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Comment by Agentlien | Hacker News Reader

This is exactly the kind of post where I'd love to engage in the discussion, but I end up not doing so because I just feel exhausted and demotivated once I consider the necessary disclaimers (not a spokesperson, my opinion is my own, ...), what I am allowed to say and how sure of that am I, what if I make a misstep and it blows up, will I be able to engage in follow-up questions...

EA has a surprisingly open social media policy which encourages employees to engage in discussions as long as they are clear about whether they're an official spokesperson and don't divulge anything they're not allowed to.

Still, every time I see something like this I become really excited, start thinking of what I can say and what not, how I should say it so it's within acceptable .. You know what, never mind. And this is without even considering that what I'm considering is saying "Hi, I'm from EA" in a forum where people generally express nothing but vitriol towards that company.

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Not to mention that you'll probably end up with death threats or worse if you say something that one gamer group dislikes. The behaviour of gamers on social media has been awful beyond belief these last few years.

You mean the behaviour of people.

And companies.

No, he meant gamers. That doesn't absolve others from bad behaviour but "gamers", i.e. group-conscious, very online, hardcore players congregating on /v/ and many other such places, are probably _the_ most vitrolitic group on the Internet rn., save for those parts of the alt-right that don't play games.

How could you ever hope to measure and compare the relative vitriol of internet communities? Anyone's perception will be heavily biased by what the media likes to report on (drama on Potted Plant Watering.com is a lot less likely to make the news than tweets about violent video games, which are on the list of talking points already). The most vitriolic ones are probably sub-forums that we've never even heard of.

>Anyone's perception will be heavily biased

i'd say biased by receiving a lot of death threats.

It would be a fascinating project, but i confess i have no idea how you'd quantify the vitriol.

I suspect that the posters here arguing that gamers are the worse are not familiar with some of the shenanigans going on elsewhere, for example:

https://fanlore.org/wiki/What_happened_with_hivliving

"teenagers"

I disagree. The folks that I see who spew the most hate are in their mid-20's to late-30's.

Maybe that's just me confusing anecdotal evidence for truth?

But I believe just hand-waving and dismissing it as 'teenagers' is not giving this problem the attention it really does deserve.

I hope you are wrong but I am not convinced that you are. Whenever I encounter such behaviour I just assume it's a teenager without thinking about it.

The environment is such that the only people who can get wound up that tightly are people with a lot of free time and no full-time jobs or family obligations. Students. People on permanent disability, for whom the socialization built into the game is their easiest route to socialization with anyone at all. Retirees. Otaku. Gold/character farmers that make money from the game in violation of the ToS.

Most people with full-time jobs and families don't have time to get all that worked up over a community built around one or more fantasy worlds. It still happens sometimes, though.

Mid 20s to late 30s (aka millennials) are the largest demographic group. Assuming poor gaming behavior equally impacts all ages, by their sheer size, of course this age group would be most visible.

Is there evidence that gamers are the most vitriolic? Seems a common accusation but not a commonly sourced accusation, especially with a source that controls other variables. I know there are plenty of anecdotes, but there are such anecdotes about other groups as well and it could be that vitriolic from other groups isn't given equal coverage.

Dunno, seems to me a subset definitely took ethics in games journalism to an extreme. Are they the most vitriolic? Don't know. I tend to avoid such groups so I can't say. But they definitely made a bit of noise.

Watch out man or the knitters will come for you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yarn_bombing

haha, never heard of that before but that's comical. The socks on the statue is gold.

The problem is when you view that extreme subset as the whole group because of an opinion and point of view that happens to align.

Many other groups are, based on the Reddit data, full of "gamers", like alt-right (/pol) politics and pits of despair like The Donald.

Just like all the other subreddits. That's a poor way to associate anything.

Reddit itself has turned to complete garbage apart from a few gems in the rough.

Looking at you /r/justrolledintotheshop and /r/woodworking.

Depending upon how you define gamers, almost everyone I know is a gamer. Even my mother is a gamer as she plays Candy Crush. My father who dislikes video games is a gamer because he will spend a little time playing some fishing games. I think you'll find that not only are some of the worst groups full of gamers, but so are some of the best groups.

