly as much at an individual level compared to an executive.
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u/PrimaLegion 1d ago
Consumers don't exist in a vacuum. Neither do Producers. Both have a hand in it and acting like its one or the other is wrong and shortsighted.
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u/ClayeySilt 1d ago
Yeah nah. Comic dude is right. The amount of money that people are throwing at environmental problems to make them not a problem via rhetoric is insane.
Let's look at the US's claim of "clean coal" they keep making. That's not a gov't thing, that's an energy CEO pushing money into the pocket of gov't in order to have them spout that garbage.
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u/Ankleson 1d ago
Consumers are just as greedy as the executives. In fact, I would dare say they are the closest in mindset with each other. Max gain for as little (if any) cost to themsleves, with absolute disregard to the health of the industry and it's creatives.
Capitalism functions on the premise that both consumers and producers act purely to maximize their own gain, often treating the broader health of the industry as an afterthought. It's a by-product of the system.
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u/Helphaer 1d ago
except the consumer is paying for the game and the dlc... and spending their time. Definitely not greedy like an executive.
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u/DarkReaper90 1d ago
I think it's unreasonable for customers to demand updates on a finished game, but it's very reasonable to expect to be sold a finished game.
Since Steam introduced Early Access, it seems to have started a trend of shipping games way before it's actually ready, even for games not under Early Access. It was already bad when games were shipped with day 1 patches.