Good old proof by exhaustion.
Ah the Economics of game development.
Let’s talk about Microsoft’s economic rationale for charging developers to update their games.
Microsoft has a vested interest in ensuring that products released for the XBOX 360 are out of the wrapper ready. The majority of people (not hardcore gamers lets remember, but the majority of people) who use the console look for sporadic engrossing experiences. Microsoft has a vested interest in ensuring that these customers, who make up the overwhelming majority of the gaming market even if they are far from the most vocal, are able to recieve the most flawless experience possible with their time. This in turn provides positive psychological responses to the consumer which in turn develops brand loyalty to Microsoft (and its future consoles).
So Microsoft uses patch release fees as a tool to encourage developers to “get it right” the first time. Of course developers fought hard against this saying you can’t discover every issue in testing, Microsoft, having its own first party software developement team understood this and implemented the one patch for free compromise.
Now here is where the economics and psychology of this get interesting. We have tons of research data that suggests that those people who play games more than 10 hours a week (and that is the data supported threshold) blame bugs and problems on the software developer, this is where in large part the blame belongs. However, amongst those who play games LESS than 10 hours a week, the overwhelming majority of these gamers blame the console or the console owner’s company for errors that occur in game. Now research indicates that these console gamers make up as much as 50% of all gamers (the number is infintely higher amongst Wii owners… and hence Nintendo first party stuff is infintely better than third party stuff because Nintendo knows it will get blamed when things go wrong because of the mindset of the gamers who use its console). Now if you had a game that sold 1 million copies that needed two patches for things that were not game breaking, but substantial issues (balance problems, graphical errors, whatever) these gamers don’t blame Capcom, Konami, EA, etc. THEY BLAME MICROSOFT. Every gamer who blames Microsoft for a software problem is a gamer who is more likely to choose the competition.
Microsoft is smarter than this and implemented the rule to incentivize game developers and publishers to get it right the first time so that these gamers don’t turn on Microsoft but rather come to the conclusion that their valuable leisure time will be well used on Microsoft’s console and will not frustrate them, but provide them the experience they’re looking for.
I would be extremely suprised if Sony does not in fact have a similar policy in place. Given the psychology and economics involved in maintaining a loyal user base, especially in a world where money is lost on consoles and made on game sales, you can’t have people jumping ship to your competition where they’ll spend money on the games that will enable you to break even and profit on your console’s life cycle.
As Thelo mentioned PC patching is much easier. If you have a game that’s released for Windows, you don’t have to pay Microsoft a portion of what you make from PC game sales. All you have to pay Microsoft for is for the development libraries and environment. Once you pay for that once, its over. Anyone can make any piece of software they want for Windows and patch it as they see fit because Microsoft does not (and could not under the antitrust ruling aginst Microsoft dating back to Netscape) have that level of control over software development on that platform when that platform runs on 95% of computers around the world… That would be a blatant violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. But in a world where the XBOX 360 is the number two console and owns about 30% of the market share, to Nintendo’s 50% and Sony’s 20% (these are rought numbers but you get the idea), Microsoft’s XBOX division can make these demands and developers can either say “Yes” or “No” and if they say no to Microsoft they can go somewhere else, whether it be Sony or Nintendo which gives enough room to act in an anticompetitive manner without violating the Sherman Antitrust Act.
If that’s the actual rationale, it’s not very, pardon me, rational. Making patches hell doesn’t incentivize devs to “get it right the first time”, believe me, they already have that incentive themselves. It just makes it harder to fix it afterwards. I don’t know where that myth of “the possibility of patching makes games buggier on the first release” came from, because it’s just a complete non-sequitur. You can have a rigorous testing process for first release without making patching hard afterwards.
That’s especially true with always-connected consoles like the 360, who recieve the patch automatically anyway, and even truer considering the fact that patch 1 is free anyway so that whole first release rhetoric falls off the window in the first place.
Wow, I had no idea that starting this thread would lead to such a debate! Some interesting and informative posts have sprung from my rant. Truth be told I don’t even own a 360, PS3 or a copy of HDR. I guess my motivation was that if at some point in the future I wanted a copy of HDR and the PS3 version still has these awful bugs in it, then I would be mad. There are many great ports of fighting games for PS3 that I want, but if the PS3 version of HDR is less than good then I would be forced to guy a 360 for that one game.