You can try to limit the scope of the term so it doesn't apply to effectively everyone with access to either a computer or smart phone, but care must be used so that it doesn't become a fishing expedition as the criteria eventually settle to be whatever is needed to obtain the desired result (this is a significant problem anytime one looks for trends in large data sets).

It'd certainly be interesting to see the stats here, as well as how it breaks down when actual violence is taken into account. Gaming has seen a lot less actual violent assaults/fights than sports, and even arguably quite a bit less than film/tv/music.

There aren't any gaming hooligan groups I've heard by any means.

For online toxicity it may be a bit closer, but again, it'd be interesting to see the breakdown by hobby or interest. Stuff like the last series of Doctor Who and Ghostbusters and Star Wars have certainly seen a few controversies recently, and it seems reactions to films/online film criticism can at least as acerbic as anything said about games.

...the gamers that have specifically been cultivated as fans by the AAA distributors and their studios. For years.

There are plenty of people who consider themselves gamers that won't touch "gamers" and their community with an 11-foot pole.

I am particularly miffed about the current gaming business environment, wherein many games require a constant network connection, force you to play with strangers, and set up the gameplay to encourage frequent in-game purchases. And you can't pause it for a week and pick it back up right where you left it. Why would the major distributors care about people like me, who will wait until all planned DLC is released, then buy the complete package on sale and then not buy anything else for 6 months, when they can string along addicted superfans who will pay $15 per month, forever, and also take the place of well-programmed NPC scripting and AI by being a vicious live-human opponent for everyone else that plays?

See Fallout 76 for an egregious example of this. There are no NPCs in it. So the intentional experience for players is to wander around an empty-feeling world, full of mutant animals whose main challenge is to kill them before they eat you, getting quests from holotapes, and to have human griefers--who are bored with the game, but still either want to get their money's worth out of what they paid for it, or to punish the developers by ruining the gaming experience for others--pestering them constantly to activate the dueling function or launch nukes at each other. I'm not going to subject myself to that, or pay money to allow my misery to be someone else's fun.

But I had zero hesitation whatsoever in snapping up West of Loathing, or its DLC, Gun Manor. That's single-player, offline, pausable, scripted, funny, and has simple mechanics with clear win conditions.

No online leaderboards or competitive mechanics or guilds or clans or PvP means you don't ever have to play with people who make the game less fun for you. If there's no meta-game, you never have to touch the out-of-band communities. The "gamers" become irrelevant. Maybe someone writes a FAQ with spoilers, that you might look up if you get stuck.

Haha.... somewhat familiar from my time playing Ark:Survival Evolved.

On the PvP servers, you needed to be part of a huge tribe, otherwise a huge tribe would find you and wipe you out. At the very least they would 'own' the servers and demand tribute, on threat of complete wiping. The megatribes themselves seemed to be run as slave labour. No taking a week or even an evening off. It didn't help that the game seemed to be written around grindy, long-duration tasks.

On PvE, where you couldn't destroy anyone else's stuff, people would jsut spam the entire map with the cheapest thing they could build, denying others the ability to play.

Any criticism of this in the game forums was quashed by the studio. And on reddit was usually met with superfans screaming that "You're just not hardcore enough" or "You're just sore you didn't get there first" or "Of course you can't have good stuff in the game unless you put in 40 hours a week..."

F*ck that, frankly.

Exactly. I don't need a game to be my second job. And if the game allows its grinding to be bypassed with slave labor, I know that it is that way because the developers designed it that way. Why the heck would you publish Slavery Simulator 2019, with a catchier name?

"Gamer" has come to mean the worst aspects of the online gaming community, like having unhealthy obsessions, of slamming people for their appearance, sexuality, gender, or anything that sets them apart from "normal" gamers. It's trash talking that's been weaponized and perverted into something deeply dangerous.

That whole scene should be burned to the ground starting with 4chan.

If your community can't keep your members in check, can't provide good examples, you're going to slowly corrupt and mutate into something you can't control. It happens every time.

The term gamer means nothing anymore. The only requisite is to have an interest in playing games. There's no conditions attached to the point where people argue over what is a "real gamer". The only way to discern gamers as different "groups" is by what games, forums, sites, and platforms gamers frequent. Reddit, 4chan, ign, eurogamer, pcgamer, kotaku etc.

