The Great Glitch Crisis of 2014
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 28 ก.ย. 2024
- Somehow, somewhere, a version of Tetris had a botched launch. A French revolutionary's faceflesh slid away from their hair and teeth. A beloved multiplayer console FPS became a hated multiplayer FPS console FPS. Here's the how and why.
I attempted to reach out to the devs behind Tetris Ultimate, AC: Unity and The Master Chief Collection, but they were (understandably) unresponsive. "Colin," however, provided me with a great Q&A you can fully see here: (edited for anonymity): i.imgur.com/VGs...
"When Big Games Launch Badly:" www.gamasutra.c...
/When_big_games_launch_badly_Breaking_the_vicious_cycle.php
What the heck is wrong with Tetris PS4? (IGN): www.ign.com/vid...
Tetris Ultimate PS4 Issues Update (IGN): www.ign.com/vid...
Canadian Press on glitchy games: www.msn.com/en-...
A friendly neighborhood guide on QA terminology: www.doublefine....
Korobeinikies:
ccmixter.org/fi...
• Korobeiniki Subbed (Re...
• Korobeiniki (aka Tetri...
I don't see it getting any better, in this age of instant access and short attention spans, consumers are likely to get increasingly impatient with their gaming apatite.
It sucks. People just aren't willing to wait another 6 months or so for a game to be released ploished
EpicSpiderWizard
Sad thing is, Ubisoft DID wait 6 months for Watch Dogs and it was STILL terribly broken on launch!
I think it can definitely get better, I think developers have to stop being afraid to tell gamers to wait while they're still fixing their issues, rather than quickly launching the game and working on debugging afterward.
Dennis Z
Nintendo did that all the time, and their consumer base kept shrinking, propably because the consumers preferred the instant gratification of third parties more. I personally never had issue with the slow release of first party Nintendo stuff because I rarely have the money to buy games, but there are people who do, and then need a lot of games to satisfy them so I can kinda understand them wanting more games all the time, but I guess I have to practice having some restraint more than them.
GBDupree there isnt enough good games in Nintendo's library to keep my hooked
the problem is that the gaming market has changed significantly. We (the people that watch this show and would never buy a AAA on launch and are tired of the same COD every year) are now the minority among gamers.
Its best for us as the more savvy game consumers to search for great titles from good studios that are not that mainstream and support them in developing great games. And spend less time worrying or bitching about AAA games from big studios that are now so mainstream that we no longer have an real input in them.
I fully agree.
I agree. For me, a company that I would consider to be extremely reputable is CD Projekt RED. They are extremely pro consumer and don't bend to the will of outside pressure when it comes to their games. I fully plan on buying The Witcher 3 (providing the sources I use for deciding on whether or not a video is game report that it is a worthy game).
Decaying Reverie Word. Them and Nintendo.
Decaying Reverie Running With Scissors are good to their fans, IMO. They've been pretty good about making up for what happened with Postal 3 and it wasn't directly their fault (Akella is most to blame for lack of communication and cooperation).
creekandseminole Nintendo haven't been saints the whole time they've been in the industry. They were serious anti-competitive ball-busters back in the NES days, which even got them into legal trouble.
Making attempts to eliminate competition when you already dominate the fragile market is not exactly what I would call pro-consumer. They did resurrect the North American game industry, but they weren't very nice about it.
Decaying Reverie
CD Projekt's greatness really puts a lot of the things wrong with many other AAA developers and publishers in perspective.
Wait, people WANT annual releases? Who? A bunch of attention span-less 12 year olds?
Fuck yearly releases. Give me a better game I can play for longer. You know, one that is complete and not broken. Preferably enjoyable. It's amazing that developers don't realize that a lot of people are sick of low quality games that get worse and worse every development cycle.
And equal shame falls upon people that keep buying these games. They're only perpetuating and reinforcing to game publishers that they're doing the right thing, business-wise. It's really not helping.
crzymn246 Yeah, ironically by actually supporting these annual releases they are hurting their beloved game series. For you see contrary to what Call of Duty or Assassin's Creed would have you believe it is possible for a game series to get by without changing little to anything from entry to entry. Look at Uncharted for instance a game series that doesnt change much from entry to entry yet fans still love it. Thats because instead for going for an annual release they release one about once every two years.
This gives fans time to fully finish their game replay it multiple times and grow hungry for more instead of shoving one down their throat every year. Naughty Dog is currently one of the most beloved game developers out there but I guarantee you they'd be on the same level as Infinity Ward if they tried to push an Uncharted game out annually. As in they'd be a once great developer whose name has been reduced to that of a joke among the gaming community.
crzymn246 Your comment's first line is both a question and the answer.
+crzymn246 yeah! Instead of a game every year I want a game that, at most, takes a year to beat, and even longer to complete! I don't want a game with shoddy mechanics. Hell, Call of Duty used to be a GOOD game franchise, then somebody got greedy. Further more, want to see games used more creatively! I want to see more games that, in themselves, is a work of art. Why can't they make games that promotes better learning, provoke creativity, and even help someone recover from mental trauma or a stroke? Instead, we get awful games with little to no originality and a stagnant game industry.
+crzymn246 the marketing equivalent of throwing as much shit at the wall as possible in hope that some of it sticks.
Supreme Buffalo Depressingly accurate
This is by far the smartest channel in the gaming community
well i think its closely followed up by Ahoy but yeah.