I guess this shows that in general developers care more about making the best version of a game for the 360. Because developing for the ps3 is more time consuming and expensive, the ps3 ports of many games end up being riddled with bugs and other flaws.
It is rational in their desire to maximize profits, which should be the ultimate goal of any business. If you can hit your developers and publishers for extra dough every time they make a mistake worthy of patching you can make quite a bit of extra cash flow that way.
I completely understand that developers have the incentives already in place to get it right the first time, but you have to remember who people blame when their games don’t play like they think they should and amongst gamers who play less than 10 hours a week, that’s Microsoft. Microsoft implements the policy both as a revenue stream and as an insurance policy.
And Thelo, you know I love you (no homo) and think the world of you as a gamer and I like to think as a little bit of a friend, but having the ability to fix anything later does incentivize its creators to not be as careful at first. An entire industry of auto repair exists because for years American Car Companies knew that if there were problems people would go get them fixed, they still sold their cars at the same price and created an entire secondary market for car repair. While the number of competing incentives in game development may lend themselves on the whole to BETTER performance, the existance of any disincentive to performance (even if its a perfectly reasonable one like the ability to go back and fix mistakes) by definition reduces the incentive for PERFECT performance (which in all reality is probably a good thing or every game would have Duke Nukem: Forever development times… and we all know how that’s ended up!)
You are right that people don’t choose really whether or not to patch their games, when a patch is available on XBL it says one is available and asks you to restart the game boom boom done. But developers have to make choices whether or not to pay the costs to make the fix in the first place, and like with all top down power structures, its not individuals making decisions, its more powerful groups making 80% of the decision for them.
To me, Microsoft’s rent seeking behavior is completely understandable and I don’t think the rhetoric behind it falls short at all. The first patch for free acknowledges the ability for human error, even collective error while punishing further errors by effectively fining developers. Of course the question then becomes, as we saw from Seth Killian’s comments to Aqua Snake, one of profitability. Is the fine that Microsoft is going to make me pay to fix a game a second time too high to make a second patch unprofitable. In the case of HDR I think Capcom USA and Backbone (or whoever would make that decision) clearly feel that paying however much for a patch would not be recooped through further sales.
And that is the danger of Microsoft’s rent seeking, in some cases, you will price developers out of the ability to fix and refine games past a first patch. The question for Microsoft is does the damage of having an unpatched game do enough damage to Microsoft and its reputation to hurt its ability to sell its consoles to prospective consumers and the answer to that question based on last month’s sales report showing that Microsoft sold more 360’s than Nintendo sold Wii’s would be no.
TL;DR
Microsoft’s finance and accounting guys pwned us all… hard.
Actually, I said that, but whatever.
Assuming you misunderstood what I wrote, and you aren’t just putting words into my mouth to cover your ass now that other experienced developers are calling you out on your impetuous ranting, I’ll summarize what I wrote:
You are comparing PC patching to console patching. This is a terrible comparison, because (1) PC software has to support extremely diverse hardware and software set-ups per user, and (2) the damage to hardware and/or software caused by a severe bug on a console is significantly more costly to fix than a commensurate bug on a PC (not only in terms of money spent, but also in terms of time and damage to the brands of MS and the developer of the game).
However, it’s not important to do it at all costs.
In fact, on a console, it is even more important to obviate patching (for reasons that I have already given you), thereby making it a non-issue.
So what are you selling now, that console games can compete with their PC counterparts as long as developers can patch them?
Hell, I don’t know why anyone would prefer to play TF2 on a console, anyway, regardless of how closely it mirrors the PC version. Is it possible that Valve have more impetus to focus their efforts on the PC version that have nothing to do with the ease of patching the console version? (e.g. A lot more people prefer to play it on a PC.)
You aren’t telling me anything that I don’t already know, son. To wit:
That’s nice. Of course, I’ve been a pro game dev for over twenty years, and held key or top positions as an artist and as a programmer on major titles for Amiga, PC, and almost all major consoles for the past four generations, so I guess I know what I’m talking about, too.
Maybe it is, Thelo, but the grumblings of some fellow coders (which you yourself say is what you’re basing a lot or most of your position on) is not enough to convince me that the reasons for the difficulty aren’t warranted. Especially in this industry, which is chock full of geeks and nerds (who are easily some of the most arrogant people in the world) by nature, I take someone’s moaning with a grain of a grain of salt – especially the younger coders. Complaining that things don’t work the way they think they should comes naturally to most of these fat social outcast keyboard-peckers.
