Why Video Games Have Launch Problems

"So why does it keep happening? It comes down to the fact that most games are now online services, with updated content, special events, virtual economies, player interaction, etc"

As someone who plays both online and offline AAA games on console (PS4, Xbox One) and PC, I haven't seen any evidence that online-heavy games are more likely to ship with major problems than offline games.

For both types of games it is routine these days to get games on day one where you have the base game, you have the near obligatory multiple-gigabyte 0 day patch applied to deal with problems found between gold master and actual release, and then you still have obvious crash bugs, serious problems with animation systems, physics systems, etc. Connection issues with backend services are just one of a very long list of game breaking problems, many of which are seen in totally offline single-player games.

The whole "preorder" culture for gaming is a large factor in this problem, IMO. There's not that much incentive to ship a product that is solid when you've already gotten a large amount of the money you will get on release before the product even ships. This is even more evident in all the failed kickstarters where people have paid for alpha-level games that were never released or evolved much past where they were at the time of fund raising.

To a large degree the gamers are thus to blame for perpetuating this problem due to buying into the preorder culture (presumably in order to avoid loss aversion due to missing out on preorder bonuses).

One issue parts of the games industry struggle with is simply coding competency. There's a tendency to hire newer grads and folks who will work for lower salaries, because people always want to make games. (And why not? Making games is awesome.) This leads to turnover, poorly thought out (or over-engineered) designs, lack of "common sense" things like load testing before launch (remember the industry standards you learned at college? if your college was anything like mine, you didn't), language soup, etc. And in my experience, the best backend systems are built by those with at least a bit of that experience already - rather than gameplay programmers trying to teach themselves what the CAP theorem is. But what senior engineer wants to work with legacy spaghetti code, or unlaunched promises (and the threat of future layoffs), when they could work at Facebook or Google or whoever?

At a previous large tech company I worked at, we built a games team internally to work on large scale platform stuff (pretty similar to what PlayFab is doing but aligned with said company's products). It was really cool - we got folks who were solid engineers but also ex-games industry, or avid gamers, themselves, advertising team openings via the videogames@ internal mailing list. We tried to combine the culture/fun of the games industry without the baggage and conditions.

But platform isn't content, and I recently joined a similar kind of team in an actual games company (which operates much more like a tech company than most, since our game is operated as a live service rather than a one-off downloadable release). Being able to work alongside artists, designers, narrative writers, sound engineers, event producers etc creates a really creative environment, and though I'm working on MySQL performance tuning and internal monitoring data pipelines, I get to hang out and talk about the new champion releases with folks at lunch. A nice balance, but for those who can't afford their own platform team, or don't have the carrots to lure us in, PlayFab seem like a neat alternative. :)

I'd say the main reason is that video games companies are usually run by a bunch of amateurs who are good at a few particular things (coding, design, creativity, and maybe even "hyping" things) but have shortcomings when it comes to engineering and delivering consistent, solid quality. Many companies dont have regular processes, and rely on employees forsaking weekends in order to deliver things on time.

I know it's usually not popular here to talk about the necessity of Project Managers, but the Video Games Industry is a pretty good example of an situation where more (i.e. better) management could help make things better compared to the current mess.

For instance, we've had articles here about how beautiful the Quake 2 and Doom 3 codebases were. It's not that John Carmack isn't an amazing programmer (I am sure he is far better than me), but the techniques for readability and maintainability that he used in those games are just what anyone writing in a large codebase should be doing. The style he used is exactly what we demand when interviewing senior devs. But then game programmers look at it as if he had discovered cold fusion. But when all you see is games, that are written expecting that once the game is shipped, nobody is going to touch your code again, standards go down. Very different from what we do in business programming, where we know some systems might end up living 15+ years, so we have to write things planning for the system to keep evolving for decades.

If anything, online games and MMOs should be written better, precisely because they are far long lived, and will be edited more, than a throwaway that will just see a few patches if users complain.

There's this thing, they're called dedicated servers. The reality is that game companies CEO's/execs don't want to pay for quality when they can push it out now get the money and patch later, aka. They put in the least effort. The whole thing is intentional at big companies, a combination of intentionality and incompetence at small ones.