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Why do game developers release games that are not even finished?

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Hey guys, 
i just wonder why todays developers keep doing it. 
What is the point in releasing a game that players can enjoy a half year later after endless patches?
I don't get it why they are releasing games in this state.

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Welcome to a world where you don't get to choose your release dates and you have to put out a yearly release for a sport infinitely more complex than football, with a team considerably smaller than EA's, all for the sake of the FIA. Even accounting for how lazy CM were in a lot of places with this release, there's only so much you can do before you have to put everything out and switch focus to the patching process.

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Marvsche said:
Why do game developers release games that are not even finished?

Because a lot of people buy the games anyway. Companies are not in business to satisfy customers - they're in business to sell things, and they'll gladly continue selling whatever people continue buying. Wallets speak louder than complaints about quality.

Functional quality of video games at launch has grown much worse across the industry. Personally, I find it unacceptable, which is why I never pre-order any games and never rush to buy any newly-released games immediately at (or very soon after) launch.

However, quite a lot of people apparently think badly defective games are acceptable enough to repeatedly pre-order & rush to buy newly-released games immediately at launch without waiting to see any indicators of functional quality before handing over their money.

Functional quality at launch will only improve if collective buying patterns at launch change. It's up to us to let our wallets do the talking and stop rewarding game companies with quick & easy sales for badly defective games.


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Sadly it's always been the same with Codemasters F1 Games...

I've been burnt too many times with this game which is why I now never buy on day one.  This year I will do what I did last year and buy it from the PlayStation store in December in the sale, the bugs will be fixed and I only have to pay £20 :-)

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Operator1 said:

Marvsche said:
Why do game developers release games that are not even finished?

Because a lot of people buy the games anyway. Companies are not in business to satisfy customers - they're in business to sell things, and they'll gladly continue selling whatever people continue buying. Wallets speak louder than complaints about quality.

Functional quality of video games at launch has grown much worse across the industry. Personally, I find it unacceptable, which is why I never pre-order any games and never rush to buy any newly-released games immediately at (or very soon after) launch.

However, quite a lot of people apparently think badly defective games are acceptable enough to repeatedly pre-order & rush to buy newly-released games immediately at launch without waiting to see any indicators of functional quality before handing over their money.

Functional quality at launch will only improve if collective buying patterns at launch change. It's up to us to let our wallets do the talking and stop rewarding game companies with quick & easy sales for badly defective games.


I'm with you on this. I don't preorder and I don't buy immediately on release. Waiting 3 days to a week after release is a good policy to see how the game goes down with the players. No matter the inducements to pre order, it's just not worth the risk.
Unfortunately a year from now the situation will be the same. Loads of people pre ordering F12018 and buying at release then throwing justifiable tantrums at the state of the game, if its like this years. There is little reason for the games companies to improve if they are rewarded again and again with these early sales despite past poor efforts.
Dirt 4 and now this, glad I stuck with Dirt Rally and F12016 instead of paying for poorer quality later games. Very interested to see how PCars 2 goes. Same again folks? 
I keep visiting this forum to see if CM are able to fix F12017, though I'm not too hopeful. I think we'll know in about a months time if they have managed to repair the game, but I'm not too hopeful. I'd certainly buy it if they can correct most of the bugs and glitches but I don't have much confidence in their ability to, given the numerous issues it has.

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agree with you guys pre order and only played a few hours since 26 august the game is full of major bugs and we have to wait weeks before its patched and even then its still buggy asf, to me this is clearly unfinished product wont pre-order again.. 

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Have you watched the Italian Grand Prix last weekend? Then you know why they HAD to ship the game before that date. Banners all around the track, commercial running in the breaks and mentions of the game in the F1 shows before the race started. That advertisment space was allready bought in months before release probably.

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People complain about early releases, but I can not imagine the rant if we were back at the time when we get a new game with last year and not actual teams and drivers. 

Relax people, if you want fresh content, updated stuff, there is no other way. 

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Yeah, sports games that have content tied to a specific season cannot be delayed easily. The business/legal side of such products is probably very complicated. Codemasters probably do not have the option of delaying their F1 games, even if they wanted to, because they are contractually obliged to release at a date set long in advance.

It's a shame, because these strict annual deadlines result in buggy products being released prematurely, and it probably makes is very difficult for Codemasters to innovate significantly. They don't have time to completely redesign their graphics and physics engine from scratch; they can only make small upgrades from year to year.

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The question should be...

Why do game PLAYERs BUY games that are even not finished?

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bax said:
The question should be...

Why do game PLAYERs BUY games that are even not finished?
Because people anticipate something and are then pleased with what they get. Simple as that, especially on Steam where you can refund with ease within the first 2 hours. Plus, this isn't Project Cars.