I take issue with this assertion. It is obviously in Microsoft’s financial interest not to “hit developers for extra dough” for patch fixes, since that would make devs less inclined to fix buggy games, which reflects very poorly on MS itself (as you yourself mentioned in your post).
Don’t take this personally, Silver Rain, but as is typical for the gaming community (devs as well as players), which is full of kids who don’t know WTF they’re talking about but who nevertheless feel empowered to talk out of their ass, many people love to come at Microsoft with hoes, shovels, and pick axes of “stupid” or “outdated” or “money grubbing.”
What is far more likely than foolhardiness or avarice – labels that the young and the arrogant love to vomit all over everyone who doesn’t do things the way they’d like – on the part of MS is that it is simply cost-prohibitive (again, in terms of money spent, time spent, and damage to brands) for MS to have devs patching XBox games all over the place. As I wrote before, and as Silver Rain intimated later, there are numerous pitfalls to that approach, not the least of which is that it fosters lazy behavior in developers, who are much more likely to release buggy or even incomplete software under such a system, which could be VERY bad for a console (regardless of what Thelo claims).
See, I would agree with that but the evidence suggests otherwise. Especially given the prevalance of patching that already occurs on XBOX Live. I’ll take one example of a game I love to death. Castle Crashers. I think its great, but its been patched at least twice that I remember, probably more. But the game sold like hotcakes both pre and post patch so the patch kept people playing and post patch no one who bought it knew of the problems the game first had (buggy online matchmaking… weird sprity things happening… very weird stuff)
I honestly believe given that Microsoft seems to give the first patch for free that they in fact probably use this policy more as insurance and to allow for error. The fact that they can capitalize on further mistakes gives incentives for dev teams to not screw up a second time and hence not pay the fine. It also encourages greater managerial oversight of the development process by third party developers and that to me, seems like a good thing, even if it may at times cramp creativity.
Oh Milo I take no offense to anything. I am actually learning qutie a bit in this discussion. I come at it as an academic outsider. I’m an economist, its what I do for a living, so I can speak as to why corporations make the decisions they make which is where this particular line of posts had been. Why does Microsoft make patching games so difficult? I wanted to explore the economic rationale behind that as I saw it acknowledging that I’m no expert as to the actual process of game design or programming itself, just as an avid enthusiast and consumer of said products. Let me say, I come from a very neoclassical training, if I call Microsoft a bunch of money grubbers maximizing their profits… I mean that as a good thing! :tup: Any responsible management’s duty is to their shareholders first and foremost and that means maximizing their value as the owners of any corporate entity. That means maximizing profits by any and all legal and competitive means.
Violating anti-trust law and being anticompetitive isn’t cool. Dominating and outthinking your competition and finding ways to exploit their weaknesses… its like complaining about Cammy v Honda… it just won’t do you any good. Either find a new character or figure out a new way to attack the Sumo… (I.E. Find a new line of business or figure out a new way to survive)
In that case, I would question just how much experience you actually have developing games. (Especially PC games.)
There are a few really obvious (to anyone who has put in significant time making games) answers to the question of why games are buggier when developers can patch on a whim. Here are just a couple:
(1) Many if not most developers have to meet funding milestones. If a dev fails to meet intermittent bullet points on a feature list, then the people funding the game withhold some or all of the money for that period (usually temporarily). A lot of times, a company will rush to get features in just so they can keep their cash flow running as projected, knowing that they can fix bugs later with – you guessed it – a patch.
(2) Releasing a title on a patch-friendly platform allows a developer to shift the application of revenue from QA to other parts of a game, with the result that a title will have more bugs on release, but more features and more content on release, too. There is tons of market research to suggest that consumer are more than willing to put up with some patch-able bugs if it means that they get a feature- and content-rich title for their trouble. It gives a developer’s competition something to sweat about, too.
Buggier games on more patch-friendly platforms is anything but a myth, junior. It is demonstrable fact (with MMOs and FPSes – two of the biggest game genres out there – being the greatest offenders, as even someone outside the industry could guess). I myself have worked on major PC titles that we knew to have bugs (some of them significant), but that we shipped anyway to meet deadlines, with the knowledge that we could sew up the holes later on. (I have never worked on team that had that attitude for a console title, however.)
