Comments on: Treating video games as software

By: Brandon

Brandon — Wed, 30 Sep 2020 07:23:06 +0000

By: Kevin

Kevin — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 20:30:05 +0000

personally, I think Epic Games are just in it for the money. I mean, how can they not have a bug report system. That seems shady to me. “Here buy this game for $60, but we’ll give you jack squat in customer support.”

By: Nitin Reddy Katkam

Nitin Reddy Katkam — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 07:21:56 +0000

I find it very annoying when I can’t seem to get a patch for a bug in a software that I bought. It gets worse when the firm that built the software doesn’t respond.

I’ve been working with the LLBLGen ORM for .NET lately and I’ve had a pretty good experience with their forums. I get a pretty quick response from the team lead, usually within a day or two.

With Microsoft Visual Studio, however, there’s just no easy way to get Microsoft to notice. I guess it’s a problem that most large firms have, especially if their reputation for not responding to bug reports already precedes them

Oh, how I wish there were more Java and PHP jobs around.

By: Tony

Tony — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 05:42:55 +0000

Haven’t you heard of someone encoding tools into crafted Animal Crossing items, and having those spread via game’s internal content distribution network?

By: Gianni A Chiappetta

Gianni A Chiappetta — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 04:02:00 +0000

I look forward to the day I can successfully perform an XSS vuln in a game

By: subSquall

subSquall — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 20:51:25 +0000

Unfortunately, gamers have been conditioned to expect bugs in games. Developers and publishers increasingly know that users can be treated as beta-testers and they take full advantage to rush their products. This has been prevalent in computer gaming for a long time, but with consoles becoming connected to the internet, its spreading there too.

I think a large part of the cause is that this software is entertainment … if it malfunctions, the company isn’t going to lose a million dollar contract.

By: Austin

Austin — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 22:50:13 +0000

I play Call of Duty: World at War a lot, and until about a month ago, there were several glitches, and the developers did nothing about it. People figured out how to go under the maps, and it got really bad as more and more people figured out the “trick”. It took the developers over a month to release a patch…

I definitely agree that the developers need to treat video games as software.

By: Tony

Tony — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 21:34:18 +0000

But now we do have a system for patching console games. This particular game it up to 3 patches, though they seem to revolve around premium downloadable content. Even if this wasn’t the case, bugs that originate in the game’s engine are important to know about, as that code is often reused for future games. Epic’s Unreal Engine is licensed out to other game developers.

WoW is different — there’s a pay-per-month subscription, and so there’s a financial incentive to keep gamers happy. I was really thinking more along the lines of StarCraft, which recently has seen its 16th major version patch, 10 years after the original game was released (and it included new features!). Are those patches being made simply because there’s a large fanbase, or are fans still playing a 10 year old game because the developers continue taking such an active role in the community? It’s difficult to know for sure, but I have my guess.

Though I think you are right that a limited lifespan encourages a different development cycle. I guess I’m just not happy with such a trend.

By: Christer Ericson

Christer Ericson — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 07:38:57 +0000

Tony, you have to understand that up until recently there were no avenues for “patching” console video games, so bug reports served no purpose.

Blizzard is a PC developer, so it is not surprising that they have an infrastructure in place for bug reports, whereas the 360 division of Microsoft does not.

This situation is slowly changing, with consoles becoming more similar to PC games in this aspect, so you can expect this to change over the next few years.

Still, games only have a limited lifespan (on average; games like Blizzard’s WoW again are not the norm), so don’t expect too much in this area. You wouldn’t expect movie companies to rerelease a movie because there’s a few frames with a microphone visible in them, would you? It’s a rather similar situation.

By: Ben Hovinga

Ben Hovinga — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 19:36:08 +0000

Nice Rant. Hopefully someone from Epic sees it and actually might put a bug report system on their website and then other game companies will do the exact same thing because Epic’s games somehow are much better now because of this feature and the others follow. But lets face it. When a company is getting feedback from users in an easy way, said company is better than another who doesn’t get any feedback at all but just show a crappy Knowledge Base.