On 11/10/2024 17:01, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
Deputy CEO at Paradox recently lamented that modern players these days
have too "high expectations" and are weirdly less trusting that
developers will fix problems in their games. This from the company
that released "Cities Skylines 2" onto the market in very rough shape
(and, a year later, still hasn't been completely fixed). He uses this
as an excuse why "Prison Architect 2" is being delayed indefinitely.
Yeah, it's the players who are to blame here. How dare we buy a game
and then gripe when its full of bugs and missing features?
High-expectations? That a product function as promised? Excuse me,
that's _ordinary_ expectations.
And I don't think that attitude is new to gamers. This has been an
issue with games since day one; I think the big difference now is that
gamers now have more of an option to be vocal about it, and we have a
lot more evidence of how common the problem it is, and how little
publishers care. More so, gamers now have more options; there's such a
glut of games that if one is a buggy mess, you can more easily move to
the next (especially since, with the plethora of free options, the
price of moving to the next title is often incredibly low).
"But we need to release the games early in order to get player
feedback and balancing just right" is a common counter-argument... and
it would hold water if gamer's weren't paying for the privilege of
being beta testers. Once money changes hands, there's a completely
reasonable expectation that the product will work.
To be fair, Paradox is apparently trying to take these lessons to
heart, and -as the recent delay of Prison Architect 2 shows - aren't depending on fan's devotion to make up for shoddy releases. But that
attitude that fans are somehow in the wrong for decrying a buggy and incomplete product just shows how broken the industry is. For decades publishers have foisted bad products on gamers, and expected them to
just take it. Only now that players have an option to say 'no, I don't
think so', they're crying foul.
With the complexity of modern games/PC hardware I do kinda accept there
will be some bugs on release. The problem comes when you think this
isn't some minor thing that may have been overlooked or not 'worthy' of
being fixed in time for release but instead it's getting into game
breaking territory.
It reminds me of a model kit company called Dragon. They are notorious
for having instructions that are just plain wrong (their nickname is the destructions) and parts that fundamentally don't fit without a lot of
work. They literally released a kit where the tracks were about 3/4 of
the length required. It doesn't help that they are not cheap but instead
at the higher price point.
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