Game theorists is probably up there too, but not in the same type of thing.
Orsyx Gaming I guess Game Theorists are fun and clever little fictionalizations of gaming culture, like mystery novels or something, but I can't say that compares to some of the most in depth, articulate and critical journalism of games and gaming media I've ever seen
Jason Bissainthe Game theory is like math/science class but Super Bunnyhop is like English/social studies
Let's not forget about Matthewmatosis and Errant Signal either if you guys like this sort of videos. But I agree, I love everything George puts out and watch it multiple times.
This was posted at the beginning of this year, and the problem is ongoing. Batman was a fiasco... but one thing was different: Steam Refunds. As refunds for extremely ineffective games become commonplace for both PC & Consoles, I expect publishers to get a lot more gun-shy about pushing broken games out the door.
+Daniel Hale It appears that people are becoming more resistent to the bullshit that some devs try to pull, at least pc players. Paid mods? Fuck that, your game has Mircotransactions? Fuck you, your game is a buggy pecie of shit? Fuck your sales, you plained out lied to your players? Fuck your life.
+Rayman It's essentially the pattern you see happen with any revolution; the people on the bottom are just starting to hate what's going on and are beginning to decide to straight-up just not TAKE it anymore. Whatever the case, whatever direction they go in, I feel that big changes are coming.
And here we are another year later and this has proven to not be the case at all, unfortunately. Just like that guy said, it only got worse.
Yea, I was looking forward to the new Deus Ex, but there's no way I'm touching it because of the dirty single-player one-use microtransactions alone, let alone bugs. I imagine enough people did buy it though to turn the profit they wanted.
Daniel Hale they didn't make enough money. they put the series on hold.
With Steam around that brings 60$ games down to 2 measly bucks after just a few years there's no reason to pay for a game when it's not even done.
Hold your fucking wallets people, there are millions of super great games from the past that's just a few dollars and clicks away.
yes, but its sinfull as all hell that you would to wait nearly that long for the game to be "over-developed" to a tolerable point. this new generation of entitlement has put companies in a fucking vice. with online patches, theres no reason for them to care about making sure it isnt broken, just as long as it meets the deadline. "we'll patch it.... the same day, next week, the week after that, so on and so forth".
suprtroopr1028
If you can ignore the hype, wait 1 year from the trailer or 2 years for it to actually be worth a damn ain't that much of a difference.
That's my strategy.
+Quiptipt ... really? no. what I mean is that developers should give enough of a shit to develop a game to a point where its at least stable. this shit didnt happen nearly as much prior to wifi standard consoles, because they only have one time to get it right. nowadays, they can piss out whatever and just fix it later. the fuck are you on about?
+Paul Staker *COUGH* Race The Sun
+Paul Staker If 100% of consumers did this, we would no longer have any new games at all. Every person works to make a profit. If game developers will lose money making games, not only did they lose money they lost that labor time money as well. Instead of losing money developing a game, it is more beneficial for that person to work at McDonald's. They won't lose money and will actually make money by working. You don't want game developers to not profit from their labor. This is why many consumers pre-order games and buy games on launch day to financially support these people and that is fine those consumers exist. Without them, you wouldn't be able to buy games for under $5. Halo 5 gave away free map packs because other Halo 5 players supported the requisition points system. So all Halo 5 players need to thank those other players who financially supported the game and now everyone is rewarded with free stuff. You need to stop and look at relationships more and why things are the way they are.
I've said it for years, until morons quit buying CoD, AC, Madden, and FIFA every year, we will never get the amount of quality games we used to. It's all about sequels and how fast they can pump them out. FC4 was mediocre at best and they're already talking about the next one but they are asking fans to choose what direction to take it. Consumers have to wake up and stop buying this crap. MCC is still a broken mess, so bad I had to hard reset my system just to play the campaigns offline yet people are throwing $250 at a mystery box Halo 5 limited edition that has no known contents. What's sad is the beta for 5 has the same issues as MCC...
Not a problem for the informed and patient gamers.
I bought games like The Talos Principle, Divinity OS, Heavy Bullets, Shin Megami Tensai 4 and many other games. All of them run fine. Indis are getting better and better, they stray from 8bit style graphics and branch out. It's mainly the big hyped AAA games, that suffer these problems on launch.
You don't need to preoder. You don't need to buy on launch. It just takes less a week before messy launches get press. Being patient saves you money.
What is the presure to buy new releases so early?
If it wasn't for Nintendo, indies would be primarily what I play. Consumers just don't learn. Like I said, MCC is still a mess and people are clamoring to pre order Halo5...
Jon Pittman Fuck these guys. I expect everyone to take care for himself at least. If someone wants to dump his hard earned cash on something unknown, so be it!
Gamers act like a clishee teenage girl from a bad sitcom. Sitting in front of the closet and say "I've got nothing to wear!" While the Steam libary lists +100 games (or Games for Gold / Playstation Plus).
Jeffrey Allmeyer People who buy buggy game are stupid. Gamers who spend >50 bucks on a title and don't know if the product is finished, are dump. George just explained that the yearly release leads to rushed releases. This is a downward spiral.
I also don't see, where Jon or me shit over other peoples taste. This is still about the quality of the product. Who likes buggy glitchy games?
Jeffrey Allmeyer "every year"
My one man solution to this, for me, is to get hyped for games, find out the release date, add 7 days and then on that seventh day after release, do some actual research from PLAYERS, not corporate shills like those on Gamasutra and then consider whether or not I want the game.