I find toxicity is often attached to multiplayer games of the competitive variety with player interaction.

There are billions of gamers worldwide. It is just people.

Things have gotten so bad that people doing voice-overs for characters are getting threats.

The absurdity of this is numbing on so many levels.

A very recent example of this is the passing of Luke Perry, who was the voice of Sub-Zero in the cartoon series of Mortal Kombat.

MK Co-creator Ed Boon expressed him sympathies on Twitter and a number of fans replied to him, asking why he wasn't including specific characters in the next installment in the series.

At Amazon I was friends with a very talented woman who had finally gotten a well-deserved promotion to product management, which she had worked on for well over 4 years. It was a pretty big deal: she was the product manager over video games, specifically new console releases, right around the time that a new console was going to be released.

I still remember her crying to me over coffee about how much her new job sucked. In her words: video gamers are monsters. Apparently they had tracked her down because she had her job title on her facebook page, and even though her facebook page was private, they were able to get some insider at facebook to do the search for them. Once they found her name, they made her life a living hell. Why? Because one of the manufacturers ended up shipping fewer units than they initially promised, and so she had to delay a couple dozen preorders by a week.

Even if I were an avid gamer, there is no way I would work in the industry.

"They got some Facebook insider to do the search for them"

She should report it, with the timeline of events. People I know at Facebook say there is zero tolerance for this kind of thing.

>Even if I were an avid gamer, there is no way I would work in the industry.

The anime industry is the same way, and I'd imagine has a lot of crossover in the gamers/fans. There's been a recent #MeToo incident in the anime world that I'm 2 degrees of separation from, and the horror stories of what the people directly involved have had to suffer are absolutely appalling. The attacks are anywhere from drive-by posts to public social accounts all the way to death threats (which are being directly turned over to the FBI). I worked in the anime world directly for 18 months. By 6 months in, I knew I didn't fit in. By 12 months in, I was actively looking for something else. At 18 months, I was finally at a new job. That was the shortest stint on my resume.

Gaming, especially with the blow-out of BR games, has become idolized by the masses. And the culture around them is changing for the worse.

I can't help but think that this is just the effect of gaming becoming a part of mainstream media. It absorbs the culture of what mainstream internet culture is. A place where the loudest, ugliest voices stand out in the crowd.

Isn't this what throwaway accounts are for? Sure you can't break NDAs and the like but a throwaway can give a lot of freedom from people piecing together stuff if you posted using an account you use daily.

I could definitely use a throwaway account. The thing is, I still don't want to say anything I'm not allowed to say. I do feel loyalty towards my employer, and I'm only protecting myself if I stay clear of saying anything which identifies me. And that includes referring to knowledge which I didn't realise not many have or just generally expressing myself with my own idiosyncrasies which I may not even be aware of.

EA's existential problems are crappy games and customer-hostile business practices, not some secret sauce at risk of being leaked.

There are plenty of interesting things I'd love to share and fun topics I'd love to respond to which have nothing to do with what you're referring to.

I'm talking about a more broad thing where I also find it difficult to join more positively minded discussions.

nevermind

(Quick recap, since there are now replies - EA had a policy of owning everything you produce, including the off hours, and with their constant "crunch mode" they expected you to not have time for any pet projects to begin with. An inherently abusive company, and very brazen at that. It was like that when I interviewed with them several years ago, but I doubt things changed much.)

I am not from the game industry or anywhere near software mecha. Can you tell me why a company would want to pay you to work on your own pet project with their money without them owning the end result? I am just confused how this is a stipulation at any job. The place I work, if I designed a model for their products on their time, with their money, it is only acceptable that they own said product. Why would they allow me to go off an compete with them?

the key is on their time. Parent explicitly mentions everything while employed there, in your free time as well.

How the F* can this be legal ?

Because in this country, contracts signed are almost always enforced.

It doesn't matter the unidirectional power assymetry. It doesn't matter if the contract is unconscionable. If you want the job, you sign the contract. And even if its illegal good luck going thru the courts to litigate. The companies also have more money and can outspent than you have to live.

Which country? The US?

Yes

There’s a misconception underlying this comment. A “personal project” is something you do on your own time, with your own resources.

