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Microsoft and Sony should go back to charging developers $40,000 to patch games.

levyjl1988

Banned
Before on the Xbox 360 and PS3, they used to charge developers $40,000 per patch, and then they stopped.


Now developers release the broken games and titles on launch. There is no point of releasing games in a stable state when they can simply patch it later for free and as many times for free.
There isn't a sense of thoroughness in the industry anymore, for example, Avengers just released an update for Spider-man and people in-game currency depleted. All the units and credits simply vanished.
Gaming of the past has a sense of weight, so they had to cram and make sure the patch was stable and tested, now quality control went to absolute shit.

If developers went back to being charged per patch maybe we might get some quality back in the gaming industry.
Modern games suck.
Everything is whored out like a casino or store filled with microtransactions.
I compare Halo Reach and Halo 4 customization compared to Halo Infinite and now I hate modern gaming. Things that were once free are now paid for, I do not want to ever go back to a Halo multiplayer because it turned to shit compared to its predecessors.
Destiny 1 was great, Destiny 2 got fucked.

I really hate free-to-play.
I want to go back to the simple days of buying a game, it has a single-player and multiplayer component and everything worked out of the box with so much feature set.
Now things are the minimum viable products. Things are released like a fucking skeleton and each component is paid for.
Gaming will never be an art form the way it's doing. At least movies and tv shows aren't whored out like video games, there aren't exclusive theatre endings for movies or some stupid shady business shit.
Gaming needs to go back to what it was.

I hate modern gaming.
Before we had rich large fulfilling expansions.
Now we have recolors, pay $20 to change your character's armor into purple. Fucking hell.

/rant

Modern Gaming sucks now.
Now we have an entire generation of kids swiping their parent's credit cards to buy skins and shit. FOMO. And when you least expect it that service shuts down and all that money spent goes down the drain.
 

Abriael_GN

RSI Employee of the Year
Yeah, totally a great idea so that developers will just start ignoring issues and let customers deal with them. 🤔

old.jpg
 
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bender

What time is it?
Patches are a good thing but there needs to be some balance. San Andreas Definitive Edition just released it's 3rd patch at a whopping 18.5GB for a game that is 21.8GB. The three patches have totaled more than the original download. Superliminal recently had a patch that was as big as the original download as well. Master Chief Collection has had several massive patches in the ~30GB range. Game Pass must be a data cap buster for a lot of households.
 
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Yeah, totally a great idea so that developers will just start ignoring issues and let customers deal with them. 🤔

old.jpg
This is some serious zoomer trash. I'll prove you wrong right now:

I know this is going to be difficult for your little zoomie brain to comprehend but there was a time when games never could connect to the internet to download patches at all. Games had to be the very best they could be before release because of this. Development studios had actual QA teams who did bug testing and games weren't sent to print until they were in an outstanding state.

TLDR - yes things were better back in the day
 

phil_t98

#SonyToo
Before on the Xbox 360 and PS3, they used to charge developers $40,000 per patch, and then they stopped.


Now developers release the broken games and titles on launch. There is no point of releasing games in a stable state when they can simply patch it later for free and as many times for free.
There isn't a sense of thoroughness in the industry anymore, for example, Avengers just released an update for Spider-man and people in-game currency depleted. All the units and credits simply vanished.
Gaming of the past has a sense of weight, so they had to cram and make sure the patch was stable and tested, now quality control went to absolute shit.

If developers went back to being charged per patch maybe we might get some quality back in the gaming industry.
Modern games suck.
Everything is whored out like a casino or store filled with microtransactions.
I compare Halo Reach and Halo 4 customization compared to Halo Infinite and now I hate modern gaming. Things that were once free are now paid for, I do not want to ever go back to a Halo multiplayer because it turned to shit compared to its predecessors.
Destiny 1 was great, Destiny 2 got fucked.