I've estimated this approach has saved me hundreds over the years not to mention the lack of headaches.
The only way this damage can be repaired is by a gaming crash. I'm dead fucking serious.
I'd be okay with a gaming crash because I have enough games from the past decade alone to keep me busy for about as long, plus who wouldn't prefer a smaller quantity of creative and well polished games as opposed to being funneled shit after shit each year?
Jason Bissainthe The industry that create these awful games, the technology industry that supports them, the journalists who report on them and so on and so forth.
The only ones who would suffer are the leeches upon videogaming.
Oh dude, totally we don't just need new fresh games, we need an entirely new perspective on game reviews and editorials. I nominate Bunnyhop for our ambassador
Jason Bissainthe Yeah it's pretty much an open system of corruption, a circular gravy train we have right now.
Developers make the same game over and over, they get the journalists to play hype for them, the journalists have something to talk about/add revenue/backroom dealing and everybody wins.
Look at the reviews these buggy as hell games get. 4/5, 9/10, 10/10, 95%, 95/100. It's a fucking disgrace. The ones who get fucked are consumers who get to play the same tepid, unchanging games over and over.
When was the last time a game really impressed you? Was it this year? Last year? For me it was several years ago where I felt a game was actually pushing forward.
Nobody gives a shit about the consumers, not the developers, not the media, not even most gamers. They're happy to play CoD: MW remake number 9.
Oh and don't hold out much hope for the indie scene either, if you've been following GamerGate you know how corrupt those lunatics are.
Like I said, the best thing that can happen right now is a crash and a restart. Maybe gaming will never be as popular again as it is now, but I'd rather roll the dice than be fed the exact same games for another year.
You can chart the video gaming years since 2009 without too much effort, it's the same handful of games every time single year with a few special blockbusters and an anticipated game or two with a few surprise shocks.
Every. Single. Time.
SniperWalrus
_'Oh and don't hold out much hope for the indie scene either, if you've been following GamerGate you know how corrupt those lunatics are.'_
You *are* aware that the term "Indie" encompasses _literally every game developer_ that works independently/aren't owned by publishers, right? That's a really broad spectrum.
Also, I'm rather sceptical at how something like the _entire_ game industry would collapse, has there been a "movie crash" in recent time? I've heard people claiming the crash is near for at least half an decade.
Who within the industry would go away and who would rise from the ashes, hypothetically speaking?
How would it go into motion?
How is the x86 architecture unfamiliar? These consoles are just PCs in pretty boxes at this point. The hardware is not nearly a viable excuse for all these broken games.
It isn't so much about how easy the machine is to code for as it is the games being increasingly high fidelity and complex. Every year Ubisoft has more than 10 studios working on Assassins Creed games, that is about 1000-1500 people working on them and they still come out like crap and I can totally see why. Realisticaly a game like AC Unity would require 4 years of dev time to release, but the team got three, not to mention the difficulty of working with so many different people across so many different countries.
well it is since x86/x64 have issues anyway, the lack of effort put into pc ports in the past means it is still kind of unfamiliar territory to the main dev teams (some pc ports were just kind of thrown at smaller teams).
SDCodex
i doubt it depends on the scope of the game as much as the rush to get the product out as soon as possible and the over-reliance on patches
And also many PC games are using DirectX or Mantel witch is different to the proprietary systems consoles have. It´s still x86 but not in the same way
Espersontheone
the xbox original, 360 and one use directx (there was a bunch of fanfare a while ago how the xbox one would support dx12) and the ps4 uses a proprietry api based on opengl............ the issue is that few triple a devs have cared enough about x86 to really get used to it.
I think a lot of the issue is this generation and the previous generation had a LOT of people getting into video games for the first time. People who didn't grow up in the 16-bit and 32-bit eras back when games needed to work properly out of the gate. They don't know any better so they think this is just how it's suppose to be.
Man, maybe I am part of some extreme minority, but I don't want these yearly releases. Take the time and get it right. I've been saying that for years. It's part of why I am never annoyed when studios like Naughty Dog or Rocksteady push a game back. They don't release a game until it's done right.
The thing what annoys me the most is if publishers release a franchise every year with little change to the last game then i get sick of it really fast. It baffles me how so many people are still into Call of Duty.
Eli Johnson I agree. Waiting for Arkham Knight has been painful but I would prefer this painful wait rather than it coming out as broken and glitchy mess like unity.
Furthermore it seems they've used this development time to their advantage by adding the multiple ally combat system, which addresses one complaint a lot of people have leveled at the series which is why doesnt batman ever call in any of his friends.
+Rock Steel looking at this comment from the future makes me sad
Alexander Marshall Sorry if you bought pc version because you know it was shit but at least it ran well on consoles.
No, Arkham Knight sucked. It was so unbelievably overhyped. I hated how bad that game turned out. Not only was the vehicle sections so utterly repetitive. The "twist" about who the Arkham night was was total garbage. And now the series is done.. What a shit ending...
You could say it was a crisis of infinite glitches?
This generation of gamers and gaming culture simply has no standards. It's like poorly made products that get more and more pricey are becoming the norm for today's society.
I heard Vampires the Masquerade was a very stable game
Game james
"Havent you heard? Gamers are dead people who buy games are either dudebro consumers or indie hipsters."
