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Unmanageable Complexity: Games
  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

    If you look around you will see arising problem with big games. They are late, postponed, closed or even worse - release in very bad state.
    Nothing surprising - game development, as modern companies realized, is not infinitely scalable thing. As complexity and scale increases - expenses and required people count increase dramatically, sometimes leading to such complex problems of management, testing and development itself that you can't solve even having huge resources.

    Just get some read:

    http://www.amazon.com/Assassins-Creed-Unity-Online-Game/product-reviews/B00KYDEWHA/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1

    http://store.steampowered.com/app/289650/#app_reviews_hash

  • 7 Replies sorted by
  • karlkarl

    I'm not too concerned about the quality of game software - after all, if such software fails, nobody gets hurt. And games have kind of always been on the low-end of software quality assurance.

    What concerns me much more is how serious software becomes more and more an amalgamation of 3rd-party supplied components that nobody actually feels responsible for anymore, especially with regards to bug fixing. Just look how companies like Microsoft, Apple, Adobe etc. leave security holes they've been notified about unfixed for half a year and longer.

    See this current exploit for example. Such a shame.

  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

    @karl

    Games are very complex software, so real reasons behind issues are same.

    About software - http://www.personal-view.com/talks/discussion/10455/unmanaged-complexity-software/p1

  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

    You go to a Redbox kiosk or GameFly mails you a disc for your Modern GameBox™. Upon inserting said disc, your GameBox turns on and begins installing the game. The wait begins. It's now several percentage points in and ready to start running. You hit the button. "An update is required to play this game." This is when you take a moment to swear under your breath. This is "the future"?

    Now imagine your next step is finding out that multiplayer is broken, or that the game won't load, or that it barely runs. You've got our current situation.

    http://www.engadget.com/2014/11/24/broken-video-games/

  • CRFilmsCRFilms

    The gaming industry is bigger than Hollywood in terms of profit, so you'd figure they'd get their act together. But then Hollywood is also pretty big and effects houses are going under left and right. Similar forces at work?

    Part of the problem is the release cycle and trying to milk the game for all it's worth. Rock Band was the biggest game out there, and they ran it into the ground, it's dead. They're doing the same now to Call of Duty(my favorite), that game is on it's last legs. I didn't even by last years season pass for the DLC maps.

    Even the biggest success in recent years, GTA 5 had it's multiplayer delayed 2 weeks(though they told us in advance so we were cool with it). But when it came out, you couldn't play MP for a week because they got slammed. The sad this is, most of us gamers do kind of accept some of this stuff as the "cost of doing business". Day one patches are pretty much industry standard now, and if you have a fast internet, it's no big deal.

    What I couldn't stomach is what they did to the new Sim City. You couldn't even play the game unless you were online and the game's anti piracy connected to the games servers to make sure you're copy was legit. Naturally they also got slammed and people couldn't play cause the game couldn't connect to the servers.

  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

    Part of the problem is the release cycle and trying to milk the game for all it's worth.

    This thing was always present. They always wanted to milk any game.

    One thing that it different is how big and complex modern games are. How severe and complex the bugs and issues are :-)

  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

    Sony Pictures' employees around the globe are still locked out of their company computers after they were hacked on the 24th by a group calling itself the "Guardians of Peace."

    :-)

    Read again - http://www.personal-view.com/talks/discussion/10455/unmanaged-complexity-software/p1

  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

    Halo: The Master Chief Collection is heralded as probably the single biggest video game disaster of the year, with a launch that continues to be a never-ending nightmare in a way that makes even Ubisoft’s Assasin’s Creed Unity release look smooth.

    http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2014/11/22/microsoft-is-losing-xbox-one-momentum-due-to-343s-halo-master-chief-collection-misdeeds/

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