We're Paying For Broken Games, And It's Unacceptable

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Now that we've identified the problem for the millionth time, what is the solution? A lemon law for games? Mass refunds would certainly get game developer's attention.

What's really alarming, however, is that this process is standard practice now. Not only do we expect games to have problems at launch, but we tolerate it. We shrug our shoulders, saying "that's just the way it is," while developers and publishers take advantage of one of the most passionate audiences in existence. That's unacceptable.
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The solution is...stop paying for broken games? If you're not patient enough to wait a week or two after launch to find out if the game actually functions, well, enjoy your broken games I guess.
 
So your just now realizing this this has been going on for the past 15 years since the release of the X box 360 and ps3 we have had day 1 patches some bigger than the game that came pressed on that neat blue ray media.
 
I almost NEVER buy games on launch day or even launch month/quarter. I'll let someone else pay the $60 premium price and do all the beta testing before I think about jumping in at $30 or less.
 
Its not as if society as a whole hasn't already been conditioned to be accepting of poor quality and for companies to take no responsibility; whether its a politician lying to voters with empty promises, to car companies with known defects killing people, to any number of industries that have low-quality parts and archaic replacement policies, we as a society accept it.

Companies can and will profit off the combined laziness of humanity.
 
webdev511 said:
I almost NEVER buy games on launch day or even launch month/quarter. I'll let someone else pay the $60 premium price and do all the beta testing before I think about jumping in at $30 or less.
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+1

I have enough of a backlog of games that I'm playing through my backlog. I finally completed the Half Life 2 games as well as the Ghostbusters video game which I thought was pretty good. When were those released? 5+ years ago. I think I will tackle Far Cry 4 which was released last month with 5 patches released now. I only got that one on release day because it came with my 980 card. Otherwise, I'm waiting until the GOTY edition hits $10.
 
Last time I paid for a broken game on release day was 11-11-11

After seeing that steaming pile of sh#t get 9fps with overclocked, Xfired 5970s I decided I would never buy a game on release day again. And I haven't.

I now wait anywhere from 3-6 months after release before I buy and I'm much happier since the games work splendidly as soon as they're installed.
 
The funny thing, is if they put in a "Lemon Law" for games, everything will be redone as "early access" on this date and full release "shortly" after that.
 
My only bitch about AAA titles these days is that they use a yearly development cycle as a reason not to patch obvious flaws. You see it in all the big franchises out there. They patch the showstoppers but leave little annoying bugs until next year's release. The AC Multiplayer was notorious for that before they killed it altogether so that they could apparently spend time adding more bugs in Unity.
 
The ONLY 2 games I have bought on pre-order/release have been Street Fighter 2 Turbo Edition for SNES and Elite:Dangerous. Otherwise, I just wait until it is out.
 
Yeah,its amazing how well games used to work out the box before they all became"internet connected". Now they just pump them out and patch them later. Really shows laziness.
 
What if a publisher/developer is not allowed to patch a product for the first 6 months from the date of release?

If their product doesn't function within reasonable limits it's dead, and it's going to die fast too. Six months is an eternity in the gaming world.
 
As games get more complex and have more features, they will have more problems at launch that a standard beta testing procedure won't find. It is something we can expect and we must tolerate. There will always be some problems with complex games. That's the price of putting in so much complexity.

Granted, some developers are doing this totally poorly, such as the latest Assassin's Creed. People need to just stop buying their stuff if they're going to release something without nearly enough testing. That is not tolerable.

(I'm having a hell of a time with a wireless access point right now because the configuration program, which only runs on iPhone, iPad, or some more recent, but not the most recent, Android devices, is one of those that wasn't properly tested. It only connects part of the time, and then times out when trying to program it. Obviously, it wasn't properly tested before release, or they knew about the issues and did nothing to correct them before release. Besides, what kind of idiot makes a wireless access point only programmable from smartphones, intentionally?)
 
Although it can be abused by certain companies, I think it is ultimately a no win situation for developers ... they can try to hit arbitrary release dates (and release with bugs) or they can delay until the product is bug free (and miss launch windows or piss off customers because of the delays)

I have been buying games since the 80's so I can remember having to wait for patches in the pre-internet days (magazine discs and later CDs, etc) ... I think the important part is supporting companies that support their products ... ironically the companies that people hate the most (Blizzard, tablet developers) are the best at supporting their products for years

I think the console companies with buggy products are worse than the PC companies ... PCs are a victim of their own flexibility ... there are too many variations of systems to debug every possible interaction with the hardware ... consoles are all the same though and should be easily to debug and configure
 
lcpiper said:
What if a publisher/developer is not allowed to patch a product for the first 6 months from the date of release?

