There’s an ugly trend in video game development that needs to stop now. Games are released in an unfinished state, leaving gamers who paid full price in a lurch until the game is fixed.
The price of Triple-A games, those with multi-million dollar budgets, has been steadily rising over the years. What used to cost $50 per game is now approaching $70.
Instead of getting more bang for your buck in 2021, some of the most anticipated games that have come out in the last 10 years have been buggy, unplayable messes.
Though most reputable companies eventually fix their games with software patches, it’s too late when the damage has already been done.
The most recent and high-profile example is CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077, which received quite the hype leading up to its release but ended up disappointing fans, according to a Dec. 19, 2020 New York Times article.
The game was released with imperfections ranging from occasionally comedic visual bugs to full-on game-breaking glitches.
And that’s when the game worked at all. It only seemed to work for the PC version or on a next-gen game console like the Playstation 5 or the Xbox Series X.
The issues were so extensive that a lawsuit was filed against CD Projekt Red, according to a news release on BusinessWire.com, global distributor of news releases.
When you buy a game on its release day at full price, there’s a certain expectation that you’re going to get blown away by its greatness.
Even if you end up not liking it, you can still walk away feeling like you got the complete experience.
Releasing an incomplete game is damaging to both the developers and the customer. Consumers are left feeling like their time and money were wasted and the developer takes a hit to its reputation.
Cyberpunk 2077 is just one example. Other unfinished games such as Fallout 76, Halo: The Master Chief Collection and No Man’s Sky prove the history of gaming is full of hype and failed delivery, according to a March 17, 2020 article on the tech news website ReviewGeek.
Save for Cyberpunk 2077, which CD Projekt Red is still working on according to its website, once finished would eventually become worth the initial hype or at least worth playing through after changes are made.
However, patching up a game should be reserved for fixing small or unforeseen problems in the game, not entirely redoing faulty gameplay.
A normal game patch would be like fixing a small leak on a boat, but fixing incomplete or broken games is more like building parts of the boat after someone has already bought it.
Of course, gaming companies are run by people who can make mistakes, but with how often this occurs it’s in danger of being a philosophy rather than an error.
Developers are under a lot of pressure to meet deadlines and release games at certain times, according to a Jan. 11, 2020 Reporter Magazine article.
The trend of games being sold in incomplete states is likely a symptom, rather than the disease in the gaming industry, in which practices like working employees past their limits to meet deadlines run rampant.
Though there should be sympathy for the victims of toxic work practices in the gaming industry, if the results are unfinished games and broken promises, then what we need is a change, not patience.
If game developers keep releasing unfinished games with promises to patch them into working games later, they run the risk of losing faithful fans.
Lost faith can translate to lost sales because more savvy consumers could just wait until the game is patched enough to buy it, costing the developer release date sales, a crucial metric for a video game’s success.
If what it takes to release finished games is a change in the development process, we’ll be all the better for it.
