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Games Entertainment

The Problems With Porting Games 330

Posted by Soulskill from the i-don't-have-that-button dept.
mr_sifter writes "There's a large lexicon of monosyllabic, four-letter words for describing something you don't like — but only PC gamers use the word 'port' with such a fervent degree of repulsion. Common complaints about console ports include meager graphics options, dodgy third-person camera angles, poorly-thought-out controls and sparsely distributed save points. In this feature, Bit-tech talks to developers of games such as Dead Space, Red Faction and Tales of Monkey Island to find out why porting games between the three major consoles and the PC is so difficult. Radically different CPU, graphics and memory architectures play their part, as do the differences in control methods and the rules Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo set about how games should work on their systems."
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The Problems With Porting Games More

The Problems With Porting Games

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  • Ported game (Score:5, Funny)

    by smittyoneeach ( 243267 ) * on Tuesday August 18, 2009 @10:46AM (#29105685) Homepage Journal
    Ported game,
    Crying shame.
    Like lesser lather,
    Endless flame.
    Burma Shave

  • Obligatory (Score:5, Funny)

    by elrous0 ( 869638 ) * on Tuesday August 18, 2009 @10:48AM (#29105715)

    Well I'm a PC gamer and PC's are the far superior platform, as any real gamer like me knows. Anyone who doesn't use a mouse and keyboard is clearly inferior to me and lacks my intelligence and superior taste in gaming. If you want to know more on the subject, just come to the videogame store where I work sometime. I regularly spend hours there snobbishly berating console game buying customers and informing them of my superiority.

    Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to play the pompous villain in an 80's teen flick. Ferrari is the ONLY car to drive, you know.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Lord Ender ( 156273 )

      The mouse is a superior controller for anything that involves aiming (FPS) or pointing (RTS). The PC can have superior graphics to any console (at the price of a $300 GPU). That said, PC gamers still aren't justified in claiming the overall superiority of their platform because certain types of controllers aren't really there for PC gaming yet.

      If one of the major game publishers (EA or Valve?) were to start selling Bluetooth-enabled motion sensor style controllers, and supporting them on multiple titles, we

      • The mouse is a superior controller for anything that involves aiming (FPS) or pointing (RTS).

        I don't think the mouse is superior to the light gun for aiming/pointing. It's just too bad the light gun isn't very common except for with coin-ops.

        • I don't think the mouse is superior to the light gun for aiming/pointing.

          But how many PC gamers are going to buy a Bluetooth adapter, a Wii Remote (the only widely available light gun that works with LCD monitors), and a wireless sensor bar? And given that figure, would it be worthwhile for major label video game developers to spend the time==money to support them? I'm not too optimistic.

          Besides, how do you use a light gun to turn your character from side to side in order to shoot off-screen targets?

    • Well I'm a PC gamer and PC's are the far superior platform, as any real gamer like me knows. Anyone who doesn't use a mouse and keyboard is clearly inferior to me and lacks my intelligence and superior taste in gaming.

      The Wii can use a mouse and keyboard (for surfing the net ...) as well as Wiimotes - guess that makes the Wii the uber-superior platform. (Not really - but when the next version comes out with hi-def video and a faster cpu ...)

  • Since the vast majority of developers can achieve the vast majority of technical feats with enough time and effort. The problem is the fact time and effort costs money. The Guitar Hero 3 port was crap because no-one put any real money behind it, simply because chances are, no-one would buy it. That only makes sense.

    I understand a lot of what the devs are saying, but if I'm going to be really negative about this I couldn't help get an uneasy feeling reading about Dead Space. So, essentially he's saying "don'

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by moon3 ( 1530265 )
      Well, some developers do not need technical feats as they franchise ability to sell is based on non-technical grounds. Does Mario or Sonic need a radiosity-like shaded environments? Nope. Or look at PopCap games and their offerings.

    • Re:Rob Lang speaks the truth... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Jurily ( 900488 ) <jurily&gmail,com> on Tuesday August 18, 2009 @11:33AM (#29106303)

      Yes, it's really fucking hard to have redefinable keyboard layouts. I don't know much about console programming, but if there's an event loop capable of calling a buttonpressed routine, you have no excuse.

      • Yes, it's really fucking hard to have redefinable keyboard layouts. I don't know much about console programming, but if there's an event loop capable of calling a buttonpressed routine, you have no excuse.

        Microsoft has a blanket ban on the use of USB keyboards as game controllers in Xbox 360 games; any game that does so doesn't get digitally signed for use on retail consoles. If step 1 involves hostilely taking over the parent company of the console maker so that it will make an exception to this ban, would that be an excuse?