I really hate free-to-play.
I want to go back to the simple days of buying a game, it has a single-player and multiplayer component and everything worked out of the box with so much feature set.
Now things are the minimum viable products. Things are released like a fucking skeleton and each component is paid for.
Gaming will never be an art form the way it's doing. At least movies and tv shows aren't whored out like video games, there aren't exclusive theatre endings for movies or some stupid shady business shit.
Gaming needs to go back to what it was.

I hate modern gaming.
Before we had rich large fulfilling expansions.
Now we have recolors, pay $20 to change your character's armor into purple. Fucking hell.

/rant

Modern Gaming sucks now.
Now we have an entire generation of kids swiping their parent's credit cards to buy skins and shit. FOMO. And when you least expect it that service shuts down and all that money spent goes down the drain.


you hate free to play games then don't play them its as simple as that, as for paying for armour colour changes you don't have to pay for that. its better than dividing a fan base by charging for extra maps. yes there was a Time when games didn't connect to the internet but it wasn't as good back then and I would never of got to play lots of games like rocket league or modern warfare multiplayer
 

Valkyria

Banned
This is some serious zoomer trash. I'll prove you wrong right now:

I know this is going to be difficult for your little zoomie brain to comprehend but there was a time when games never could connect to the internet to download patches at all. Games had to be the very best they could be before release because of this. Development studios had actual QA teams who did bug testing and games weren't sent to print until they were in an outstanding state.

TLDR - yes things were better back in the day
Yeah no.
During 3 and 4 generation gaming was full of clones of the same genre ( 2D plataformers) and the games were at beast a couple of hours long with a brutal difficulty to stop you to finish it only renting it.
Saying that game is worst today than back them is like saying cinema is dead because you only see transformers movies.
 

emivita

Member
More and more games are now GaaS that require constant updates and patches, and there are a lot more indies now than the PS3/Xbox 360 era, so no, it's not possible to go back to that.

FF7R was probably the only game during the last gen that didn't have a day one patch, but it's just an exception.
 

The Shepard

Member
FF7R was probably the only game during the last gen that didn't have a day one patch, but it's just an exception.

I only remember it getting one patch about a year and so later to which was likely something to do with next gen, game was released in a highly polished state minus a few dodgy textures which was solved with the next gen version. It can be done.
 

GHG

Gold Member
They will simply stop patching games because they already have peoples money due to the amount of people that pre-order.

The only thing that fixes this problem we are frequently seeing at the moment is a shift in gaming culture wherein hype no longer rules the day and people learn to stop parting with their money until they are clear on what they are actually getting.
 

nemiroff

Gold Member
In this case I think the old man yell at cloud is the correct response. The compromises in the past is not a good fit for 2021. It would be like going back to hand-cranked silent films. I love indies, but I also love my modern open worlds and flight simulators. You can't always have 100 000 people making a complex modern game to perfection at launch. If there was a restriction for patches it would for sure be a much bigger mess than we have today. We have to have standards and balances though, of course. And we in our end as customers can also do our part by being more restrictive around pre-ordering, and refrain from buying games that isn't up to par. Have some patience and wait for feedback, then decide.
 
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cireza

Banned
Most of the time it is written all over these games that they are going to be broken. Don't buy them.
 

-tetsuo-

Unlimited Capacity
This would not change the release state of games. It would only delay the release of updates as studios will try to bunch up many updates in one patch.
 

emivita

Member
I only remember it getting one patch about a year and so later to which was likely something to do with next gen, game was released in a highly polished state minus a few dodgy textures which was solved with the next gen version. It can be done.

FFXV had a bunch of patches, and it was like a different game after the final patch. So FF7R case was kinda unexpected from Square Enix, especially after the release was delayed.

Played FF7R on PS4 Pro without any patch, and minus a couple of textures, it was a perfectly playable experience.
 
This is gonna sound harsh, but to the people criticizing OP's suggestion and giving "old man yells at cloud" remarks, you guys truly are idiots.
I personally think this would is a valid idea that would force companies to give as-complete -as-possible products at launch. This way they cannot slack off and make half baked games and fix them later. If they abandon the games, their IP takes a hit as people start abandoning the game; of course they will release patches, but these would be actually patches and not the minimum to make the game work.
 