You’re an economist? Sweet! I’m not a trained or pro economist myself, but I LOVE that discipline. I’ve read a LOT of Sowell, Hayek, and Friedman (and watched many of Friedman’s videos); economics is really a fascinating line of work, and it’s applicable to SO much in life.
You’ve got my admiration, man!
Well, let me ask you both this. I know Thelo for example worked for EA, the world’s (I believe, maybe its Activision Blizzard now…) largest video game publishing house. I mean EA is massive and has been making its bread and butter on consoles for years.
Is it possible that you both come from different corporate environments that have a different philosophy on how game creation takes place? Or is it a pretty universal process? I’d love to hear both of you talk about the pre-design process and your philosophies on that.
I do find it interesting Milo that PC dev teams actively sort of ignored bugs to put in more features and that hasn’t happened to you in console development. That would seem to indicate that console dev teams are more aware of the costs of patching for consoles and don’t want to waste precious funds when they can take their time and get it right the first time. But that raises a question about designing each differently. Do you design PC games with a “Here’s what we have, lets see what we can add” philosophy versus a console “Here’s what we have, lets make sure it works” philosophy?
Milo: Yeah, I’m 25, got my Ph.D. from George Mason University in 2007 with specializations in Public Choice Theory, Public Finance, and Political Economy. I’m a Political Scientist with an Economics Ph.D., but as a doctoral student who had to take Ph.D. level Micro, Macro, Industrial Organization, Labor Econ, International Etc… I feel pretty good about that stuff. BTW, you have an EXCELLENT choice in economists sir :tup: If you want to know why goverment is so screwed up go read some Public Choice authors, The Calculus of Consent by James Buchanan (My Ph.D. mentor and Nobel Laureate) is quite fascinating! See, now it all makes sense, the love for economics, the Sarah Palin Icon (or at least my wife would agree, she LOVES Sarah…), the fact that you live in SD, you’re one of 5 sane people left in California… Now why can’t you convince the rest of your state its heading for fiscal ruin? lol
Yes, SR, that is absolutely the case. The approach to PC development has traditionally been significantly more feature-oriented, since the cost of patching or enhancing a PC title, to say nothing of the cost of major bugs, is far lower than it is for consoles.
Of course, the line between the two has blurred and continues to blur now that consoles are catching up (some might say have caught up) with PCs in their Internet capability, but as an economist, you know that the efficiency of complex systems takes time to evolve. All signs do point to it becoming economically feasible for consoles to be about as patch-friendly as PCs in the near future.
I agree wholeheartedly with your analysis of complex systems and efficiency, but here’s where my lack of indepth knowledge may hurt me. I believe that the XBOX 360 was the first console to really (and I know XBOX did okay) make online gaming a staple, a cornerstone of its functionality. I feel like Microsoft said to itself, “We’re going to do this online thing so well that PS3 is never going to catch us.” And I personally feel like Microsoft has continued that philosophy by expanding XBL’s functionality over time, whether it be Netflix, Twitter, Facebook, Last.FM, soon ESPN whatever.
But the PC is such a unique platform, it can do EVERYTHING. Can we see an evolution of consoles in THIS generation likely via software to do what PCs are able to on the internet and for that matter can we see the ease of progamming on consoles that we see for the PC? That type of evolution would certainly seem to fix the patching problem outside of artificial barriers created by console makers. Or are we going to have to wait for the next generation of consoles? Do we have to wait for a 720 and PS4 (or whatever they’ll be called)? Because if it can happen in this generation then perhaps Thelo is right in that there are too many hurdles to patching and perhaps too many of them are in fact artificial. But, if that level of complexity isn’t possible in this console generation then maybe Thelo is simply guilty of looking too far into the future.
Either way, I think both of you have made excellent points.
LOL, totally feeling you on government being utterly jacked up, man (especially in California, New York, Michigan, et al.) – largely as a result of people adhering to Keynesian economic theory (which fits with their ideological visions) as opposed to the classical Austrian/Chicago schools of thought.
I’ll take you up on the book recommendation as soon as I’m able; I rarely have fewer than six or seven books lined up for reading (virtually always non-fiction). I take it you’ve read Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions? Best book by an economist that I’ve ever read, which makes it one of the best books ever (for me), period. (I hear it’s Sowell’s personal favorite, as well.)
