← Back to context

Comment by flohofwoe

9 months ago

It's a chicken-egg problem. You won't even see 10% of the bugs lurking in your game without releasing it to a wider audience, no matter how long you worked on it or how good your QA process is (that's what Steam's Early Access is for after all). YMMV depending on the complexity of the game of course.

But even if your game code is perfect and completely bug free, there are so many weird PC configs and buggy drivers in the wild that your game will crash for some users. And for the affected users it doesn't matter whether that crash is caused by crappy game code, or some crappy 3rd party software interfering with your game. For the user it's always the game's fault ;)

> You won't even see 10% of the bugs lurking in your game without releasing it to a wider audience, no matter how long you worked on it or how good your QA process is (that's what Steam's Early Access is for after all).

Just because they like to say that doesn't mean it's true. I've had access to see the list of known issues considered "critical" around release time for a few games. They know the bug exists, they just want to release it more than they want to fix it.

> But even if your game code is perfect and completely bug free, there are so many weird PC configs and buggy drivers in the wild that your game will crash for some users.

Which in no way invalidates the point that most modern games are absolutely unplayable for most users at release.

Oh yeah, and also that's why beta testing exists