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Comment by georgeecollins

7 years ago

As a game developer: Amen!

I had been doing that a long time when one of my producers (on his first game) wanted to be on the forums to interact with "fans". I think he was excited and thought it would be satisfying to interact with people who were playing the game we developed. I remember thinking it would be like that when I started. Don't get me wrong, most gamers, like most people, are terrific. But they get drowned out by the disgruntled.

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georgeecollins

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Faark  7 years ago

Then you better stick to that classical sales model that seems to be on the way out. The minute you sell the full package of an unfinished products, people will feel entitled to what they expect it to be (rightfully, imo). So you'd should avoid Pre-Purchase, Season Pass and some degree Early Access. I'm torn about the latter, since it is supposed to be sold "as is" with no expectations, but don't think this is was most actually do.

Also how do you think about post launch updates to fix bugs? Those seem to be generally expected as well, now.

  • btschaegg  7 years ago

    > Also how do you think about post launch updates to fix bugs? Those seem to be generally expected as well, now.

    Personally, I'd say the consumers are entitled to those, too. Your comment made me think of various games where I think that wasn't the case -- and that's mainly because those games were finished (and polished) before release.

    I never expected any bugfixes for Games such as Starfox 64, Zeldas, Super Marios, and various others out of my old SNES and N64 cartriges. Because they worked. They were finished. Funny enough: Super Mario Odyssey had some a-ha moment for me because it also worked just fine literally out of the box, which is something I'm not seeing often enough anymore.

    But honestly, launches nowadays are usually far more on the side of Games like Elder Scrolls: Oblivion than those examples.

    Imagine a regular software engineer in $MARKET going "ugh, all these people we've sold buggy software to at full price now think they're entitled to bugfixes."

    OTOH, there are of course some games where the effort put in by the developers far exceeds what any customer could reasonably expect. Terraria would be a great example for this.