Comment by incrudible | Hacker News Reader

Comment by incrudible | Hacker News Reader

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I disagree that this is getting worse. Every game of this magnitude of complexity has shipped broken, even way back in the nineties. The Elder Scrolls series in particular comes to mind. Back then, you'd get patches from print media.

The games that didn't ship broken simply weren't that complex. Console games never were that complex. PC gamers gamers accepted this in order to be able to (sort of) play through an experience that was at the edge of what was possible. There was no Digital Foundry to count pixels and analyze frame drops. If you hit 20FPS most of the time, that was considered "playable".

If a game like Cyberpunk 2077 can't ship broken, then it can't ship at all. It can't even get produced. Nobody is going to put hundreds of millions of dollars on the line to maybe ship next year, forever. Nobody except maybe the Star Citizen community.

From a very, very casual gamer's perspective, how did expectations get so high? Consumers are demanding more, companies are promising more, developers are worked to the bone and everyone still ends up unhappy.

Does pricing, pre-orders, or online play have anything to do with this? It feels weird that a sports game can change a few names and ship a $60 title, but a company like CDPR goes through absolute hell and still ships a dud -- what's the incentive for that?

> From a very, very casual gamer's perspective, how did expectations get so high? Consumers are demanding more, companies are promising more, developers are worked to the bone and everyone still ends up unhappy.

The dynamic is the same in films, where all of the studio's profits come from a few blockbusters (sometimes called 'tentpoles'), and in publishing, where all of the profits come from relatively few bestsellers, and got that matter in venture capital, where all of the returns come from a few unicorns.

BTW, you might be interested to note that in film at least, the "work to the bone" component is largely missing (not that film crews don't work hard, they do), and that the film industry is unionized to the hilt (Screen Writers Guild, Screen Actors' Guild, Directors' Guild of America, International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, etc. etc.), nor is pervasive unionization any sort of barrier to incorporating equity compensation (often in the form of residuals) for key talent.

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