You should read an article of Leigh Alexander. She makes a wonderful point that gamers are far more than just pathetic dudebros.
Sadly, the dudebros threw a massive fit and are still harassing some (mainly female) indie devs over it.
Sad that a lot of gamers cling desperately to the "obtuse shitslinger" identity and their FPS games as the only "acceptable games".
Game james "banned by feminists"
lol
Game james I have a feeling that most actual gamers are just regular people like you or me, or even Bunnyhop. I know there are a lot of dudebro douches out there, I've met a few, they probably outnumber the hipster douches who latch onto gaming culture for the sake of their own reputation. But I mean, the internet and/or media might just be describing gamers as these two stereotypes because it's sensationalist. Maybe I live in a weird part of the world (Canada) but most gamers I come across are the kind of loveable and personable geeks and nerds I've always conceptualized them as, close friends or strangers. Have things really changed that drastically?
PS: I don't participate in GG conversations any longer since I have a hard time due to the fact that I consider SJWs/feminazis and actual Feminists two different things, I was replying to your first comment
That known shippable thing is completely correct, I work in QA and the amount of bugs which the fucking devs let through were unforgivable *ahembigredbuttonahem*
Even something as simple as that makes QA sound like a nightmarish job to have. Especially when developers treat QA testers like crap, thinking that their insightful knowledge on the game's state to be irrelevant and unimportant (I suggest you hear the QA tester's story when working on Spark Unlimited's Legendary - I'm sure you could relate to that).
DarkStarAngelo Hi I'd like to read this story, but nothing is coming up on google. Could you link me to it or give me a few extra keywords?
We need to stop pre ordering games
It's things like what we see in this video that argument my stance whenever someone says "Why doesn't Nintendo just go multiplatform?". For all it's many shortcomings, mistakes, and obsessions with twisting the norm more than it should, if there's something Nintendo hardly fails in is Polish; And no, I do not mean games for their console, like Rise of Lyric, but games developed by them most of the time are well polished.
Rarely do you heard of Nintendo games having glitches, and the ones that do have them few and far between, and never game-breaking. This comes because of the freedom they have as being their own company working for their own consoles. If they think a game needs polish they WILL delay it. IF even that is not enough they will delay it AGAIN to fix it. This is something that, while you do see in multiplatform releases, is very uncommon with them.
Now imagine Nintendo going multiplatform as a game developer or publisher. Now not only having to deal with their own group of shareholders, but also the shareholders of Sony and Microsoft breathing on their necks. As Bunnyhop says, the deadline situation and consumer hungry while not make every game meet this fate, would lead to an increase on Nintendo games being rushed for the sake to appeasing both consumers and higher ups.
And I don't know about you, but part of what I feel of Nintendo's "magic" is the fact very rarely do I have to turn on a Mario game at launch and meet a galore of glitches only for days later wait for a black screen with a bunch of patch notes in it.
to be fair... NINTENDO is a gaming company.
not a Bussiness Company.
...I think you might be missing the point of what a "company" actually is
You made valid points. Seriously, Nintendo should never go 3rd party. NEVER.
Funny to see so many people in the comment section thinking the industry's going to crash again.
Yeah... I very much doubt that the video game industry will crash and burn, even like it did before, but the yearly release glitch-fest with locked off DLC and unplayable porting is a bubble that I hope bursts sooner than later. Like he said, consumers will probably get smart sometime in the future (hey, COD isn't selling AS well as it has in the past), and the embargo-fueled gravy train can only last so long before the parasitic practices of game publishers are well known.
Really hope it does.
Game james lolz
Game james i doubt that. people have to much fear for those lazy hipsters. if you ask me this continuing cycle of broken games will eventually get so bad that people will start losing faith in buying games. this will cause many companies to lose money and start closing shop and this wont stop until something happens to rebuild consumer faith. i also think this will happen sometime in the future where games go all digital and you wont be able to get refunds, sell, or trade in games anymore.
Best remedy for this is to _burn_consumers until they outrage.
Please, fuck us more and and hurry up!
I returned to E.Y.E and Quake in 2014, I didn't buy a single game last year.
I bought dark souls 2, but mostly played arcanum, wizardry 8 and fallout 2
ps: e.y.e is great
e.y.e?
It's funny because E.Y.E. was an absolute glitchfest at launch and would have benefited a lot from proper QA testing. Still a great game though, in its own weird way.
dadanikk
E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy
Nachtmahr
It is also kinda sad, on launch it was more stable then most of the games came out this year.
7:08 Hold on. People WANT to see yearly sequels? Last time I checked, the majority of the internet HATED yearly sequels. Where's this guy pulling THAT out of?
+Jimmy William The passionate gamers you see on the internet are probably just the most vocal. He's talking about casual consumers that mostly just get what's popular, which are where a lot of AAA developer's money comes from
+Jimmy William From sales figures. People in the millions buy the games, obviously they want the games.
