The release of SimCity last year is regarded by many as the worst game launch in recent memory; quite a hard title to earn after Diablo 3’s PC release back in 2012.
When Creative Assembly released Total War: Rome II in a broken and unfinished state, many players slammed it as the worst installment in the franchise to date. By the time Battlefield 4 came out for PC in a messy and unfinished state, with the game constantly crashing to the desktop and graphical bugs appearing all over the place, I wasn’t surprised at all; I just soldiered through it and kept playing the game. It says a lot about the industry that even though the game was obviously broken, I kept playing without really thinking about it except to get a bit angry every time it crashed.
If a game had been released 6 years ago in the state that Battlefield 4 was, it would have been trashed as broken and unfinished. then maybe played by a YouTuber further down the line for some hilarious content. But because of the state of the industry at the moment, Battlefield 4 sold around 8 million copies worldwide across all platforms and played by huge numbers of people every day.
We don’t get angry anymore when a game is broken on release; instead we all sit back, put up with it, and wait for patches to fix it.
It has become industry standard now for a game to be broken on release with a heavy reliance on patches later down the road. With the advent of the Internet, developers were able to patch their games far more easily. This was a great and wonderful thing; it meant that bugs which once would have crippled a game were finally able to be fixed. However, it wasn’t long before many developers started to become complacent about ensuring their games were up to a high technical standard upon release. Bigger and more blatant bugs were left in games, and eventually features that had been planned for release were left out and added later. Sometimes this happens because of technical issues, or a lack of money and time; but in plenty of cases there is no real reason except trying to make as much money as quickly as possible.
Eventually we reached the point where games are released almost completely broken or obviously could have done with a few more months of development: like Total War: Rome II, which was patched weekly to fix its major game-breaking issues. Some games never even get fully fixed, like Skyrim on the PS3. Admittedly, Bethesda explained that many of the issues with that title couldn’t be fixed because of how the PS3 worked. But you can’t help but wonder why they didn’t notice the problems before release.
While patches and mods have pretty much fixed it by now, for a few weeks Rome II was a bug ridden mess. But at least I could play it, unlike SimCity.
People have referred to SimCity as the worst release in the history of video games. This is perhaps understandable, considering many couldn’t even play it when it first came out. What was especially annoying was that players who pre-ordered had to wait longer than people who bought it after release. Publishers should realize something is wrong when initial reviews mention looking at timers counting down the hours until you can log in to servers. More than that, they should learn from it and do better next time.
Grand Theft Auto Online suffered similar issues, with a large amount of people unable to play the game because of over-crowded servers; we couldn’t tell if the game was in fact any good. Server based issues normally get fixed reasonably quickly, but they wouldn’t even happen if companies like Electronic Arts gave developers more time to get ready, rather than forcing a product out the door before they are fully prepared.
Gamers put up with more than any other type of consumer. Imagine this: you line up overnight for a book release that you have been excited about for months. But when you get it, you realize that random chapters have been left out of the book. Or you bought a computer, and you got all of the pieces except for the cables, and you get one cable a week for 5 weeks. The gaming industry is the only medium where it is deemed acceptable for a product to be unfinished on release day, and I’m getting tired of it. Going by forums and social media, many others are too.
Publishers shouldn’t be able to get away with releasing an unfinished game, and gamers shouldn’t have to pay for something that obviously isn’t finished. More concerned with making money than they are with letting developers make a polished game, publishers are releasing games as quickly as they can without any concern for the experience of the person who actually buys them. I understand that to succeed in business they need to make money, but in the long run this can’t continue.
Eventually it will reach a point where publishers are taking so many liberties that gamers just won’t stand for it anymore. Battlefield 4 has suffered because of its poor state of release, with many people who were smart enough to not buy the game on release deciding they would rather not buy it at all. Total War: Rome II has been labelled the worst game in the series yet by some. But despite their problems, both of those games sold huge amounts upon release. I can’t help but wonder what their sales figures might have been like if they had been released in a better state.
YouTubers are becoming less tolerant of bad releases, with many promising to not let any more slip through the cracks, and websites like Continue Play are trying to find these games before they get to you and warn you about them.
The mainstream gaming industry is in a bad state at the moment. If we continue to buy broken games, we will continue to get broken games.
Games should be judged by their technical state on release, because that’s what we expect when we pay our money. But more and more often, we are paying for broken products.
Jay Adams is an opinion columnist for Continue Play. His views are his own.
