Why Video Games Have Launch Problems • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Video Games Have Launch Problems

#31

Post by pandaman » Sun, Oct 11, 2015, 7:56 AM UTC

Yhippa wrote: post #25

As an outsider is it possible to do game development in an Agile manner?

It is. Some studios actually do this (e.g. Blizzard, High Moon, some had done it before they had been shut down). The problem is that Agile has been designed for a process at a service firm, one that does work for hire. As far as I understand, in that business you don't really want to ship. Instead of shipping you want to keep your customers engaged and paying your invoices as long as possible, preferably forever. This can also be useful for a firm that provides continuous service since there is no shipping involved too. And there is nothing wrong with it. But games have to ship. Continuous development without a hard shipping date is called "development hell" [1] in game industry.

From what I've seen Agile does not work very well here, at least on the engineering side. Design might be doing something similar to Agile on a small scale.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_hell

Re: Why Video Games Have Launch Problems

#32

Post by flohofwoe » Sun, Oct 11, 2015, 8:55 AM UTC

ekianjo wrote: post #26

jlg23 wrote: post #11

This article completely ignores that single player, mostly-offline games have exactly the same launch problems. The reason games have these launch problems is that publishers got away with it for too long. Having users who already paid for the game do the beta testing is much, much cheaper and more efficient than in-house testing. I sincerely hope that steam's move to grant refunds ( http://store.steampowered.com/ste…

> The reason games have these launch problems is that publishers got away with it for too long. Having users who already paid for the game do the beta testing is much, much cheaper and more efficient than in-house testing. 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…

You never saw a games company from the inside did you? Major game studios are just as much entrenched in their software development processes as any other company that size. Also, there is no single 'typical' game company. You have EA or Ubisoft which put 600 people on a single project, and on the extreme other end you have the one-man-army indie developer, and everything inbetween.

Re: Why Video Games Have Launch Problems

#33

Post by flohofwoe » Sun, Oct 11, 2015, 9:15 AM UTC

I think the article left one important reason out: you always only hear about game launches that go bad, never about the ones that go smoothly.

Also: a game launch is like an explosion going off, lots of pressure on the first day. Marketing usually wants to concentrate everything on that one single launch event. Demand on launch day and the 2..3 days after can easily be 100x to 1000x higher than in the second week. You now have the decision to somehow spin up many times the backend infrastructure that you normally need, with the associated cost (theoretically achievable with a cloud service, but see below), even if it is technically possible to smoothly scale up against millions of players wanting to login simultaneously somebody needs to take the cost hit, this is usually when the finger-pointing between management and tech begins. Sometimes it's easier to 'wait it out', since the storm will be over after a few hours.

As for cloud services: Most game-servers have soft-realtime requirements which many cloud providers can't provide (at least with the cheap cost plans). For a web server running at a cloud provider it isn't much of a problem if you have 250ms load spikes or delays from time to time, for an action game it is catastrophic.

And finally: players that can't login will spend the time raging on the internet. If you can't get your iOS update on day 1: well, shrug, I'll try again tomorrow :)

Re: Why Video Games Have Launch Problems

#34

Post by njitram » Sun, Oct 11, 2015, 1:18 PM UTC

Umn55 wrote: post #30

njitram wrote: post #29

The difference with major online services like facebook and twitter is that games have a -very- big launch, and get a lot of users at the same time all at once. It's really hard to test for all that traffic in advance, as there will be so many configurations, (slow and fast) connections, hackers etc coming in all of a sudden. Its almost impossible to simulate the enormous variation. Facebook, Twitter etc begin by a s…

" It's really hard to test for all that traffic in advance" 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.

I don't know what dedicated servers has to do with it?

I do not disagree on your point that it might be a combination of intention and incompetence, although I think most of them really do not want to see downtime and negative press at release date, when they sell the most. So next to intention and incompetence there is also a strong incentive for them to prevent this from happening.

But the orignal point I was making is that scaling up all of a sudden for an enormous amount of people/traffic is intrinsically very hard, so its easy for them to underestimate the effort needed, and pay deeply for that on launch date (and we too as gamers).

Re: Why Video Games Have Launch Problems

#35

Post by Umn55 » Sun, Oct 11, 2015, 2:24 PM UTC

njitram wrote: post #34

Umn55 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" It's really hard to test for all that traffic in advance" 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.

I don't know what dedicated servers has to do with it? I do not disagree on your point that it might be a combination of intention and incompetence, although I think most of them really do not want to see downtime and negative press at release date, when they sell the most. So next to intention and incompetence there is also a strong incentive for them to prevent this from happening. But the orignal point I was makin…

>I don't know what dedicated servers has to do with it?

First see the science, I can tell you the facts and figures and you won't reason to the conclusion correctly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ

If you wanted to avoid "back end problems" (aka problems with 'stressing servers' because of your desire for locked down games where the server code is never released to the public) then you should allow gamers to run their own servers using server software like what games did in the 90's - problem solved. The corporate world basically stole gamers ability to own and run servers and since most gamers are 100's of miles away from these game companies they get away with it.

The free market simply cannot work when buyer and seller are 100's of miles away from each other, the seller has a huge advantage, all the outraged customers can't patrol outside the company and give the people there an earful for being corrupt criminal bastards.

Free market is a fantasy held onto by people who don't know much about how the real world works and gullibly believe the false ideological propaganda in the universities.

Protectionism for the rich and big business by state intervention, radical market interference.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHj2GaPuEhY#t=349

Crisis of democracy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYFxtNgOeiI

Manufacturing consent:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwU56Rv0OXM

https://vimeo.com/39566117

Re: Why Video Games Have Launch Problems

#36

Post by alexk7 » Sun, Oct 11, 2015, 4:00 PM UTC

flohofwoe wrote: post #32

ekianjo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The reason games have these launch problems is that publishers got away with it for too long. Having users who already paid for the game do the beta testing is much, much cheaper and more efficient than in-house testing. 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…

You never saw a games company from the inside did you? Major game studios are just as much entrenched in their software development processes as any other company that size. Also, there is no single 'typical' game company. You have EA or Ubisoft which put 600 people on a single project, and on the extreme other end you have the one-man-army indie developer, and everything inbetween.

In the current game dev industry, there is no longer anything "in-between". The days of the medium sized games are long gone. It is either big winner takes all or very small indie under the radar.