+Jimmy William The internet gaming community is only a small microcosm of the larger consumer base. In indie gaming, there's a real impetus to listen to that microcosm, because it makes up the majority of people who even know about, let alone buy and play, their games. But for AAA companies, "what the consumers want" is very different from "what the internet gaming community is saying". The reality is that most people buying AAA games, particularly people buying on launch day (or god forbid pre-ordering) don't partake in games media. Gaming is a smaller part of their lives that they put less thought into, and at worst if a game is broken when they buy it they'll just keep it, wait, and try again later (if they're lucky, after it's been patched). The result is that what really drives sales isn't quality, it's publicity. The games that sell the best are the ones that have the biggest marketing budgets/campaigns, lots of storefront coverage, and high-end graphics demonstrated on the cover and in advertising material. The most efficient way to capitalize on that is to push out fancy-looking games with regularity to establish a brand and get casual players buying new entries in the series by default. Hence, yearly sequels. From a business standpoint, the current state of the industry is close to ideal. I'm sure it will get a little better, as earning a reputation for broken games isn't a GOOD thing, but it'll only improve enough for companies to let any issues blow over. We may see consequences for one or two companies (Warner Brothers is earning a damnable reputation among PC gamers), but I doubt we'll see any real change (e.g., Warner Brothers will probably just continue not caring about PC ports because consoles drive their sales. If anything, they'll reduce investment in PC releases because they see profits from that shrinking).
big stores like Walmart also want them. The stores make a lot money off of selling physical copies of games. stores keeping a portion of the money means less money for the game company. which is why they sell dlc.
Any environment except one filled with passionate gamers.
Some guys in my class didn't really care for the futuristic changes they made to one of the cods, but they had to buy it since everybody they played with moved over. Nobody they played with really liked it but those guys knew people who knew people who liked it so they ended up just kinda buying it I guess
DON'T PRE-ORDER GAMES, PEOPLE!
I literally clapped at the screen at the end of the video... Really good quality content, I didn't expected such a good video, grats on you. You've earned a new sub ^^
-"2 more months of testing and the game should be ready for launch"
-"Are you kidding me?! that stuff costs money and it's already October, just release the piece of shit, those idiots will buy it anyway!"
Someone posted this in a conversation about Cyberpunk 2077 - still relevant 5 years later
Being a miser waiting for steam sales has served me well
THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR MENTIONING LITTLE BIG PLANET 3's HORRIBLE LAUNCH. I never hear ANYONE talk about how bad that was in videos.
Thank god for steam refunds.
I really love the writing in these videos, man. Thanks for the hard work!
Thank you for making such a well thought out video on the elephant in the room. Excited to watch more of your videos but subscribed on this alone. Great work Super Bunnyhop! - Bryden
IGN did something smart with their review of Splatoon. They made their usual review, but they kept the score pending until they could test the game in true online conditions after release.
The publishers trying to meet yearly quotas and deadlines is dumb, but I don't see how blaming the consumers is the default answer whenever a game fails. That has never, ever made sense to me.
"Gamers demand yearly releases for the big franchises." *sigh*
I'm not saying that people DON'T want new yearly editions of their favorite franchises, but it's up to the publishers to determine when they're released. They pump them out every year because that's probably the shortest time-frame in which they can publish a game, buggy or not. That'll net them the most amount of money, rather than taking their time, going about 2-3 years between titles, doing a REALLY good job and releasing excellent games when they're ready. Consumers will consume whatever you give them. You just need to figure out the quality of the content that you're providing for their "meals."
Thanks so much for yet another awesome video. Great stuff. Looking forward to the next one, as always.
Far Cry 4 still has a permanent glitch on my PC, the landscape and roads have a visible wire frame mesh on them, I'm not sure what causes it, it is very distracting.
+Grant Sibley That's fucking weird
kruger4444 I don't know.......I don't know, maybe I'm just not making myself clear, I aint got time for this bullshit !!. I've got the muscle to shove my cocaine factorys so far up their stupid fat asses that they'll shit snow for a year!!
I really like the way you present your videos. It's so cinematic in 30FPS :D.
I'm kidding of course, subscribed.
Dude I love your shit man. You are able to articulate your points and topics so damn well. When I try to do a post commentary video I stumble over my words like crazy. Youtubing is hard. D:
Good video bro!
This is so depressing. Not only do we get the same shit, it's also broken.
Thanx for this video, just subscribed because of this and your Critical Close-Ups/MGS series! I hope this trend doesn't continue.... leading towards another video game crash.
Amazing video.
But still... how do you manage to fuck up Tetris this badly? I know a bit of coding and can make a shitty clone of tetris, but a triple-A studio releases Tetris with shiny graphics and it ends up being a glitchy mess?
I can understand that a triple-A game with a massive budget has some glitches/connection issues at launch, but a simple game or a re-release/HD upgrade? It's ridiculous.
Playing Korobieniki in the background was a nice touch. I liked it.
Only Nintendo can save us of this mediocrity. Apart of all haters, big N still is the best developer out there.
Seriously. People are criticizing Nintendo for not having many game releases each year when other consoles have dozens. But those dozens (often many MANY of them created by the same companies) suffer from having to pull from one game's resource to work on another.
I'd rather have Nintendo's 3-4 good games than 3-4 dozen mediocre games on the PS4.
Good luck when Nintendo goes bankrupt.
+Mrneo Nintendo has way to many billions to go bankrupt. They will just become even more irrelevant than they already are......
Jimmy De'Souza Earthbound. Mother 3. Most Kirby Games. F-Zero. Most Metroid Games. Splatoon.
Jimmy De'Souza dont forget pikimin,Pokémon(i know its not made by Nintendo, but it belongs to they,it counts),star fox and fire emblem.
stuff like this is why QA is needed in the video game industry.
i'm the man who arranges the bugs which continue to fall from up above
I haven't' bought a game at launch in ages. & I feel rewarded for doing so, as waiting half a year to 2 years garners me a steep price drop, a fully bugfixed game, free DLC, & includes the expansion packs.
