When did they start selling incomplete games?

[Tanooki]

Funny I missed its game free technology.  Imagine that.  That and it's environmentally friendly smoke machine output generation too.

Edited February 18, 2020 by Tanooki

[Agamon]

10 hours ago, Steven Pendleton said:

Edit: Fantasy Grounds is worse.

FG isn't a game. It's an online virtual RPG tabletop. The "DLC" is just RPG books imported to be used in games. You can play without them, the virtual "books" just help automate character gen and some of the mathy stuff during play.

[Steven Pendleton]

9 minutes ago, Agamon said:

FG isn't a game. It's an online virtual RPG tabletop. The "DLC" is just RPG books imported to be used in games. You can play without them, the virtual "books" just help automate character gen and some of the mathy stuff during play.

Good... I think. Maybe not. I'm unsure. Anyway DLC is bad. Sequels are okay. So are complete games. Physical expansion packs are also somehow okay, but I'm not entirely sure why. Maybe because of Brood War. But maybe not.

[Shawn]

I found that when online updates became accepted by the masses, that is when some games started to ship out incomplete or with bugs they intended to patch with future updates. Sometimes they had the patch ready by the time the game made it to the public but not in time before the discs got pressed so you had to update as soon as the disc was inserted for the very first time. Once they had the bulk of buyers ok with buying extra content via DLC they also fed us "updates" to the main program as well. That would have been fine if it was the .1 percent bug that nobody found in testing that ended up being a big deal once the public got their hands on select games but it didn't stay that way. 

[Steven Pendleton]

1 hour ago, Shawn said:

I found that when online updates became accepted by the masses, that is when some games started to ship out incomplete or with bugs they intended to patch with future updates.

So... Xbox 360?

[Tanooki]

12 hours ago, Steven Pendleton said:

So... Xbox 360?

That's basically what I said a page or two ago.  When MS got their network structure together and solid, then started packing in a good sized hard drive, that's when the crap started to roll down hill.  The xbox started the feelers for it, but when they realized (they being not just MS, but also Sony and all those third parties) they could get away with charging full price for a beta release product as gamers didn't care about waiting on downloads, they were all in with a free pass to abuse the storage to finish up their work.  So yeah, the 360, technically the original xbox tested the waters but really the 360.

[Steven Pendleton]

9 minutes ago, Tanooki said:

That's basically what I said a page or two ago.  When MS got their network structure together and solid, then started packing in a good sized hard drive, that's when the crap started to roll down hill.  The xbox started the feelers for it, but when they realized (they being not just MS, but also Sony and all those third parties) they could get away with charging full price for a beta release product as gamers didn't care about waiting on downloads, they were all in with a free pass to abuse the storage to finish up their work.  So yeah, the 360, technically the original xbox tested the waters but really the 360.

Yeah, whenever I refer to "Xbox" I refer to the collective nastiness of all of them together unless I call out one specifically. Great job for more or less ruining games, Microsoft. Yes, someone else would have done it if you hadn't popularized it, but you did, so you get the blame for eternity and your reputation can NEVER be purged! Unless you make a time machine and unmake the Xbox, which would be awesome. Please  find a way to make it happen!

[Tanooki]

I was in a unique space at the time.  I joined the actual game industry and was in it through 2001 and 2002 before jumping to the media for another 4-5 years after that.  So I was there fiddling with the GC and XB before it came out.  I saw the hardware issues it had, the GC kits as you probably saw were not optical but large carts.  We had xbox systems catch fire with shorts to the early model/pre-model systems having fiddly drives that would circularly re-surface discs.  The storage there at the time was nothing, but the thing had a HDD and capable but they at first cut some limitations with the network being fresh and reliance for a time on those lame memory cards they eventually dropped.  Once the network was stable in use, tested for larger downloads from DLC or expansions into pushing fixes after the HDD became the predominant then only real choice it kept up in frequency going forward.  More people saw how on the inside the benefits but also what could benefit from using it for other (as you'd likely call it) nefarious stuff.  That's why and how they 360 so hard as they did, and out nearly a year earlier than the others, both sides them and developers back patting that new way to go about stuff because it worked and the sheep were fine with it.  I can't blame MS for lazy people and sleazy developer antics other than enabling it, but they came from PCs where Windows has been patching out fatal f-ups since the so awful release of Windows 95 years earlier.  The sad thing is, a PC can do many things, even when running installs and patches (in Windows) you can still do other stuff, but a console it's on lockdown so you're just stuck.