If their product doesn't function within reasonable limits it's dead, and it's going to die fast too. Six months is an eternity in the gaming world.
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How would you enforce such a rule? Also, what is the bar of "function"? Can we define the minimum or recommended requirements as a contractual requirement with the user? (If you don't meet the exact requirements they specify then you have no legal complaint) ... if the bar is raised to that level it would only encourage developers to do something that gamers really hate (write games for specific hardware manufacturers only ... game requires Intel and NVidia to work, etc) ;)
 
dgingeri said:
As games get more complex and have more features, they will have more problems at launch that a standard beta testing procedure won't find. It is something we can expect and we must tolerate. There will always be some problems with complex games. That's the price of putting in so much complexity.
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That is no excuse. More complexity just means more testing time is needed. There was a time when games went through a QA process in-house before marketing budgets skyrocketed. If it is obvious to a casual player then it should be obvious to a QA technical director and their team.
 
As games gets larger in scope more issues will arise and need to be patched. Games 5+ years ago maybe needed one patch to fix the issues, now even with Skyrim many patches and still so many small glitches you need the unofficial patch.

I read they paid people to play games and note down the flaws to be fixed, where are they?
 
PC gamers at the very least will LINE UP ACROSS THE STREET to beta test your game completely free for you!

The problem is, they don't want to ruin the hype machine, where they try everything they can to keep the actual game mechanics a top secret, and just let the marketing team pile on bullshit on top of bullshit to get pre-orders in. There are after all a TON of retards that will buy a game without ever having seen five minutes of actual gameplay.

So that's the root of the problem, and one I don't think we can solve.

There are too many kids like Eric Cartman in the episode where he was waiting for the Wii U where every second they don't have whatever the latest thing to be hyped is feels excruciatingly painful to them.

southpark_wii.jpg
 
Lunas said:
So your just now realizing this this has been going on for the past 15 years since the release of the X box 360 and ps3 we have had day 1 patches some bigger than the game that came pressed on that neat blue ray media.
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My favorite id downloading a game than it having to update before playing....I figure if I downloaded the game of PSN, it would be the most updated version.
 
By most accounts the Wii U has the least buggy games. And clearly this does not translate to market share. So, the game developers and publishers will continue as long as the market supports this. If you don't like buggy games your best bet is to wait for the inevitable patches or buy Nintendo consoles and games.

Side note, for this and other reasons, my respect for Nintendo has been steadily increasing in recent years.
 
I'm all for a lemon law for software.
If we buy something and it doesn't work, you've got 3 days from activation to uninstall and go for a refund.
I'd LOVE to see it!
Ubisoft and EA would probably go under.
There is ONE CONFIGURATION for a console, so there's NO EXCUSE for a buggy and broken console game.
 
Armenius said:
That is no excuse. More complexity just means more testing time is needed. There was a time when games went through a QA process in-house before marketing budgets skyrocketed. If it is obvious to a casual player then it should be obvious to a QA technical director and their team.
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I'm the admin of a software test lab. Believe me, I know about software testing. As software becomes more complex, mostly at the mandate of the users, there will be issues pop up that the developers simply could not have tested.

For example, Blizzard recently released a new expansion for World of Warcraft. As many players returned for the new expansion, problems arose with merged servers having performance issues. They had previously merged these servers due to low populations, but some of them had many more players return than expected, so the cross realm communication became bogged down, causing issues for the login server. While it was really only two servers that had a population explosion and became overloaded, it caused login issues for all players. They simply could not have tested for this.

In the case of the software I work with, we had an issue with our recent 2.1 release. While we tested with every combination we could, a problem popped up with a specific combination of hardware and software. Apparently, a certain Unix server with a certain HBA and FC switch and a certain patch level could not properly connect to the virtual tape drives of our product and had data corruption problems upon restore. IT was simply a combination we could not have foreseen. We had actually tested this hardware combination, but not to the same patch level as our customer. We had used the latest patch level at the time, but our customer was a couple patches behind due to their patch approval process. We were able to release a patch in 4 days to correct that issue, but the customer was upset that it didn't work right away. We ran into a similar problem, poor performance over 10Gbe with a different certain Unix OS, but we were able to tell that customer that they needed to update to the latest patches to get 10Gbe performance up to where it should be.

There are too many combinations to things these days to be able to test for everything. The big problem in many cases is patch level. Certain patches do make Windows behave differently. Sometimes, a patch released after a game hit the DVD printing presses will make Windows fail to play the game properly. Sometimes, it could be a driver issue. Sometimes it could be simply something different about how the system changed over time. (Microsoft's problems with KB3004394 can show this pretty well. Most systems had no issues with that patch, but some systems had major issues. I don't think they've even determined exactly why yet.) It's just not possible these days.