"People want to see a Assassins Creed every year, people want to see a Call of Duty every year"
I don't know, do people really fucking want that? Why not, say, two years? Spend that extra dev time to make your game really shine and make people clamor for more? FFS it's the age of the Internet, if your player base is really losing interest in the first year 1) learn why (learn from your mistakes) and 2) push out compelling DLC to keep people playing.
Who am I kidding, of course this will never happen until the inevitable crash.
But if COD is selling so well, why should of they stop?
It's the gamers fault this happened. I remember every critic warning that preordering is pointless.
But cod is on a 3yr life cycle between 3 developers so technically they have 3 years to release call of duty
Funny how this vid was made before NMS. Would love to hear his opinion after the clusterfuck!
Consoles go home, you're drunk
The sad thing is, that at the end of the day, this is the blame of the consumer. Developers only go as far as the consumer allows them. The only thing we can really do, is hope that people have learned something in 2014.
I was wondering the same thing with that Tetris until I saw Ubisoft!
Apparently Ubi themselves got the memo. Their games are performing a lot better now
Uh... no. Clearly you are either delusional or under Ubisoft's paycheck. You are not helping the game industry by supporting a poorly made game!
Literally, Ubisoft barely had any memo. This modern Tetris game on PS4 and XB1 performs worse than the Gameboy/DS/PSP version.
Still ongoing in 2016. The top Steam Community post for the Division is "how to fix black screen crashes upon booting the game". Every person I've played the game with has had to restart their computer on several accounts because The Division threw them a black screen they couldn't Alt-F4, Alt-Tab, or Ctrl-Alt-Delete out of. Also, the PS4 version of Street Fighter V leaves me and my friend unable to create Battle Lounges. The game's been out for over a month, and we get disconnected within a minute of creating a lounge, and get greeted with a "battle lounge does not exist" message when we try to join someone else's.
Having done QA work at a video game company, I know these developers are aware of the issues before the game is released, so it kills me that these games are released this way. Theyre basically ignoring the bugs so they can meet the deadline and not have to push the game back (because that cost the company lots of money) but this is has been getting so ridiculous lately, im glad you made this video to point this BS out.
Man, remember the days when big games came out and didn't had any glitches or had little to none? When games TOOK there 2-3 years of time to get these problems? Or when Games were about the story? The lore? Not who can make the next COD or Halo game and cash in?
Those where good times.
You see, older games tended to be buggier than their modern counterparts due the QA departments of many games being much smaller.
As an example here is GTA SA- The best selling PS2 game with 15 million + sales
gta.fandom.com/wiki/Glitches_in_GTA_San_Andreas
And this isn't exclusive to GTA though. Go to speedrun.com and look at the Any% completion of PS2 Games. You'll see that there are far more bugs to exploit. This is less the case for modern games which is one of the reasons why fewer people speedrun modern games to such a crazy extent
We didn't notice it because patches weren't a thing and the internet wasn't around for us to croudsource complaints.
Had the internet been around, you would have been complaining just as much
Secondly, plenty of modern games are more about the story now then ever. God of War, Spider-Man, RDR2 and Assassin's Creed have all embraced that
I ended here thanks to a Facebook link. I'm not a gamer, well let's say I'm not a "hardcore gamer" as the people who are here. Reading the comments i find quite interesting the gamer culture (if that's a way to say it). Some people hate, others are in dissapoiment for something very ironic. The game industry are not making games for people who enjoy, are making games for people who only buy, sorry if i don't explain myself. But i kinda like how you guys have real valid points, more than any politic in this world.
How in hell can you fuck up Tetris... I'm studying to be a programmer and programming Tetris was our assingment in our second class!
Well well... 2014 really was a bad year. And As you said George, there really isn't much point at it changing. Thougt I could see the rise of Indie games into popularity solving a lot of these problems. If publishers learn to put their money on more small indie projects they would not only divide the risk of only betting on one huge project. They would also have something to give to players while they wait for the next installment of a AAA (that then could be pushed forward). Futhermore indie games show developers that more can be done with less. That a more focused game usually is better and that photorealism and shit like that usually isnt something worth trying to achive. I see some publishers start to do this (for example Square Enix has started a kickstarter-like thing I think) and the rest of them really should follow.
Still I know indie games are not "perfect". Last year sadly was a year of horrible releases and behaviours from indie developers and even the good ones are really starting to feel a little "same" if you know what I mean.
Here we have the perfect reason why i like Nintendo, Ladies and Gentlemen. Same like Blizzard in the early days they didn't give a crap about the whining community and released their games when they were DONE. Yes, you may wait a year longer for your game, but you might get a game that lasts more than a year on your system due to the good quality and well-balanced content.
So that's what the "Won't Fix" resolution is for! I only used it for bug reports that don't actually describe bugs (business logic requirements can be so extremely complex that not even the customer's employees know what some things are supposed to do).
@ 7:07 - who exactly is demanding yearly releases of popular games? I don't know anyone who thinks this is a good idea. It's the greediness of the publisher who wants yearly releases, this is one reason why so many games are broken at launch. Developers are rushed to complete a project that should require two years at minimum. They think it's okay to release a broken game and can just update it down the road. it's unacceptable and I refuse to pre-order games any longer, especially after the MCC fiasco.