From my time in the game industry, I haven't encountered too many employers that were friendly about personal projects. I was able to get an explicit exception for one of my already released games in my contract for one of the companies I worked for, but most made it clear that they expect me not to work on anything in my own time, or that it belonged to them.

Even a game that directly led to my employment at one of the companies, as they saw my game showcased at a game convention when it was a finalist in a major game competition, saw I was local, and brought me in to discuss a possible publishing deal (which turned into a job interview).

As someone who had made and released about 8 small games on my own and liked doing it as a break from my other things, it really rubbed me the wrong way, and I didn't end up releasing that game until after I was no longer working for the company and I had lost all benefit of the free marketing I had from the contest.

It's part of the reason why I haven't gone back into the game industry since I got out. I don't want to feel like I can't make anything on my own again (especially now that I'm getting into board game design and getting game designs signed with board game publishers).

My current employer's business has nothing to do with anything related to gaming whatsoever, so even if they did try to take control of my games, they'd have a hell of a time taking me to court over it, or acting like I violated any noncompete laws.

Not my experience of working at EA for four years. There is a copyright assignment clause in the employment contract, and as unfortunate as that is, it is fairly common across the software industry. There was an internal process by which EA legal would clear personal projects, for which you would then have the copyright, but I never availed myself of it.

As to crunch most teams I worked for at EA did not crunch in the sense you're suggesting. There was widespread recognition within the company that long term crunch was both deleterious to productivity and morale. Studios were increasingly adopting a system called "focus mode" - a short period of focused work towards a specific goal (milestone/demo/etc) where non-essential meetings were cancelled, lunch catered, and distractions eliminated - which purported to produce better results without more than standard hours.

Studios at EA are fairly free to operate autonomously and they each have different cultures. Some were slower to adopt better practices around crunch, and even within the same team some disciplines would often crunch while others worked normal hours. Still, there was recognition of what better looked like in terms of production and will at all levels to make it happen. Not what I would call an "inherently abusive company".

EA has a history of acquiring previously very successful, well-loved game studios and running them to the ground.

After acquisiton, key people start leaving the studio, games released end up being rushed/crappy, and in the end they are closed.

Bullfrog, Maxis, Westwood, Origin to cite the more known ones, too many to be a coincidence.

As of now, I wouldn't be sitting comfortably if I were working at Bioware .

Most studios killed themself by releasing crapy games tbh. Do you think it's the interest of EA acquiring studios and shutting them down?

Take for example BioWare, they were acquired 3 years before their best game release: ME2 then they released ME3 an other excellent game then ...

I worked at Bioware. I worked directly with people who worked previously for Bullfrog, Westwood, and Origin through the EA acquisitions. I also know people who work(ed) at Maxis. The narrative around EA's acquisitions is a gross mischaracterization. Each acquisition and its eventual outcome had a number of confounding factors.

In many cases the studios were acquired because they were in financial straits and wouldn't have survived otherwise. Key people leaving after an acquisition isn't surprising: your studio was acquired because it made X type of game or franchise and maybe you don't want to continue doing that; your retention stock vested, time to try something new; you're entrepreneurial at heart and want to start a studio again after a (successful) exit.

Maxis and Westwood (EA LA) went on to make their most successful titles and decade plus runs as EA studios. Likewise DICE, Bioware, Tiburon, Pogo.com and several mobile studios.

The thing is, your employer probably does not feel loyalty towards you. Protecting yourself is the real reason.

Whistleblowing/etc aside, if you sign an NDA you should adhere to it. We should not respect people who don't hold to their agreements just because they have some juicy insider information about nothing of any consequence.

I think there's some merit to you point, but what about people who "need a job now." Not everyone is in a position to be picky about who hires them.

The argument of employers being these evil things that hold no loyalty is tiresome.

Loyalty is not a black and white thing.

I can list close to 15 years of small experiences that make me feel like my current employer truly cares. I’ve had very few negative experiences, and when I have had them I’ve said “hey that’s not cool”, and the company has fixed it as much as it could be fixed. The fact that I may be fired at some point does not invalidate that.

To me, loyalty between a company and an individual is not about the contract of work, it is about the environment that exists while you are working. Both I and the company have the option at any time to terminate the employment, that’s just part of the deal. That does not mean long term loyalty and expectations can’t exist.

