<story><title>CD Projekt Red is under investigation</title><url>https://www.mcvuk.com/business-news/cd-projekt-red-is-under-investigation-by-polands-office-of-competition-and-consumer-protection/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Sodman</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t think it&amp;#x27;s fair to blame this on gamers. With all of the hyperbole over various games being &amp;quot;broken&amp;quot;, most people that are hyped about a specific game are just going to buy it and see for themselves. Unless it&amp;#x27;s literally unplayable (as may actually have been the case here), most people won&amp;#x27;t refund it.&lt;p&gt;This has been going on for years and years, it&amp;#x27;s just getting worse over time. It&amp;#x27;s always some variant of this conversation at $GAMEDEV_STUDIO:&lt;p&gt;Focus group feedback: Our test groups are noticing 10% of players are running into this bug&amp;#x2F;issue. It&amp;#x27;s frustrating them, but there are workarounds.&lt;p&gt;Management: All of our marketing materials target release date XX&amp;#x2F;XX&amp;#x2F;XXXX. If we try to fix this bug we&amp;#x27;ll have to push the release... How many people will _not_ buy the game because of this bug?&lt;p&gt;Focus group feedback: Nobody that would have otherwise bought this game would decide not to buy it over this issue.&lt;p&gt;Management: So we ship as planned, and fix the bugs in a patch.&lt;p&gt;Over time studios realized that you can get away with much bigger bugs affecting much larger portions of players. Ship sooner, start recognizing revenue, and push post-launch patches to fix the &amp;quot;really bad bugs&amp;quot;. It&amp;#x27;s shocking how bad the quality has to get before it starts making headlines.</text></item><item><author>jgust</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s a tragedy of the commons situation with gamer enthusiasts acting against their own best interest.&lt;p&gt;If people can&amp;#x27;t delay gratification for something as inconsequential as &amp;quot;non-broken video games&amp;quot;, I don&amp;#x27;t see how any personal responsibility campaign has any chance of working for things impacting society at large such as climate change, overfishing, public health, etc.</text></item><item><author>chundicus</author><text>I hope this will encourage big studios to stop releasing broken games, but I doubt it will. The incentives are just so broken due to ease of patching, a need&amp;#x2F;desire for cash after a drawn out dev process, and a general disrespect for their customers.&lt;p&gt;I think releasing a &amp;quot;broken&amp;quot; game in the form of &amp;quot;early access&amp;quot; from smaller studios can be good in terms of iterative and community development, but also that can be abused too. These bigger studios really don&amp;#x27;t have as much of an excuse in my opinion.&lt;p&gt;The only solution I see is to stop pre-ordering games and don&amp;#x27;t reward studios that do this, but easier said than done.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>incrudible</author><text>I disagree that this is getting worse. Every game of this magnitude of complexity has shipped broken, even way back in the nineties. The Elder Scrolls series in particular comes to mind. Back then, you&amp;#x27;d get patches from print media.&lt;p&gt;The games that didn&amp;#x27;t ship broken simply weren&amp;#x27;t that complex. Console games never were that complex. PC gamers gamers accepted this in order to be able to (sort of) play through an experience that was at the edge of what was possible. There was no Digital Foundry to count pixels and analyze frame drops. If you hit 20FPS most of the time, that was considered &amp;quot;playable&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;If a game like Cyberpunk 2077 can&amp;#x27;t ship broken, then it can&amp;#x27;t ship at all. It can&amp;#x27;t even get produced. Nobody is going to put hundreds of millions of dollars on the line to &lt;i&gt;maybe&lt;/i&gt; ship next year, forever. Nobody except maybe the Star Citizen community.</text></comment>
<story><title>CD Projekt Red is under investigation</title><url>https://www.mcvuk.com/business-news/cd-projekt-red-is-under-investigation-by-polands-office-of-competition-and-consumer-protection/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Sodman</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t think it&amp;#x27;s fair to blame this on gamers. With all of the hyperbole over various games being &amp;quot;broken&amp;quot;, most people that are hyped about a specific game are just going to buy it and see for themselves. Unless it&amp;#x27;s literally unplayable (as may actually have been the case here), most people won&amp;#x27;t refund it.&lt;p&gt;This has been going on for years and years, it&amp;#x27;s just getting worse over time. It&amp;#x27;s always some variant of this conversation at $GAMEDEV_STUDIO:&lt;p&gt;Focus group feedback: Our test groups are noticing 10% of players are running into this bug&amp;#x2F;issue. It&amp;#x27;s frustrating them, but there are workarounds.&lt;p&gt;Management: All of our marketing materials target release date XX&amp;#x2F;XX&amp;#x2F;XXXX. If we try to fix this bug we&amp;#x27;ll have to push the release... How many people will _not_ buy the game because of this bug?&lt;p&gt;Focus group feedback: Nobody that would have otherwise bought this game would decide not to buy it over this issue.&lt;p&gt;Management: So we ship as planned, and fix the bugs in a patch.&lt;p&gt;Over time studios realized that you can get away with much bigger bugs affecting much larger portions of players. Ship sooner, start recognizing revenue, and push post-launch patches to fix the &amp;quot;really bad bugs&amp;quot;. It&amp;#x27;s shocking how bad the quality has to get before it starts making headlines.</text></item><item><author>jgust</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s a tragedy of the commons situation with gamer enthusiasts acting against their own best interest.&lt;p&gt;If people can&amp;#x27;t delay gratification for something as inconsequential as &amp;quot;non-broken video games&amp;quot;, I don&amp;#x27;t see how any personal responsibility campaign has any chance of working for things impacting society at large such as climate change, overfishing, public health, etc.</text></item><item><author>chundicus</author><text>I hope this will encourage big studios to stop releasing broken games, but I doubt it will. The incentives are just so broken due to ease of patching, a need&amp;#x2F;desire for cash after a drawn out dev process, and a general disrespect for their customers.&lt;p&gt;I think releasing a &amp;quot;broken&amp;quot; game in the form of &amp;quot;early access&amp;quot; from smaller studios can be good in terms of iterative and community development, but also that can be abused too. These bigger studios really don&amp;#x27;t have as much of an excuse in my opinion.&lt;p&gt;The only solution I see is to stop pre-ordering games and don&amp;#x27;t reward studios that do this, but easier said than done.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>surge</author><text>Stop announcing release dates until its 90% finished or all major bugs are fixed and you&amp;#x27;re just 3 months away from being ready.&lt;p&gt;Publishers are a problem too, they pressure to release games around the holidays, or the console manufacturers do cause it helps sell hardware around the holidays.&lt;p&gt;From what I gathered its mostly fine on PC, they&amp;#x27;re a PC shop after all, the console versions needed probably at least 6 months of work to be polished. People were screaming for it to be released no matter what or to stop making excuses no matter how much crunch the devs were already doing. If they released it as an &amp;quot;early-beta&amp;quot; like a lot of games or just said up front, okay we&amp;#x27;re releasing it but its not finished, so you can play it but you&amp;#x27;re getting the beta now and we&amp;#x27;ll be fixing it with updates. I think hardcore gamers would understand. It would just not look good for release sales and I&amp;#x27;m not sure if the game media would care.</text></comment>