I can't say I've ever expected a yearly release of a game series in fact I expect the opposite. It's the greedy shareholders that are pushing for yearly releases.
Awesome video as always! Its a shame that technical standards are falling to this degree.
I got Grey Goo at launch and it's been great so far. I haven't hit up the multiplayer yet, but then, it's kind of dumb to jump right into the multiplayer in an RTS title without completing the campaign first just so you know what the hell the units do at least..
I recently decided to grab "LEGO The Hobbit" (2014) for some nostalgia play with my brother, as we played LEGO Star Wars a lot when we were kids.
LEGO The Hobbit is the fucking glitchiest mess I've ever played. I once even fell out of bounds at the boss battle at the end of a level, leaving me and my brother having to restart the entire long-ass level. That fucking level was the reason we stopped playing.
... and here we are in 2015 with Fallout 4 being super buggy and 60$ multiplayer only Rainbow 6 Siege netcode being so bad that I dind't even buy it even if I loved the gameplay from the beta... this is getting ridiculous.
Are you playing Todd's games Bojack?
Also, in 2020, Anthem and Fallout 76. God damn it!
And now we got the sequel to the glitchfest that was AC: Unity, Arkham Knight
I subbed tnx to TB, finally another channel that is written by a smart critically engaging and rational human being, THANK YOU! and keep up the vids!!!
I think the problem lies in the fact that no one goes in-depth for what they're buying. People buy the game near launch, play it, and hope for the best.
Most people buying these games don't use TH-cam to the extent you or I do (SBH's criminally low subscriber base) where we can look for decent opinions and gameplay footage and ascertain whether it is worth our time and money.
Some just hear the concept of the game, get hyped, like and invest in it, which is fine of course, until publishers start exploiting a business model of selling incomplete products of said good concept to the consumer.
I guess the irony here is with all this savvy technology where ignorance is not an excuse anymore, people still fall for this nonsense.
Great video. Love your channel especially the critical close ups. Congrats I saw this vid on the reddit gaming sub.
Absolutely spot on. Thank you for making this video. This really describes the ethics and power the consumer has over the quality and methods of a developer.
Super Bunnyhop is the perfect youtube channel. Its videos are critical and smart, are released pretty often, and its community isn't big enough to be stupid.
I've seen this kind of thing coming for a while now. It's the combination of companies not wanting to push back the release of games that clearly need it, and a lazy reliance on their ability to patch these games later. Except of course, nowadays "later" sometimes means after half a year, or sometimes not at all. All because these companies are so focused on their short term profit, and don't care who or what they exploit to get there.
6:08 is just perfect. MCC was surely released early because microsoft wanted to get it out there at the perfect timing.
I think you raise a good point with the 'release it now, patch it later' mentality, but with the exception of a few, ahem, titles COUGHEsbern'sdoorinSkyrimCOUGH only minor bugs seem to have been popping up until these past couple of years when games like Watch Dogs, AC Unity, PC port of Lords of the Fallen etc have been absolutely broken. I guess it can be put down, mostly, to devs rushing to finish their games either for the twilight of one gen or the continued popularity of the next. But 2013 and 2014 seemed to have far more serious, game-breaking crash-inducing bugs than we did between, say, 2008 and 2012.
(it still sort of unnerves me to remember that the PS3 and 360 life cycles have been around ten years. A decade. Twice than the previous two gens)
I hope you never leave the interwebs, George
I'm kinda glad I managed to avoid all these massively buggy games in 2014 all while not visiting the largest gaming news sites.
It's a real shame that games are allowed to release broken partly because patches are a thing now. I wonder if anyone at any of these companies has made the argument that your company would look a heck of a lot more competent if you released a game that didn't need a day 1 patch, especially now.
Glitch crisis. My first thought was that videogames lacked of glitches, but then I remembered how everyone else hates glitches, even if they help you in a difficult single player game.
I think a big part of the problem is the very fact that the games can be patched after launch now. Game companies basically take that for granted now, and no longer care about getting it right in the first place. It's probably also seen as a good way to push streaming and online purchases, as the chances of being able to play a game you buy in the store without downloading gigabytes worth of patches is quite low.
I mean, think about it. They can save a lot of money on QA if they just ship the game right after development and then let the consumers be the beta testers, relying on their complaints to figure out what to fix. Then later, the late adopters may be none the wiser regarding how buggy it was before, and everyone just remembers it as a good game overall. It's awful, but it makes sense to cut costs there because people are already used to this cycle with computer software and apps, and video games are now regarded as basically just software, and thus are no longer expected to provide a premium experience out of the box.
This video and the numerous videos about botched indie PC games on Steam all validate why 2014 was the Year I Was Afraid to Buy Games.
It's been a good year to be an Indiegame hipster. Transistor, Shovel Knight, The Talos Principle and Issac Rebirth had no problems for the majority of players.
Notice how none of these games were made by Nintendo? That's because they actually polish their games and make sure that they are finished before releasing them, unlike everyone else.
I find it really off putting that Indie games are being released with almost 0 bugs/glitches and if there is they are usually patched, and they are more appealing, cost worthy and FUN to play that most triple A games on the market today.