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Regardless of the reasons why, the consumer is endorsing this and so we can't really expect them to change their release strategy if we as consumers can't adjust our buying habits.

"New and Shiny I need it now!!!"

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Coffer said:
Welcome to a world where you don't get to choose your release dates and you have to put out a yearly release for a sport infinitely more complex than football, with a team considerably smaller than EA's, all for the sake of the FIA. Even accounting for how lazy CM were in a lot of places with this release, there's only so much you can do before you have to put everything out and switch focus to the patching process.
Although I agree with this when it comes to yearly releases, I also think developers are losing that desire to make sure it's complete these days before releasing considering they can all now release updates to patch over the missed issues via downloads. I mean I got Ghost Recon Wildlands which apparently took 4 years to develop and that was buggy as hell from a large developer. It's all getting a little lazy considering the large sums involved in the world of gaming these days all about money rather than pride on making an awesome, bug free game. 

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It's why I never get game on release day. With 2016 I monitored this forum then made my purchase when I was convinced that bugs etc had been fixed only to discover the career mode didn't work due to the lack of ability to change teams and the r and d design. All games do this. They release incomplete and buggy games then the public basically act as testers. In the old days games companies would hire companies to test the games for them before release.

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because we (players) are demanding a F1 game every year.
If they say they bring it once every two years everybody is mad!

Thats why

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martbloke said:
Coffer said:
Welcome to a world where you don't get to choose your release dates and you have to put out a yearly release for a sport infinitely more complex than football, with a team considerably smaller than EA's, all for the sake of the FIA. Even accounting for how lazy CM were in a lot of places with this release, there's only so much you can do before you have to put everything out and switch focus to the patching process.
Although I agree with this when it comes to yearly releases, I also think developers are losing that desire to make sure it's complete these days before releasing considering they can all now release updates to patch over the missed issues via downloads. I mean I got Ghost Recon Wildlands which apparently took 4 years to develop and that was buggy as hell from a large developer. It's all getting a little lazy considering the large sums involved in the world of gaming these days all about money rather than pride on making an awesome, bug free game. 
I did say that it's a problem, and it's especially apparent when you look at all the problems from 2016 that weren't even touched, let alone fixed, but that still hurts them less than the small amount of time and resources they have to throw at a new entry every single year. And I'm not particularly convinced those large sums are that large in this case.

>considering they can all now release updates to patch over the missed issues via downloads
Keep in mind that the release version has to be approved long before release. The patches are usually things they've worked on since then. Though two things surprise me here, the first being all the issues they've run into since the final beta version (the DSQ one for instance), and the second being the very relevance of the beta being called into question seeing as they somehow didn't even notice McLaren's engine upgrades not working until seemingly yesterday.

>bug free
There are no bug free games, just ones where they haven't been discovered yet.

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Because making a game to perfection on release, DOES NOT HAPPEN. Seriously how many times does it need to be said, a perfect game on release never has existed, never will, it take releasing to public and up to us to find errors too, seems there is too much demanding though now, its a joke on behalf of the community

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Games are very complicated these days. but they are still made with lines of code. I'd love to know how many lines of code are in F1 2017. And finding a bug in that, and fixing it without effecting everything else that uses it. Must be a nightmare! 

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Rayg1979 said:
Sadly it's always been the same with Codemasters F1 Games...

I've been burnt too many times with this game which is why I now never buy on day one.  This year I will do what I did last year and buy it from the PlayStation store in December in the sale, the bugs will be fixed and I only have to pay £20 :-)
Its not just codemasters its every game developer u all so got to think the are not making it for one platform if it was made for one console then the can get it in a pritty deasent shape but trying to do it for multipleplatforms then the will be bugs as each platform has diffrent hard ware if the brought the game out just after the season starts then could have rid of majority of bugs by the midway point in stead the bring it out  half way threw the season and the issues aint fixed till the real season is finished so u end up having to play an out of date game kind ofi think the have done a good job on this years game apart from the issues that people are having at moment id prefere for them to release the game near the start of season next year just add the new tracks a couple more diffrent layouts and driver changes and that then they would have that extra time to develop 2019 the cars are a carry over next year from this year so the really isnt any reason the couldent do it then that way get to play the game in same year as season 

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8 games in 8 years (not counting F1 2009 on the Wii) and it seems lessons aren't being learned with this game, either in development, testing, or initial early customer take-up. 

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Coffer said:
Welcome to a world where you don't get to choose your release dates and you have to put out a yearly release for a sport infinitely more complex than football, with a team considerably smaller than EA's, all for the sake of the FIA. Even accounting for how lazy CM were in a lot of places with this release, there's only so much you can do before you have to put everything out and switch focus to the patching process.

