I do not agree with everything he says in the video, but this is fact that the gaming industry is a hot garbage. When a game releases, its always unfinished, full of bugs and poorly optimized. When did we start accepting that this is okay. Just look at relic bug that was in first release. I am programmer myself. I can never imagine a bug like this could have made to release if they were following industry standards. It feels like every game developer rushes the game and actually develops after the release.
10 Likes
I largely agree with the sentiment. Unfortunately due to consumer practices and a number of AAA gaming companies, the only real way to profitably make games is to release poorly tested games and/or sell a bunch of microtransactions or DLCs. The cost of making games has increased dramatically over the past 10 years, but the cost of a major game has only increased from like 50 to 60 dollars.
For companies to be able to make quality tested games like they did 10 years ago, AAA games would probably be selling ~$100+ dollars but they wouldn’t make enough sales.
2 Likes
So noob question.
If, hypothetically, AoE4 didn’t get good reviews at launch and didn’t sell so many copies, we wouldn’t expect to see the stuff that they promised on the roadmap?
So the development is only to be completed if the initial sales are good?
Can’t this also hurt? Like maybe sales weren’t good because an incomplete build was released?
Depends, a big game like this supported by Microsoft will likely get patches, but if it stays unpopular a game will likely just get dropped as we saw Valve do with Artifact or Gearbox do with Battleborn or Paradox with Imperator.
The game was set to release at the end of the financial statement.
It is a move to make a profit through Christmas and New Year sales, so simply they didn’t want to miss the best selling months by not releasing the game.
I truly agree that the AOE4 is released at beta state.
Why?
- We cannot choose colour
- Poor balancing
- Missing features (taunts, key binds (not complete), editor, modding, etc too many to mention.
- Lots of bugs
- Poor lively environment compare to AOE 3,
For example, we have similar fish on every map, no whales, sharks, various fish etc same goes to animals - Ranked Matchmaking missing at release
This is just a truly sad decade of PC gaming.
5 Likes
Based on the patch release speed, and the “volume” of these patches. ( so the amount that they fix with them) minimum 1 year of development would be good with 1 week of public beta testing every 2 months.
But I understand they had a lot of pressure from the marketing side, that they have to release it so they choose this way. I think they spent way more money on the development of what was foreseen, so they started to think if it’s worth spending more or not. In the end, they decided to release it to see how much money it will produce and check if it’s worth spending more development time on it or not.
RTS games are hard to support, income is low, and the ongoing development is very expensive (well this is true for all kinds of ongoing developments). That’s why they dropped sc2, dow3. I hope they had enough income to have another year of support for the game. As there is a lot of potential even without new civs.
I kind of agree but with the caveat that “AAA” games in general don’t need to cost that much, just good, honest games like AoE4.
Reason being that most AAA games have a side-hustle to generate more revenue (read: microtransactions, lootboxes, skins, etc.)
And also most “AAA” games have an insane marketing budget which most of the times is larger than the budget for creating the actual game itself. I really doubt that’s the case for AoE4.
I think the devs did one hell of a job releasing this title for just 60 bucks and none of the microtransaction BS you see in other titles. Especially in the current climate of the games industry. But something always has to give and this title needs some extra dev time desperately. I really hope it gets that.
1 Like
I’ve heard that they had 4 years, is that correct?
They started out with an RTS engine, and they had made RTS games with that engine before.
You have to release your game at some point. People will say that they should have waited till it was finished before releasing it, but I think after 4 years it probably should be finished, or a lot closer to finished than this.
You take much longer than that, and gaming has advanced so much that your game can’t compete with games being released… Especially a game like this, that was already compared to mobile games, when it released “early”…
it is, but
Now is christmas + holidays - the best time to sell (even as it is).
to wait 1 year for next holiday, who will pay the salary?
the other half of the game shipping in 3-4 months from the start, according to the road map.
for sales it was the best option, but for players… you can see the number of players dropped dramatically…
you can check xbox series(movie)… i watched another documentary, and they rushed to be faster than PS3(?) and before christmas, which cost them 1 billion $ for repairing service.
a lot of speculation can be done, here is a wild one: they want 3-4 years of window before Frost Giants release their game. (3 DLC without competitor).
In the end they recieved a lot of rewards “best RTS of the year”, “best rts for long time” and it’s all true…but number wont lie - players are leaving(in my opinion too fast).
I wrote something ~6 months ago, 6 months later still thinking the same… : Do you guys think developers is giving their best? - #6 by Mischkov
By the way, compare the current vacancies I posted ~6 months ago with the current ones :
https://www.relic.com/#careers
These “missing” programmers would have helped a lot with code reviewing / debugging of AoE4 even by working mainly on another project…