You and satchbag should collab one time, it would be the most intellectual video game related video ever if that ever happenned
Here after George’s somehow “anti consumer” viral tweet. I thought we were mostly over bad launches but it seems like every time a new console generation launches, we’re gonna get bad launches. Never buy a new PC game on launch, don’t pre order games and wait for price drops. Be responsible consumers and reward good behavior from publishers.
I think the problem with the majority of net codes is that some of them can't handle the massive flux of players that join in, but will still work if there is less amount of players. Even if gamers stopped buying them on launch, once people start saying the game is okay to play, the majority of gamers will still rush to get to game thus stressing the servers. So I think the real problem is the net codes that become stressed once flux kicks in.
And then you look at the credits:
Billions and millions of artists and designers.
12 programmers.
2018 here: Gamedev biz still works people at 100+ hour weeks and ships big mega-titles with characters who fall through the floor or forgot to put on their faces. So yeah, as bad as it was in 2014 or just getting worse.
There was a mission in the port for San Andreas. You had to go to the beach and dance for a mission and then steal the van. The issue was that you couldn't beat the dancing part no matter how perfect you hit the buttons. The only way to beat the mission was to use a glitch and it took a while for me. I dont know if they fixed it but that's what I'll take away from the last gen ports for San Andreas.
Another problem is that the people who do wait to purchase don't encounter a majority of the bugs at launch. I waited a few months to play assassin's creed unity and had a lovely time with the game. They finally introduced stealth and deeper missions into Assassin's Creed. It's hard for me to care about this glitch catastrophe when I feel so detached from it. It seems that Ubisoft is learning their lesson by softening up on their blitzkrieg release strategy, by taking some more time for the next Assassin's Creed and Far Cry, and a well crafted sequel to Watch Dogs, so hopefully other studios will follow suit.
I've been saying last year that I wished a lot of these developers would have an extra year to develop these AAA games so they would have a much better quality for them, so I'm glad this video shows that I'm not the only one who agrees on this.
What I don’t get is like, so how do you break the cycle? If super broken games continue to make sales milestones, and the shareholders continue to up the demands in response to the sales, it seems like this is just how things are gonna be from now on
Great video, I love to see this side of the gaming industry.
I can't necessarily put the full blame on publishers, I put the majority of blame on consumers. Consumers have become McDonald consumers in the gaming scene with people pre-ordering everything and demanding DLC as soon as possible. Publishers realised this and responded with pre-loading and season pass pre-orders. Games are more grind orientated than ever with micro-transactions implemented to speed up the process. Why are they getting progressively more common in games? Because people buy them. People love quick and easy access to their games and content even if they risk buying a broken game.
I agree with you. I also blame 3rd Party AAA publishers (Ubisoft, EA, ActivisionBlizzard, Epic, Konami, Bethesda, Microsoft, Ouya, Onlive and even Google and Atari)
And to think that STALKER was considered very buggy game back in 2007, with one broken secondary quest (that can be fixed with loading a save), and few crashes to desktop.
Very very good job! I don't say it that often but this is very well explain and show
It's very very rare for me to buy a game on Day 1, most of the time I wait for a few weeks to see if by then, assuming i still want it, the bugs have been fixed or not.
It's pretty sad that we have to wait for games to be made playable after they've already been put on store shelves, but as long as consumers in general keep buying it and making this practice okay, and pushing developers to release games annually this is gonna keep happening. I wish it wouldn't and I've said countless times myself that I'm pretty much done with modern gaming (though I must admit I'm still around on my Wii U ) because of this practice of releasing broken games. But I'm only one person and in the grand scheme of things if people keep buying it and accepting this as the norm, it'll keep happening no matter what I say or think about it.
Oh well though It's not like I don't have a MASSIVE catalog of old games and consoles to fall back on so Keep buying your broken games and I'll just be back here in the archives playing some of the greatest games (at least in my own biased view) of all time.
I worked for EA as s QA, and honestly I quitted because I got tired of hearing things like, we don't have time to fix this, or this bug is a KS, it made me really angry to go to work, to find bugs, to be told later that those would not be fixed or something along those lines. But is not just games, everything is glitchy now (i'm an electrician) and even electrical supplies are so goddam fragile, they are not as sturdier as they were 50 years ago, cuz I've seen them and those still work like the first day
You know what?
FUCK EA!
There is such an easy and simple solution to this problem:
*SIMPLY DON'T BUY ANY GAME THAT HASN'T BEEN REVIEWED FOR A FULL MONTH AFTER RELEASE*
If a game is shit, reviews destroy it, so it won't sell. It forces publishers to let developers finish their game, because only the great games will sell. The hype train and EA won't tell you a game's quality, it's the reviewers and early patch counts that give you that information!
oh my god a video about ethics in game journalism/review (for about 2 minutes admittedly)
I feel like the fact we're seeing THE SAME AAAAAAAA*10^27 GAMES, EVERY, SINGLE. YEAR. is a much bigger problem than the fact these releases are often buggy. The bugs are the only way to tell Call of Asscry's 2014 installment from 2013's.
You know we're in trouble when you fuck up Tetris.
Still when I look at some of the best games that came out this year, none of them felt rushed. Take the South Park game and Shadow of Mordor. And frankly the best game I played last year was King's Bounty: Armored Princess, which came out in 2009.
Brilliant video. Depressing that the lack of polish is going to get worse.
I really hope 2015 is a better year for gaming, but I'm kind of worried things will just get worse.
The best time to play a game is at least a year after its release.
dude, loved dat tetris music that you put in