F1 2017 is CodeMasters' 9th consecutive F1 game: they've had 9 years to work on polishing the functional quality of the series, and they reuse the same core game engine & many of the same game assets over multiple releases, so it's not like they start all over from a blank slate every year.

CodeMasters has been making multi-platform racing games for 20 years, so they should have more than enough experience & know-how by now to release games that don't have so many critical gameplay-impacting issues. Instead of learning from mistakes, they seem to repeat many of the same ones, along with making all new ones each release.


mceci1 said:
Because making a game to perfection on release, DOES NOT HAPPEN. Seriously how many times does it need to be said, a perfect game on release never has existed, never will, it take releasing to public and up to us to find errors too, seems there is too much demanding though now, its a joke on behalf of the community

Nobody is expecting or demanding "perfection." It's perfectly possible to release quality games on-schedule that don't have pages of critical gameplay-impacting issues. Most people wouldn't be too bothered by a few minor bugs as long as they don't significantly impact game-play, and as long as they are resolved within a reasonable amount of time post-launch. Instead, we often get a broken mess that's nearly unplayable.

Rather than buying games we can take home & play immediately in their entirety, we effectively pay full retail price for a ticket to wait weeks/months until patches finally allow us to completely play the game we bought. That's not a game ready for retail launch - that's essentially "early access" or a full-price beta.


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Operator1 said:

Coffer said:
Welcome to a world where you don't get to choose your release dates and you have to put out a yearly release for a sport infinitely more complex than football, with a team considerably smaller than EA's, all for the sake of the FIA. Even accounting for how lazy CM were in a lot of places with this release, there's only so much you can do before you have to put everything out and switch focus to the patching process.

F1 2017 is CodeMasters' 9th consecutive F1 game: they've had 9 years to work on polishing the functional quality of the series, and they reuse the same core game engine & many of the same game assets over multiple releases, so it's not like they start all over from a blank slate every year.

CodeMasters has been making multi-platform racing games for 20 years, so they should have more than enough experience & know-how by now to release games that don't have so many critical gameplay-impacting issues. Instead of learning from mistakes, they seem to repeat many of the same ones, along with making all new ones each release.
>they've had 9 years to work on polishing the functional quality of the series
Are you going to somehow tell me that they haven't polished the series significantly between F1 2009 and F1 2017?

>and they reuse the same core game engine
Are you saying that's a bad thing? What, would you rather they relied on the Unreal Engine like the absolute comedians at SimBin UK? Do you even have any idea how long it takes to develop a new engine? If you had any knowledge of the history of the series, you probably would, as that's why F1 2014 was delayed with a stop-gap game being released in its place.

>so it's not like they start all over from a blank slate every year
With certain issues, they absolutely do. You need only look at the transition between any of the first 4 games (2009->2012), or 2015->2016. Them being lazy with a good number of issues doesn't change the fact that they're still adding as in between iterations as can be added in a yearly release by a smaller company than EA on a more complicated series than FIFA.

>CodeMasters has been making multi-platform racing games for 20 years
Which means you probably know about TOCA Race Driver 3 and GRID, different yet equally wonderful examples of what they can do when they're not limited by the FIA and by having to put out yearly releases. The same goes for Dirt Rally - the difference between a game they were allowed to work on freely as their pet project compared to something they had to rush out just to hit their ridiculous deadline (Dirt 4, especially after the FIA took the WRC license away from them and gave it to Milestone in their mad quest to become even bigger comedians than those guys or SimBin UK) should be simple enough for even you to see.

>
Instead of learning from mistakes, they seem to repeat many of the same ones, along with making all new ones each release.
At this point, given your extreme ignorance of what game development implies as well as the actual plethora of issues within the game, I wouldn't be caught dead taking what "seems" to you to be the case seriously.

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Coffer said:
>they've had 9 years to work on polishing the functional quality of the series
Are you going to somehow tell me that they haven't polished the series significantly between F1 2009 and F1 2017?

Not so much in terms of functional quality at launch. What good are new features, graphics, & physics if the game doesn't function properly until after multiple post-launch patches are released?

Coffer said:
>and they reuse the same core game engine
Are you saying that's a bad thing?

No - I'm saying reusing assets means less time & effort is required to develop each installment.

Coffer said:
...different yet equally wonderful examples of what they can do when they're not limited by the FIA and by having to put out yearly releases...

Other CodeMasters titles also had substantial gameplay-impacting issues at launch.

Coffer said:
...At this point, given your extreme ignorance of what game development implies as well as the actual plethora of issues within the game, I wouldn't be caught dead taking what "seems" to you to be the case seriously.

At this point, given your extreme tendency to defend broken games and sling personal insults, I wouldn't be caught dead trying to continue any further rational & civilized discussions with you.


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