It is certainly reasonable to expect them to at least try, though.
 
Nope I hit them where it hurts the most, I torrent the game like Assassin's Creed Unity for PC that game was and still is a mess. I won't pay for an unfinished beta sorrry. So in this way the devs are hurting not me.
 
dgingeri said:
As games get more complex and have more features, they will have more problems at launch that a standard beta testing procedure won't find. It is something we can expect and we must tolerate. There will always be some problems with complex games. That's the price of putting in so much complexity.

Granted, some developers are doing this totally poorly, such as the latest Assassin's Creed. People need to just stop buying their stuff if they're going to release something without nearly enough testing. That is not tolerable.
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I would agree, if the bugs being reported were extremely rare and only being reported on exotic or bizarre hardware combinations, but in general that is not the case, and in fact a large number of the issues reported are so widespread that if any sort of QA testing was done the developer surely knew about them before the title went gold.

Then we have the simply truth that even titles that have public alpha/beta release with bugs that were known and frequeuntly reporting during that alpha/beta testing.

I don't think any software will be 100% bug free, and as such I really don't expect it to be, but I don't think expecting developers to not release software that is buggy as shit is to much to ask.
 
T1125P said:
Nope I hit them where it hurts the most, I torrent the game like Assassin's Creed Unity for PC that game was and still is a mess. I won't pay for an unfinished beta sorrry. So in this way the devs are hurting not me.
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Pirating is not the answer either...your hurting or at least disrespecting legitimate buyers as well.
 
SGA76 said:
I'm all for a lemon law for software.
If we buy something and it doesn't work, you've got 3 days from activation to uninstall and go for a refund.
I'd LOVE to see it!
Ubisoft and EA would probably go under.
There is ONE CONFIGURATION for a console, so there's NO EXCUSE for a buggy and broken console game.
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You're right there. A buggy, broken console game is detestable. Any company that releases something like that should definitely be put out of business.

So, stop buying EA and Ubisoft games. I did a long time ago. My nephew had issues with the original Farcry, how it would slow to a crawl with hyperthreading enabled on the old P4, and they never fixed it. He also had an issue with an EA game that same year, that they never patched. I swore never to buy anything EA or Ubisoft since then. I've stuck with Blizzard and Cryptic. They still have bugs on release, but it is usually fixed within a couple weeks, not six months, or never, like with EA or Ubisoft.
 
Hopefully Australia wins its lawsuit against Steam, then maybe Steam will start giving a shit about QA.
 
T1125P said:
Nope I hit them where it hurts the most, I torrent the game like Assassin's Creed Unity for PC that game was and still is a mess. I won't pay for an unfinished beta sorrry. So in this way the devs are hurting not me.
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Actually the actual solution is to not buy, nor play, the game, the whole "oh it sucks so I'm going to pirate it" is just being entitled and self righteous.
 
The reason I never got in to PC gaming was because of having to update and configure shit. No big deal as there was consoles. Put the game in and you're playing in no time. Once the 360 and PS3 came out that changed. Once again you could have to update your console just to play a game. I never bought either of them and I'm happy for it. Gaming in it's shit state can die for all I care.
 
T1125P said:
Nope I hit them where it hurts the most, I torrent the game like Assassin's Creed Unity for PC that game was and still is a mess. I won't pay for an unfinished beta sorrry. So in this way the devs are hurting not me.
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yea, yea... just a lame excuse to pirate a game pretending to be lord justice, holiest of paladins. just don't buy the game and drop that retarded robin hood attitude.
 
DarkStar_WNY said:
Actually the actual solution is to not buy, nor play, the game, the whole "oh it sucks so I'm going to pirate it" is just being entitled and self righteous.
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Plus it doesn't give him/her any right to bitch about it one way or the other. You lose your gamers card. :)
 
MrAgmoore said:
Hopefully Australia wins its lawsuit against Steam, then maybe Steam will start giving a shit about QA.
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Ummm, while I would agree that Steam needs to have a better policy on broken games, I don't hold them responsible for shit games, be it buggy or just crappy.

To me this just smacks of "We can't be responsible for pre-ordering games that end up being buggy shit, so it's got to be Steam's fault.
 
My personal favorite for biggest bug was with the game "The Crew". Day one release, you couldn't actually join a crew. I waited two weeks before I bought the game after these issues were addressed but I'd be really pissed off if I had bought it on release.
 
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