Seems to me the argument of employer loyalty I think is more than (but still involves the matter of) whether or not an employer will go to bat for you, and speaks more to the leverage an employer has in a situation where they're faced with retaining an employee or firing an employee.

As in: most often than not, in more situations than not, they have most if not all of the leverage.

> that exists while you are working

I think that in this case when people say 'loyalty' they mean 'commitment over time'. "We'll dump you as soon as that option becomes slightly better than keeping you" is what people are reacting to.

It's different than being fired because of something you did/didn't do - it's the fear that something's going to change and this important part of your life (your source of income, of identity, of your professional status and one basis for your professional network, etc) will be yanked away without any real concern for the even short-term impacts on you.

This is an inefficient way to operate.

So don't say anything you're not allowed to say. I think the main point of a throwaway here is to say perfectly legal things, just without worrying about potential death threats.

For me at least, I would not use a throwaway.

The one thing we get asked to do for social media is always be clear that we have ties to the company but don’t speak for the company when commenting on things that could potentially be a conflict of interest. Both sides of that matter - I.e. I don’t want there to be any risk that someone doesn’t know I work at Blizzard when reading a comment (mostly because of native advertising rules) but I also don’t want them to think I speak for the company (mostly for fair disclosure rules).

I think that’s a reasonable request and I feel like using throwaways goes against that (and make it seem like there’s something to hide when really there is not).

You can still be responsible and give people disclosure while using a throw away. The benefit is you don't have to worry about people mining your entire post history to look for stuff they can use to draw negative conclusions about you/blizzard. You can also never look at that account again after that post so you don't have to worry about any crazies sending abusive messages about Diablo Immortal or whatever.

I think that whole thing came about because of EA Spouse, no?

https://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-03-28-ea-doesnt-...

It doesn't help EA's image that they decided to call their game launcher "Origin," so we can remember all the game studios they've murdered any time they try to force us to use it. However, I will not blame you, poor cog, for management's unethical behavior. I hope you can find a better job someday.

I always love encountering content and discussions from engineers or game designers who work at big games companies. I've befriended a few game developers over the years and they always have incredibly fascinating "war stories" which they share in private.

Your hesitation is understandable, though. A lot of people forget that there's real humans behind these big faceless companies. There's lots of potential downsides to sharing stuff online, without many equivalent upsides. However, I think if developers were a bit more open and people got to peek behind the curtains a little it would help to humanize these big faceless entities. Even adding minor things like developer commentary to patch notes can cause a drastically different reaction from the community. If I'm often playing a game and something gets changed I think it's reasonable to wonder about the reasoning behind those changes. Being more open and communicating frequently with the community helps set expectations and build trust.

To give a parallel from another industry, all of my favorite book authors are writers who give frequent updates and are quite open about their progress. Informing readers about your expected timelines helps temper expectations and it shows that you care, making people more likely to want to invest time in your series. If there's any kind of delay or a deadline gets missed the best thing you can do is communicate it quickly. Based on my experience, people tend to be incredibly understanding when they actually know what's going on. If all you get from an author is a vague date and it keeps getting moved around without any additional information it kinda feels like you're being jerked around.

Since we're on the topic, I've also encountered people that work at game companies who are incredibly resentful towards their customers, which doesn't seem very healthy. Hating your users is probably a good sign that it's time to move on to something new. Taking on this attitude appears to engage a negative feedback loop as well, causing things to degrade further. The absolute worst attitude I've seen is calling customers entitled because they didn't buy your game, although I'd like to be charitable and say that it was likely due to the person being under an overwhelming amount of stress.

Yeah I honestly can't see how an insider, in this particular scenario, could feel comfortable and expressive without being at least 5 years removed from the situation. Seems like there'd be a natural inclination for the memories/discussion to devolve into nasty blaming, and/or the added pain of remembering if the company's disaster coincided with a personal tragedy/downtime.

I've been fascinated with some of the most recent big blowups, like Bethesda's Fallout 76 and BioWare's Anthem. The former seems to be a product of heavy complacency; the latter has been such an unexpected disappointment that the reasons for failure seem like they could be innumerable.

