I work hard for every penny I earn. I work more than 70 hours a week. Most of the time I wake up and go to bed and all ive done is the AngryJoeShow and related things.
I play every game to completion, I record all 60 hours of footage even when it comes to RPG's then I go by hand to find all the cool or messed up moments to put them into the video where I talk about them. I produce the video myself, record the video myself, edit the video myself, add fx myself. Go buy all the costumes and props all over my city myself. I twist my friends arm's and try to work around their busy work schedules to get them to be in my videos when a scene calls for it. Then I post the video, update my website, admin my website, post on social media, promote the video, share the video as much as I can because I worked my ass off on it. And I have to do all this within a matter of DAYS sir, in order for the review to be relevant and to beat major outlets with millions of dollars and hundreds of staff who get their reviews out early exclusively.
On top of all this ive found time to create my community website AJSA myself and working with talented web guys to build the best possibly gaming community for my fans to play with me on regular streams which I have to also find time for. Then i have to deal with all the forums, policy, and website issues that popup from having a community grow to 16,000 members within 3 days.
So don't you talk to me about internet videos being not hard and my job not taking any time or effort you ignorant dismissive forum cancer. I bid you good day, sir.
I SAID GOOD DAY.
Good answer! I'm glad that you came online to make a stand. Certain people need to be more appreciative and understand that it is NOT EASY to make videos like yours, especially when there is plenty of promotional & plugging work that needs to be done within a small time-frame in order to obtain strong viewing exposure. Even my Versus Battlecast videos (especially episode 6:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVXMim20eNs) on Youtube took plenty of hours to create, and required much much editing time and research within the incredibly little time I had available to spare. Please only focus on the constructive criticisms here, but of course, you don't need me to tell you that.
Back to your video, you are completely right. What EA did was release a game with a "showstopper" bug. This absolutely a complete "no-no" for EA nor any other company to have in their game. For this to happen, you are potentially correct that it was the EA publishing team pushing DICE to provide a working code of the game (working code doesn't mean non-broken code) in order to release it within their desired release window. The problem is, if DICE ramp up the coders and testers nearer to the game release, which is exactly what they would or should have to do in order to release the game out on time, they would incur an incredible overhead in the P&L that goes way above their assigned budget. Knowing EA like I do, I’m sure they would hold one of the DICE team member's head for ransom for that... production oversight. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised that someone's head is already threaten to be placed on a silver platter if the game doesn't generate enough desired revenues within a specific window. So yes, as you've pointed, this is not DICE fault in its entirety, this is possibly EA publishing's fault for not being supportive enough to DICE.
However, there is another side to this coin: if the game was delayed by 1 1/2 months in order to fix the bug (I'm very sure that's the time DICE require to iron the game properly) would everyone be happy? I don't think so... That would mean no BF4 for next-gen release, the competitor window against COD:Ghost would have been missed, and you would potentially almost miss the holiday shopping window too as the game would most likely be released near the end of December or January 2014 earliest. That wouldn't have been good for anyone, not to us gamers who are excited to play the game during the Christmas holiday season, not the retailers who are supporting the game, and especially EA as this period is definitely the right time to release game, and promote the Premium Pack and DLC before Christmas hits. i.e. high sales. I guess this is why they took the "origin is mandatory so let's release an update patch when we have isolated and fixed the problem" route.
None the less, a showstopper bug is a showstopper bug and a bug that big is still inexcusable (crashing several times is crazy). Therefore, I believe what EA should have done is what you suggested in your video. They should have ramp up the testers and coders like no tomorrow to iron the game as much as possible before release to comb out all potential showstopper bugs. The overhead cost would have been high but the margins would still be small in comparison to the one year sales-projections that EA expect to generate from the game. Whether EA and DICE done this we don’t know, but as the end-users of the game all we can do is speculate, demands, boycott if necessary and nothing more. Sounds like small actions, yes. However they are still powerful ones in the eyes of the company if the majority of the users are doing this.