BTW, I’m actually in Los Angeles, now (Marina del Rey). I don’t like it here, but I work for a great small company (a nice change of pace), so it’s all good. Hoping to get back down to SD in a few years.
w00t w00t Sarah Palin! Give your old lady my regards.
WAY off topic, now…
You betcha!
Yeah, I live in Indiana and I’m blessed to live in a state with competent governance, its amazing what a difference that makes! lol.
Conflict of Visions should be required reading for every college undergraduate. Its absolutly amazing… but would so radically challenege the academic status quo on so many issues… many of my “colleagues” heads would explode… but back to my original question!
Actually maybe you and Thelo are living out the Conflict of Visions right now, the Constrained versus the Unconstrained… only in developer philosphy land as opposed to political conflict land.
I don’t know much about CC. Maybe its bugs were severe enough that the company felt that the cost of issuing successive patches was warranted.
A couple of things to keep in mind:
(1) The Behemoth (the company that developed CC) is a relatively new outfit. It is probably in their interest to take the financial hit of patching their game in order to maintain brand integrity.
(2) Although I don’t know a lot about CC, I do know that it is a HUGE hit. That means that Behemoth have made a lot of money off that game, which means that XBL patching is more affordable for them than it is for, say, whoever made the XBL version of Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? (Not that AYSTaFG is a bad game.)
I think you could argue probably both points about Capcom’s releases of HDR and MvC2.
1.) Capcom isn’t a new outfit but with their core fan base don’t you believe that patching HDR would in fact make these players more likely to adopt future Capcom products in fact reinforcing their own brand integrity with a consumer group that right now feels very disenfranchised?
2.) HDR sold pretty well and to expand it to MvC2 it sold EXTREMELY well. Most MvC2 players I’m sure would like some of what they see as bugs (whatever differences there are between the DC and 360 / PS3 versions which come on guys are they really that big of a deal???) fixed and HDR sold well enough I would think to warrant the hit to maintain point one on brand integrity.
Now in fairness, maybe this did in fact happen. We know that XBOX 360’s HDR recieved a patch that fixed a number of issues that PS3 did not. Perhaps the game sold well enough on XBOX to warrant the time and labor costs to run the first patch (at no additional fine from Microsoft) but not well enough for a second (which would carry the aforementioned Microsoft fine for a second patch). Whereas PS3 just didn’t do well enough to justify translating the work on the first patch to PS3 owners… how difficult that would be however, I don’t know, and if it wouldn’t have been terribly difficult that just seems lazy. BUT I’m no expert and there could be real difficulties translating a patch on one console to another, you and Thelo would be much more qualified than I to answer that question.
BTW, Castle Crashers deserves to be a hit, its hilarious and awesome rolled in sweet griddle cakes
True, developing for Sony consoles has always been difficult, relatively speaking. (First-hand experience talking, here.)
Even now, I am working on a PS3 title and my fellow programmers can sometimes be heard bitching left and right about how Sony has done and still does certain things. In fact, one of the first things I was assigned to do on this project was to look at Sony’s Collada exporter and try to make sense of it, because it’s buggy and was causing many of our art assets to bloat up to massive file sizes.
XBox development, on the other hand, is overall a rather pleasurable experience. Heck, if I want, I can make an XBox Live game right now, by myself, essentially for free (all I need is a PC, and who doesn’t have one of those?). I don’t even have to use C++, which is industry standard (especially on PlayStation consoles) but which I and MANY other professional coders don’t like (though there are still lots of hardcore Luddite nerds out there who maintain their death grip on the language) for its massive verbosity, complexity, error-proneness, and scary syntax (relative to many of the more modern languages like C# or F#, which are both awesome).
Well, to be fair, PC developers don’t really have anyone above them saying that they must meet X requirements for patches, plus hosting PC patches can be done for very cheap (or close to free if you distribute over torrents like blizzard). MS and Sony have to pay for the bandwidth that goes along with transporting these patches to every person who owns the game and connects to their respective network.
I’m not saying that $150,000 is reasonable for updating a single title on two different platforms, that’s insane. It is sad that Capcom is essentially too cheap to polish two of their most high profile arcade network games (HDR and MvC2) though. God knows they made a shit-ton off of these two games.