On the other hand, recaps by developers of their successes have almost always been the most fun things to read about, e.g. Starcraft [0], Crash Bandicoot [1]

[0] https://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/tough-times-on-the-road-to-...

[1] https://www.naughtydog.com/blog/making_crash_bandicoot_by_an...

It's funny. This happens in most Internet forums. People ask questions often to seek validation rather than illumination. So they'll turn on you when you don't validate.

And in the end, throwaway or not, why help anyone who really wants to bite your face off? The insiders will continue to be privileged wrt information because the outsiders can't behave.

Thanks for sharing this insight!

In your experience: What is the biggest misunderstanding that customers (or critics) seem to have about the game development industry?

Wow, that's a really tough one. Turns out my answer became a really long one and touched on a number of things.

The biggest one is probably that developers aren't hearing or understanding feedback. We're in the same forums, reading the same posts. When players have concerns, the developers have mostly raised the same concerns long before the game was shipped. But identifying a problem isn't enough. Sometimes fixing problems are very difficult or very expensive. Sometimes, thorough design and testing has shown that all the obvious improvements are actually worse in non-obvious ways. So developers do read the feedback. We just, for reasons I already touched on, mostly don't comment.

On a similar topic, it seems a lot of players don't realise that we're not an army of drones in suits aiming to make money. Most of us, by quite a margin, are really passionate gamers who've decided we love games so much we want to make them our vocation and spend at least 40 hours a week on them. Every time I see a post about how "the developers" don't understand what "the players" want, I look around the office and see nothing but players, most of whom share the same feelings and concerns.

Another big one, and this is something I realised that I myself was clueless of before joining game development, is how difficult it is to react quickly to feedback, fix bugs and add features. You often see players complaining that they've raised a concern weeks ago, and it still hasn't been addressed. Being allowed to release a game on consoles requires going through certification with the console manufacturer. This is a really big, costly endeavour which takes a lot of time and requires making sure you adhere to a staggering amount of rules.[0] This and other concerns regarding distributors and retailers mean what's on the physical disc needs to be in place months in advance, making it pretty old once the game is released.

Add to that the fact that bringing out a game patch for PS4 or Xbox is very expensive[1] and requires you going through cert again, and you'll see why many developers try to schedule their patches way ahead of time. Obviously, you want to do rigorous internal testing to make sure you don't have to go back and forth with cert more than necessary. Which suddenly means you have a month-long gap between something being submitted for testing and the patch reaching your loyal paying customers. It's definitely painful, watching the angry comments flow in about an issue you solved weeks ago. Now, I'm not complaining about this. The cert rules and patch restrictions are almost always very logical and there to ensure high quality for the players. But they do come at a cost.

[0] https://kotaku.com/so-how-long-do-sony-and-microsofts-approv... [1] https://kotaku.com/wait-it-costs-40-000-to-patch-a-console-g...

I'm not the original poster, but also work at another publisher similar in size to EA, and I'd say that the whole idea of complaining about day-1 patches from both gamers and critics makes no sense, especially in the era of "live" games which receive ongoing support all the time. Like, we're releasing a game this month, right? Do you know when we sent our master builds for submission? In December. It honestly takes nearly 4 months for the game to go from a finished build to a disc you can buy at a store near you. And the team working on this game is something like 600+ people. What are they going to do between closing the master build and March? They continue working on the game, of course. And the culmination of this work comes out as the day one patch. In fact, the day one patch was submitted and approved couple weeks ago, and the game isn't even out yet - we're now working on the second patch that's going to come out few weeks after release.

I'd say in general a misunderstanding of how impossibly long things can take is an issue. Even if we wanted to create and publish an emergency patch for one of our games today, it would take at least 3-4 days before it would go live on PS4/X1. It's just how it is. Bug reports can take days to percolate through support, then to the right studio, then to the right team, then to the right person. Yes, it might be an "easy" fix of just changing a value or two in a text file, but between the customer support taking a report and us pushing a patch out it can take a week or two.

And in general, it's quite frustrating that as a dev I sometimes see someone having an issue on a forum for our game and I know that I can't reply with advice, because if someone found out that I work for this company it could be misconstrued(as an example - I know that you can get around a particular error by using a VPN temporarily, but I can't be in a position where I'm advising people to download and use VPN software) - so instead I say nothing, and it bothers me that I could help someone but at the same time I can't.