  • Punchline: (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Tuesday August 18, 2009 @10:52AM (#29105775) Journal
    All the stuff about CPU architectures and rendering pipelines and things falls into the "Hard; but we have smart people who can do that, if EA gives them enough time" pile.

    Making an interface that actually works properly on both Mouse+keyboard and gamepad(never mind wii stick) falls into the "squaring the circle with world peace" pile.

    • Making an interface that actually works properly on both Mouse+keyboard and gamepad(never mind wii stick) falls into the "squaring the circle with world peace" pile.

      Personally, since I bought the Xbox 360 Controller, I don't mind playing ports which skimp on Mouse+keyboard :).

      The Prince of Persia: Sands of Times trilogy (haven't played the new PoP game) was awesome with the gamepad on the PC. In fact I'd say that a dual analog stick gamepad is by far the best method of control for these types of games, jus

  • Dead space no remappable keys (Score:5, Insightful)

    by zaibazu ( 976612 ) on Tuesday August 18, 2009 @11:03AM (#29105915)
    Having trouble making a good conversion from pad to keyboard is one thing, but not being able to remap the keys is just stupid.

  • If I had a nickel for every time someone purchased a terrible port...

    Oh wait, someone IS making that... and making alot of Nickels...

  • On the issues of port (Score:3, Informative)

    by superphysics ( 1619033 ) on Tuesday August 18, 2009 @11:05AM (#29105933) Homepage
    And I thought port was just some kind of wine... :|

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      neither one is an emulator?

  • Oh course, I suppose having the entire original PC dev team involved along with some Wiiware developers helps.

  • There's a large lexicon of monosyllabic, four-letter words for describing something you don't like ...

    i glanced at 1st sentence of the summary, and got all excited to read the article ... only to be disappointed because it is lacking heavily in four-letter words for describing something you don't like. now that would make a great article.

  • I disagree with the first paragraph! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by King_TJ ( 85913 ) on Tuesday August 18, 2009 @11:14AM (#29106043) Journal

    "...only PC gamers use the word 'port' with such a fervent degree of repulsion"??

    How about Mac OS X users!!?

    Every time they give us a "port" these days, it's just someone repackaging the PC game code around the Cider engine, tweaking some of Cider's parameters until it appears to "basically run ok" and then they turn around and charge full retail price for it, AFTER it's been out at least 3 months for the PC already!

    Never-mind the PC version might ALREADY have just been ported from a console.....

    • Re:I disagree with the first paragraph! (Score:5, Informative)

      by El_Muerte_TDS ( 592157 ) on Tuesday August 18, 2009 @11:33AM (#29106299) Homepage

      Mac is also a PC.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Minwee ( 522556 )

      But I thought that once software was exposed to the healing rays of Steve it would "Just Work".

      How can anything that runs on The Holy Mac be bad?

    • You forgot that they also change just enough of the networking code to make it completely unusable with the "real" PC versions. Rainbow Six 3, I'm looking at you.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Gryle ( 933382 )
      Linux users are in the same boat. While there are some good original games written for Linux, if you want to play something originally written for Windows, you're limited to Cedega or WINE. The latter's been a crap-shoot for me for the last few years.

      The usual argument against ports I hear is that it's too much work for too small a market. Apparently Linux pirates are way more damaging to the industry that Windows pirates.
    • I tend to buy the PC version anyway, if I want games to run on the Mac. It's likely to get better long-term support and work under WINE on a platform I'm using in the future. I can still play old DOS and Windows games under DOSBox / CrossOver Games / WINE. I have one game which came with both MacOS 8 and Windows binaries on the CD, but I can only play the Windows version on my Mac.

      For a game, it's not like it matters if it's using the native platform look and feel, so don't care if it's using X11 or e

  • Isn't a poor port evidence of a poorly engineered original software product? There ought to be a separation of the game logic layers from the actual hardware implementation of the details.

    I'm not in that industry, but, I've come across hearsay that game development these days is pretty shoddy for the average title since all the money is poured into asset development (sound and visuals) and the software part of it is an afterthought.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Sockatume ( 732728 )

      Actually these days middleware and the use of thirdparty engines is becoming hugely important. Thus the software part isn't an afterthought so much as outsourced to someone more competent. The biggest problem in porting tends to be when someone tries to bring a game developed for consoles to the PC, or vice versa. Essentially the console is dramatically underpowered versus contemporary PCs. So console games are developed "close to the metal" to gain as much power as possible from coding tricks, and therefor

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Desler ( 1608317 )

        Essentially the console is dramatically underpowered versus contemporary PCs.

        A tri-core 3.2ghz PowerPC powered Xbox360 is underpowered? Yeah, maybe compared to PCs that cost 10 times as much, but it's far more powerful than most desktops people are buying even today.

