Games are so complicated now that how much testing is "better testing"? I've never been affected by the AssCreed save file bug, whereas I think JaseC has (multiple times?). How do you test for that? At what point do you accept a release as good enough?
I think that a general idea has been established that games should ship in a form which doesn't have bugs with basic functionality. Should be able to play without predictable crashing. Should be able to save and depend upon that save. Settings should change what they say they will change. The RPS article echoes stuff like that.
I mean, look back and we can see points of reference: Save file bugs have been a pretty common issue, industry wide, over the past few years. WTF? Before say...2008, I'd never heard of widespread issues with saves. And the save bugs are often platform/version agnostic. Meaning, an issue with the main codebase. Stuff like this shouldn't be a problem with released games. Especially now, that people have been burned on this now, several times. It should go without saying, but no game should be releasing with common save issues. Ok, one guy didn't experience. But someone out of 15 probably does. So, design a team to account for enough gaps to represent a slice of the market.
Consoles have certification processes on games and patches. It seems to often work. Its a semi-closed system. So naturally, its a little easier to do.
But it doesn't always work! BF4 was a shitshow on all paltforms, at release. A lot of that was to do with the backend. Which probably isn't certified as well.
Yes, games are more complex. Testing should expand to reflect that. Valve shouldn't
have to do it. But, Valve or someone like them,
may have to do
something, to push the issue. If customers have to be beta testers, then Valve should back us more aggressively. and it wouldn't take long for some push back to improve things enough that they wouldn't have to do it, even though the threat is there.
Greenlight and Early Access imply that a game isn't finished. May be buggy. So what determines that a game is ready? The dev says so?
Couple that with the fact that missing a release greatly affects a company's bottom-line (and shareholder dividends, too, if it's public), and you'll still have company's releasing games that have flaws. They'll take the initial hit, and come back, as long as Valve doesn't find something immediately. Which is another question - how much testing should Valve do? At what point would a game have the "Valve Seal of Quality"?
I don't think we need to hash out a detailed process, here. A company should know that botching a release will hurt them. So, they should do everything they can to make that release, good. If someone knows at the 11th hour that a thing is wrong----delay. It hurts a company, but that isn't our fault. If the company survives the delay, then hopefully a lesson is learned. Or maybe someone in a position like Valve delists a poor release, until the game is fixed. and hopefully a lesson is learned. Nowadays, poor sales and/or feedback on a single release, can shelve a franchise. Can even fold a dev house. I would think devs and companies would be doing everything they can to at least release functioning products. Still, we see insider articles every now and then, which talk about how mismanaged some projects are. I've never contributed to a game's development before and even I can read those and facepalm at the parts where the big time team director missed the mark.
I can't remember what it was, but recently read an article about a dev team where everyone is constantly playing the game as they create their respective content. and I'm like, yeah, good! DUH to anyone who isn't doing that.
Agree to disagree here, but I think once Valve start pushing the "We QA your titles and maybe not let them be released if they're buggy", a lot of developers and publishers will move elsewhere. Ubisoft could easily push UPlay as "the next Steam" considering a lot of gamers already have UPlay installed. Bethesda are just waiting for Valve to trip-up in a big way, and they start hawking their own platform as the only place to get the next Elder Scrolls and Fallout. EA will turn-around with a big "We told you so!"
I think it's important to remember that Steam is as big as it is due to developer and publisher support, so once you start playing with that balance, it becomes a fraught situation (from Valve's perspective). The only reason EA's loss didn't affect them all that much is because, really, EA's big franchises are on console, not PC. Even Battlefield has lost its sheen.
I see what you are saying. Totally. However, with "agree to disagree"---its all an unknown. The RPS article is fed up with Valve pushing it onto the customer. Valve the leading digital vendor on the PC platform and I heard once that they account for like 1/4 of all internet bandwidth or something. With great power comes great responsibility.
app culture is flooding the Steam market with cheap shit. Hoping to make aggregate riches. Its also drowning out small games which are actually decent or better. But they get swept away in the flood and blocked out by the suns of big name games. But sometimes even those big name games don't really work so well. Valve is rich enough to figure this out. They are slow on the draw and so far, they are asking us to pull the trigger. or asking for a bounty.
Rumors of as much as 5 grand. I bet a game like Super Hexagon, that's probably a significant portion of their total development costs. But Super Hexagon deserves to be on steam. So a pay wall isn't going to work.