It's interesting to see that we both brought up the same thing about day 1 patches in our responses.

It's cool that you share your thoughts on this! I hope what I write below does not sound too aggressive.

> It honestly takes nearly 4 months for the game to go from a finished build to a disc you can buy at a store near you.

But we do not buy games in stores anymore.

I do think you miss why day-1 patches are hated. It's not really about the patch, it's about the state of many AAA games on release, in that they are released with significant bugs. I understand why that happens - time is short, testing on PC with all the possible configurations is very hard - but when really basic things are broken as a customer you feel betrayed. It does not help when console ports have completely unusable UI on PC and games have always-on requirements that fail on game launch, etc. All this "vitrol" gets merged with day 1 patches and that's what this is about. At least partly, I think.

> especially in the era of "live" games which receive ongoing support all the time

That's kind of a funny thing to say in a thread about EA when they and others shut their multiplayer game servers down all the time to sell the next very similar installment of a franchise. In the current climate, this "live" service thing stinks like corporate speak for an ongoing stream of new micro transactions. We just had games getting micro transaction + lootboxes shortly after the reviews were over. Not a good precedent to set.

> It's just how it is. Bug reports can take days to percolate through support, then to the right studio, then to the right team, then to the right person.

That seems to be very common in large enterprises in general, but it is also very sad. I think having these crusted large-enterprisey structure on one side is a big factor of why gamers feel developer studios/publishers are disconnected from their reality. But there are means to combat this, Riot for example was very successful in reaching their base with their champion spotlight and nicas community shows while already having a huge number of players, at least that seemed to work well for a while.

> But I can't be in a position where I'm advising people to download and use VPN software

VPNs are not illegal. Is it that your EULAs forbid using one? That would be ridiculous. In a good company you should be able to give that advice.

No offence taken ;-)

>>But we do not buy games in stores anymore.

Well yes, I meant release in general, not discs specifically - it takes few months for the game to come out on Xbox Live/PSN mostly due to certification process as mentioned by Agentlien. The actual production process for discs has almost no impact on this.

>> It's not really about the patch, it's about the state of many AAA games on release, in that they are released with significant bugs.

Yes, I do see that. The dark side of what I said is that sometimes our master build has a significant issue, but it can be waived through because "we have 4 months until release, obviously we can fix it until then". And then for whatever reason it doesn't happen and the game launches with this critical problem that we totally knew about just didn't fix it in time. It's partially linked to the almost complete inability to push release dates back due to some technical issues, I could probably write a whole blog post about the amount of pressure things like preorders are putting on the push to release "on time".

>>In the current climate, this "live" service thing stinks like corporate speak for an ongoing stream of new micro transactions

Well, from the inside, all it means is that teams are not rolled off a project after it ships. I've worked on both "traditional" and "live" games and the difference is that with the "traditional" game you make your master build and pretty much everyone rolls off to another project, with a skeleton crew staying around to fix any bugs that pop up after release. But in 2-3 months after launch no one is actively working on it anymore. With "live" games the entire team stays on and is still in full development mode, even though the game shipped already. They are producing new content, and well, yes, they need to be paid somehow. So you get more content for a game that is unlikely to sell more copies than it already did by either making this content paid or by selling so many copies that you can effectively afford this development until next paid expansion ships. But hey, I'm a C++ developer, I don't have any control over this stuff ;-)

>>VPNs are not illegal. Is it that your EULAs forbid using one? That would be ridiculous. In a good company you should be able to give that advice.

No, it's just that if I say "use Tunnelbear to get around this issue" and someone finds out I work for this company then suddenly it's "Company X endorses Tunnelbear!". If I just say "try using a VPN to get around this problem" and someone downloads some dodgy VPN software that gives them a virus, then again they will present it as our fault. And gaming press is very very quick to pick this kind of stuff up so it's just safer to not say anything. If not for the company sake then for my own, you don't want to end up in spotlight by accident.

To be honest I don’t blame you. I have the same anxiety whenever I consider posting anything on the internet. Once it’s posted, there’s no going back.

I'm sure a lot of casino operators feel the same way.

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