[Steven Pendleton]

2 minutes ago, Tanooki said:

I was in a unique space at the time.  I joined the actual game industry and was in it through 2001 and 2002 before jumping to the media for another 4-5 years after that.  So I was there fiddling with the GC and XB before it came out.  I saw the hardware issues it had, the GC kits as you probably saw were not optical but large carts.  We had xbox systems catch fire with shorts to the early model/pre-model systems having fiddly drives that would circularly re-surface discs.  The storage there at the time was nothing, but the thing had a HDD and capable but they at first cut some limitations with the network being fresh and reliance for a time on those lame memory cards they eventually dropped.  Once the network was stable in use, tested for larger downloads from DLC or expansions into pushing fixes after the HDD became the predominant then only real choice it kept up in frequency going forward.  More people saw how on the inside the benefits but also what could benefit from using it for other (as you'd likely call it) nefarious stuff.  That's why and how they 360 so hard as they did, and out nearly a year earlier than the others, both sides them and developers back patting that new way to go about stuff because it worked and the sheep were fine with it.  I can't blame MS for lazy people and sleazy developer antics other than enabling it, but they came from PCs where Windows has been patching out fatal f-ups since the so awful release of Windows 95 years earlier.  The sad thing is, a PC can do many things, even when running installs and patches (in Windows) you can still do other stuff, but a console it's on lockdown so you're just stuck.

Yeah, it's their fault for enabling it on consoles, and since consoles became mainstream outside Japan when the Xbox made gaming accessible to the non-gaming market (Sony had a super nerdy image at the time, as did Nintendo with their long history in the industry), this is the cause of everything wrong with the modern industry.

 

You know what else caught fire? The Mega-CD prototypes, supposedly continuing until not long prior to Japanese launch. Sega really did use the worst quality parts for that one. The whole thing was a badly designed, hastily assembled rush job to have a CD unit to compete with the PC Engine.

[+wongojack]

you guys are geniuses . . .

[Austin]

3 hours ago, Steven Pendleton said:

Yeah, whenever I refer to "Xbox" I refer to the collective nastiness of all of them together unless I call out one specifically. Great job for more or less ruining games, Microsoft. Yes, someone else would have done it if you hadn't popularized it, but you did, so you get the blame for eternity and your reputation can NEVER be purged! Unless you make a time machine and unmake the Xbox, which would be awesome. Please  find a way to make it happen!

Hi.

 

Get over yourself.

 

Sincerely,

 

-The Rest of the Forum

[Guest]

On 2/10/2020 at 5:14 PM, Keatah said:

Why they'a selling incomplete games? Because they know you will be happy to pay for the privilege of beta testing for them. Because they can.. and more.. But when did this practice start? It isn't like there was an off/on switch where one day games were complete and moderately bug-free and all of a sudden they needed to be half-bought and half-downloaded with bugfixes every week.

 

This seemed to be a gradual process that started around the "Doom era" more or less and grew as connectedness picked up speed. I might even argue it's always been there. We just didn't notice it till the past 10 years and today when it is out of hand. Out of hand to the point it eats into the gaming experience. And operating systems are even worse, they are patched daily. Not a day goes by one of our win10 rigs is receiving updates. Are they that bad to begin with - requiring such measures..?

 

Shit. Man. With Doom we had a couple of updates a year. And not only were bugs repaired, but new features were added too. In between these patches (if you want to use that as a measure of time progression) we had user add-ons and we loved it!

For want of better words 'it's a piss-take'. They spend 18 months to 3 years working on a game, then throw it out as a Beta you have to pay for 'early access' to. Only for a year to go by, they don't complete it, they close the servers and cancel the game. What happened during that development cycle? What happened during the last 4 months of 'Crunch'?

 

Don't get me wrong, I have some mates and good friends working in the game industry but this practice is just reprehensible it's abhorrent it's like that Kickstarter we are all moaning about over on Lemon64.

 

One of the Football (English) games I have for the PS3 was actually a demo on a disc. When you put the disc in you had to update, a massive long tedious system locking update which was actually the main game being installed onto the hard drive. So at some point that game will be totally useless because that server will be dead in a couple of years.

 

It is now possible in the gaming industry to release never release an actual game, just the demo, make a huge ton of cash, shut up shop and never actually complete the title. Look at GTA, they DON'T WANT to release GTA6 they're too busy shovelling the cash from the online modes. Just keep putting out some extra DLC every few months and away you go.

 

It really grinds my gears... 

[Steven Pendleton]

3 minutes ago, ∞ Vince ∞ said:

They spend 18 months to 3 years working on a game, then throw it out as a Beta you have to pay for 'early access' to. Only for a year to go by, they don't complete it, they close the servers and cancel the game. What happened during that development cycle? What happened during the last 4 months of 'Crunch'?

Yay, Star Citizen! I still have hope for it to actually get released, though.

[Guest]

1 minute ago, Steven Pendleton said:

Yay, Star Citizen! I still have hope for it to actually get released, though.

Or Godus. Or others. I hope SC does come out as well. I actually have a feeling it might. Or SkySaga: Infinite Isles which was a particularly painful one for me as some friendly acquaintances were working on it at the time the money plug was pulled.    - plus it must be a serious downer for anyone working on a game that doesn't make it!

[Steven Pendleton]

Just now, ∞ Vince ∞ said:

plus it must be a serious downer for anyone working on a game that doesn't make it!

I mentioned a game called ResQ over in the Genesis recommendations thread. This game was finished and cancelled before release, so the devs put it on the internet for everyone to enjoy. It's too bad, since it's a really cool and unique game.

 

Too bad StarCraft Ghost never made it.