[TRENCHES] Thursday, April 25, 2013 - Downton
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
Downton
http://trenchescomic.com/comic/post/downton
Let slip the dogs of war.
AnonymousQA testers have an unusual relationship with gaming press. I’d like to elaborate a little. You see, every time a member of the press plays any game that requires a second player, you’re playing alongside a member of QA. We have the most experience, and handing the game off to some unpracticed marketing guy with no idea what bugs dodge would be a catastrophe.
So here’s where it gets awkward on the QA end. We have collectively spent the last 6 to 9 months playing nothing but this game for 8-16 hours a day. Once you hit 1000 hours spent playing a single game you ascend beyond mortal skill. Multiplayer games against each other are measured in single bullets and millisecond reaction times.
Now imagine asking these people to lose.
We are asked to collectively throw the game while playing you. To appear like we are trying but never kill you. To make you feel like a champ. I really hope that didn’t shatter egos.
Now to rein this back in and turn it into a proper story.
It was roughly 4 years ago, and I was on the 30-ish person large Multiplayer team for a AAA Shooter. The brutal grind known as the prep for E3 was winding down and it was game time. The name of the game was 3 days of non-stop multiplayer against the press. Breaks and lunch taken at our desks. The entire time only maintaining the facade of a game taking place. Bullets flying everywhere but to no real effect. Like storm troopers.
We periodically get feedback from the attendants on the floor with the press. Things like “he’s lost over by the docks, someone get over there and keep the action going,” or “people are noticing the bad lighting on those trees. Keep the action elsewhere.”
While we were getting feedback from our liaison, some obnoxious dude was hanging out near the booth loudly proclaiming “Wow, is that the best AI you could come up with? Those bots are terrible!”
Our lead asks what Marketing wants us to do about it. Our Marketing liaison utters the magic words through the speakerphone.
“It’s an hour until we pack it up, Let ‘em off the leash.”
The ground shook. The heavens split. The world exploded.
Posts
I guess the comic is mirroring real life a little too much. I'm not sure what I was hoping for.
I just don't get it.
kingworkscreative.com
kingworkscreative.blogspot.com
And the justification to this business model is that there's a diagram?
I shall explain it to you:
Preorders
First week sales
Early guided previews
Late accurate reviews
Industry pressure towards high scores
Advertising on review sites = conflict of interest
Customer apathy
Misguided customer loyalty (fanboys/fangirls)
Short term customer memory
Refunds are hard to come by, or often impossible
Short term profit > Long term market stability
Really, with as much of a sellers market at this, it's a surprise people aren't just buying annual and bi-annual rereleases of the same games in the same engines with the same stories told in the same way, for triple the price of an original idea told well. Oh wait...
Some AAA games are really good, but there's a lot of pressure on a AAA developer to spend more money on marketing (== first week sales) than on a decent game (== long tail sales)
Shareholders are happy as long as the value of their stock is increasing in the short term (days/weeks), because as long as that is happening they can sell their stock anytime and turn a profit.
What shareholders don't like is bad news. "The title that matters so much to our short term financial success is actually still a year away from shipping" is the kind of thing that pisses off shareholders. The value of their stock goes down, and they need to either sell at a loss once everyone has heard the news, or hang onto the stock for a year until it does go up, tying up their money.
So long term stuff like "if you put out a crappy game it will be really bad for you forever because your reputation will be sullied" doesn't matter to shareholders. They can sell their stock after the game launches at their leisure, because "produced a bad game that isn't going to make as much money as it could have over its lifetime due to crapiness" doesn't have much short term impact on stock price. Plus the company gets to free up a dev team to make another title a year sooner!
This is why everyone is so excited about kickstarter and such- if you get a game funded via crowdsourcing, there's much less short-term pressure to get the game out the door. How good the game is really what will determine if you get funding for another one, so you need to get it right. And if you really need to take an extra few months or a year to take it from "buggy crap" to "polished and fun to play", it's actually in your best interest to do so. You have people who kickstarted the project eager to play and putting pressure on you, but it's not the kind of pressure that can see you replaced on your own project with someone who is willing to push out a crappy game so that they don't lose out short term.
kingworkscreative.com
kingworkscreative.blogspot.com
I have no idea why they didn't listen to you.
Haha, kind of, yeah. I mean, the game was obviously not ready, but declaring it was a year out when everyone else is saying it's good is just going to make you look like an idiot who should be ignored. There are more tactful ways to handle that :P
It also probably matters what type of game it is. A MMORPG would probably be a different story than a non-MMO release, since they are being patched constantly and there is so much content that it's reasonable to assume not all of it will be done for launch.
Ultimately this sort of thing comes down to money though. Certain companies especially can probably get away with this. You are losing customer loyalty with stuff like that, but if you are also bringing in new customers at a fast rate, there's a point where that kind of balances out :P
Indeed. Also, the guy in question was from customer service so I can almost guarantee that the thought process was "Ugh, CS. They want us to fix every bug so that we don't get any calls. He's probably hyper-exaggerating."
The tale didn't mention a lot of details about the meeting, but a better way to approach this would have been to say "Well, I think there are a few critical issues that we should address if we can get an extra week into the schedule. For example, we really need to fix bug 12345 (the game crashes when you swing your sword three times without moving) and bug 23456 (saved games get corrupted if you are carrying more than eight potions)."
The end-luser in the consumer space, by a vastly great majority, is a complete egocentric retard that spends a lot of money with little thought or regards towards prospects of service, quality of product and future consequences.
It's only when they start ranting on forums, being abused by the CS, getting banned by the publisher that they suddenly open their eyes to see what is around them.
This is also reflected onto politics and just about any other field. The old "at first they came for..." applies.
now they get to live upstairs and nobody learns any lessons and yet more no development for any of the characters
OH BOY