Azurro

Banned
This is some serious zoomer trash. I'll prove you wrong right now:

I know this is going to be difficult for your little zoomie brain to comprehend but there was a time when games never could connect to the internet to download patches at all. Games had to be the very best they could be before release because of this. Development studios had actual QA teams who did bug testing and games weren't sent to print until they were in an outstanding state.

TLDR - yes things were better back in the day

Pfft, come on, that's old man talk. Yes, games had less bugs, but it's not because devs back then were paragons of virtue, games were a lot simpler to create back in the day. And most still had bugs, still had shitty controls, still had shitty graphics, etc.
 
This would only affect smaller developers and publishers. Some gigantic entity like EA would still release broken garbage and pay what to them is a pittance to patch it up after the fact.

Might work with an introduction of penalty tiers. The bigger you are, the heavier the fine. Because you're right. Something like $40.000 is pocket change for the likes of EA. They'd brush it off and continue business as usual.

In this case I think the old man yell at cloud is the correct response. The compromises in the past is not a good fit for 2021. It would be like going back to hand-cranked silent films. I love indies, but I also love my modern open worlds and flight simulators. You can't always have 100 000 people making a complex modern game to perfection at launch. If there was a restriction for patches it would for sure be a much bigger mess than we have today. We have to have standards and balances though, of course. And we in our end as customers can also do our part by being more restrictive around pre-ordering, and refrain from buying games that isn't up to par. Have some patience and wait for feedback, then decide.

You can't be serious.
 

cormack12

Gold Member
This means you're more likely going to wait until the equivalent of a rollup or service pack drops so the developers get the most bang for their buck. At least this way, devs can drop smaller more urgent hotfixes quickly when needed.
 

BigBooper

Member
This is gonna sound harsh, but to the people criticizing OP's suggestion and giving "old man yells at cloud" remarks, you guys truly are idiots.
I personally think this would is a valid idea that would force companies to give as-complete -as-possible products at launch. This way they cannot slack off and make half baked games and fix them later. If they abandon the games, their IP takes a hit as people start abandoning the game; of course they will release patches, but these would be actually patches and not the minimum to make the game work.
You're imagining a utopia that never existed and wouldn't exist. They patch games now and can get bad press for buggy games now... but you think having to pay a penalty would make them release more than just the minimum they had to. Based on what?

What needs to happen is people wait for reviews and patches before buying games. If a game is released buggy, why would you buy it before it's patched?
 

CuNi

Member
I feel like that idea wouldn't really stop tripple A rich corps from releasing half assed software but more so hurt the indie dev that now has to really calculate if a update will ever be compensated.
40k for a update for a indie dev is probably 25% of the budged the game was made on over several years.

I feel like there should be a team inside MS that looks at games on release and/or play them and then give out fines based on how poorly a game runs, how many crashes it has in given timeframe etc.
Like don't take the submitted version, test the retail release.
 

Filben

Member
Gonna hurt indie developers and smaller studios. Big corporations will still keep fucking their customers, sorry, their fanatic fellowship.

And even without the fee these days there are still many games left unpatched and in a state they should not be in.
 

Allandor

Member
This makes me sense. Studios would just stop to patch games on consoles.
Instead Sony and Ms should faster throw them out of the shop and hold back payments until very bugged (unplayable) games get patched.
 

bad guy

as bad as Danny Zuko in gym knickers
Games have gotten more complex leading to more bugs, and internet connections have improved dramatically over the years.

Maybe just wait a few days when a game comes out to inform yourself, it's not that hard.
 
I wish they would have the balls to not even allow a game to release without it being up to a standard. They need to put more heat on publishers. We don't expect perfection but paying for broken games? That's unacceptable and scummy. Why is it becoming more frequent too? If it aint ready, DELAY THE FUCKING THING UNTIL IT IS!!!
 
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