Every once in a little while
Some big-budget game is released in a horribly buggy state
and the gaming public at large asks:
"Why with a hundred million dollars at their disposal
Couldn't the studio launch something that worked?"
and "Why wasn't the game delayed so that it could be fixed?"
Today I will attempt to answer those questions.
First, let me start off by saying that I am not defending the practice of launching buggy games.
It's bad business and it means that something got done wrong.
But exactly where and when that something went wrong isn't always as obvious as it first appears.
On a macro level, it often boils down to two fairly straightforward categories:
scheduling issues
and production issues.
Let's start with the production side.
Here, there are three possible causes for a bug-filled game getting released.
One:
we can't fix it;
two:
it'll cost more to fix than we will make fixing it; or
much less frequently, three: we just didn't catch it in testing.
What players sometimes fail to realize, though,
is that the "we can't fix it" or the "it'll cost more than we'll make to fix it" scenarios
aren't a case of mere
laziness and certainly not malice.
Bugs like these are often the result of decisions made
super early in the development process,
and by the time the consequences of those decisions are visible
there's very little that can be done about them without a complete overhaul.
For example, since we just recently had a case of this:
Buggy animations.
If a game ships with a load of obvious animation problems
it could be the fault of incompetent animators
but it probably isn't.
Often, issues like these are technical -
a result of how the game engine handles animations; how the
animation system itself works,
and that system is built early in development -
way before a single asset gets put into the game
So you're not likely to start running into the edge cases where that animation system starts breaking in unexpected ways until a lot later -
once the game is mostly put together -
and by that point the flawed animation system
you've built is such an integral part of the game engine that removing or even altering it could break tons of other systems,
setting development back months
and leaving tons of expensive employees sitting on their hands for weeks.
Now, truly great studios have all sorts of practices for testing these things early and
lots of fail-safes to fall back on,
but problems like these are really tricky and even the best studios
sometimes get thrown when they hit a really fundamental or sometimes
undiagnosable bug in some core part of their engine two-thirds of the way through production.
And there's another side to this problem:
sometimes these unforeseen bugs aren't even the studio's fault -
at least not directly.
See, many studios don't actually build a lot of their core engine anymore.
Modern game engines are such a huge investment to build that it often makes much better business sense
to license one of the many quality
third-party options out there,
like Unity or Unreal,
and then flesh those out even further with middleware tools like FMOD or Havoc.
It's often the best option,
but it does mean relying on a series of third parties.
Every developer I know has a story of that time where they were waiting on a crucial feature which the engine company promised
but never delivered,
or of having to integrate a patch from a middleware developer that suddenly broke everything.
And, by its very nature, the decision to use such software happens very early in the project
cycle - well before any of those potential problems could possibly be foreseen.
By the time bugs start
surfacing or some critical feature never gets added to the engine,
it's too late to go back
and that means that it's often too late to ship anything but a buggy game.
But perhaps even more frequently,
buggy games get shipped due to scheduling issues
Players will often ask things like,
"Why don't they just push back the release date?"
But a lot of people don't realize just how much is tied up in that release date.
Marketing spend can begin as much as a year in advance of release. And things like
magazine covers and TV ad buys?
Those are often locked-in months and months before launch.
These aren't things which you can just reschedule at will - at least not without huge expense.
Then there's launch windows in general.
Everybody can probably think of some game that they love which didn't get the attention it really deserved
because its launch week was dominated by something like a Call of Duty or any given Blizzard game.
Publishers really want to avoid those scenarios, too
so they carefully coordinate all of their launches and try with varying degrees of success
to make sure that all of their games get at least a week where they don't have to compete
with some other major title for attention.
Pushing back a game's launch
even just a fortnight
can put it right in the shadow of a competitor and screw all of that up.
Then, there's the need to move on to other projects.
Major AAA developers,
especially ones owned by a publisher,
move -
or at least are supposed to move - like clockwork.
When a title is done,
that team is rolled onto a new project
or sometimes
they're temporarily brought in to help on other titles that the publisher studios are working on,
while a portion of the team spins up the next project.
This means that delaying a game isn't just delaying that game,
it's also delaying that team's next game or delaying
projects that team was meant to help with after launching their own.
And this can be an even greater issue when working with outsourced
developers, because today you'll often find that some assets,
levels, or parts of the game weren't built by the main studio, but by some outsourced team
elsewhere in the world. And these external studios?
They've got to move from one project to the next too.
They've got their own production schedule to keep.
If some unexpected bug bubbles to the surface and that
outsourced content,
many of these external studios are actually great about going above and beyond to try and help fix it.
But if they've already moved on to another project
by the time that bug is encountered,
they may not be able to help,
and if so the main studio on the game either has to run with what they've got or
remake all of that work themselves,
putting things further and further behind.
And I know it's easy for us as players to brush off factors like increased development costs,
because the publisher or the studio having to spend more money isn't our problem.
But this is a business.
AAA games represent
highly calculated risks
- a precision investment of millions of dollars based on
a carefully calculated prediction of how well that game might sell.
And sometimes,
not always, but sometimes,
as much as the artist in me hurts to say it,
sometimes the objectively better business decision is to not
sink more millions into that investment.
So should we be shipping buggy games?
Obviously not.
We have to keep looking for ways to test things early and
to leave ourselves some fall-back options if things go wrong.
And sometimes this stuff is just a matter of studio discipline.
But, when you're building software as complex as this,
bugs are gonna sneak up on the best of us,
and it's often not as simple as just delaying the game a few weeks
to iron those bugs out.
Sometimes, due to decisions made months or even years before
launch, those bugs are embedded into some part of the engine that can't be replaced or
sometimes those bugs are out of the studio's hands entirely,
still waiting on an update from a middleware developer that never happened.
And sometimes, even when it is theoretically possible for the team to iron those bugs out,
the potential cost of doing so is
simply so great, with so many
irreversible decisions about marketing spend and release schedules already made,
that the publisher chooses to move forward anyway.
And I don't say any of this to excuse releasing broken buggy titles
nor am I saying that it's wrong for you to be upset about being sold a broken buggy title.
I'm just saying to be aware that the bugs in that broken buggy title -
they might be more than a delay could ever fix.
See you next week.