        • The CPU's pretty nippy, still, but RAM is comparatively limited and the graphics card's showing its age. It's just the tradeoff you get for the benefits of a fixed platform.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Desler ( 1608317 )
            It still blows the pants off of the average desktop that most people are using to play games. This whole thing comparing gaming rigs to consoles neglects the fact that a gaming rig costs anywhere from 2 to 3 times as much as a console.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        Actually these days middleware and the use of thirdparty engines is becoming hugely important. Thus the software part isn't an afterthought so much as outsourced to someone more competent. The biggest problem in porting tends to be when someone tries to bring a game developed for consoles to the PC, or vice versa. Essentially the console is dramatically underpowered versus contemporary PCs. So console games are developed "close to the metal" to gain as much power as possible from coding tricks, and therefor

      • Bear in mind, a 'contemporary' PC is six years old with on-board graphics. And that the biggest selling PC titles are things like WoW and the Sims which don't use much graphical power at all.

        Maybe PC gaming would be in a better state if they made more games like those, and fewer like Crysis and Oblivion which are pretty much just graphic-card bench-tests.

    • The structure of the engine itself might vary considerably - consider the situation of the PS3 vs the PC.

      With the PS3, you know every user has around 6 free cores, each of which is somewhat less powerful than one core of a C2D for certain kinds of data. So if you want a high end product that performs well, you parallelize. Massively.

      Now consider the PC, where you can't even guarantee the user's got 2 cores, and even if you do, they might have 2-4, you've got a division of labor problem. You could spawn to

  • If done right, almost any FPS should be portable from console to PC, and be FAR better on PC. (Mouse + keyboard is a superior control mechanism for FPS games.)

    Most RPGs aren't too bad either, especially if you plug in a joypad to the PC.

    Of course, frequently ports are NOT done right - the PC port of Final Fantasy VII is a notorious example of a port being done so lazily as to break compatibility very rapidly within about a generation of hardware releases. Nowadays it's often easier to get the PSX version

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by slyrat ( 1143997 )

      If done right, almost any FPS should be portable from console to PC, and be FAR better on PC. (Mouse + keyboard is a superior control mechanism for FPS games.)

      Most RPGs aren't too bad either, especially if you plug in a joypad to the PC.

      Of course, frequently ports are NOT done right - the PC port of Final Fantasy VII is a notorious example of a port being done so lazily as to break compatibility very rapidly within about a generation of hardware releases. Nowadays it's often easier to get the PSX version running in an emulator than to get the PC port working.

      Even after you just use these game types you still end up with far too many good games that you can't change the controls. The most recent example of this is the pc version of Arkham Asylum (batman game). A standard usb analog stick logitech pad messes up and has the up be down, down be up. And there is no way to fix it. Every pc game should either have customizable controls or tested well enough so they know that all devices are going to work with it. Sigh...

  • RE4 (Score:4, Informative)

    by wisnoskij ( 1206448 ) on Tuesday August 18, 2009 @11:27AM (#29106217) Homepage
    The PC port of RE4 did not even contain a option to exit the game and even though it was a FPS did not allow mouse control.
  • If a game is released on PC, Xbox, and PS3, and you can't tell which platform it was developed on, because all three are so well implemented... then only a pedant would think of it as a port.

    If it feels like it should be on a console, then one is likely to consider it a port, even if the development was done primarily on a PC, for a PC.

    In other words, whilst not being particularly technically accurate, 'port' is a word that gets thrown around precisely because it is obvious that not all the pieces fit.

  • If you want to see porting done wrong, you should look no further than Valve's partnership with EA. I don't think anyone can argue that Valve makes some very good games. Half life 2, L4D, TF2, Portal, etc... are all excellent games. But their console versions are a crying shame. They range from passably mediocre (Orange box for 360) to downright awful unsupported shovelware (Orange Box for PS3). The only product that actually can be called good is L4D on the 360, and even that is a pale imitator to the PC v

  • DX? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by msormune ( 808119 ) on Tuesday August 18, 2009 @11:40AM (#29106379)
    How can DirectX games be hard to port between PC and XBox as they use DirectX for pretty much everything?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Quarters ( 18322 )
      DirectX doesn't handle the streaming of data from the disc. DirectX doesn't handle threading, DirectX doesn't handle physics, DirectX doesn't handle file I/O, DirectX doesn't handle (etc...). Outside of audio (which most devs forgo for other solutions), graphics, and controller input DirectX does nothing to help you develop a game.
      • Do game developers really file I/O operations including streaming themselves? I always thought that stuff is for the OS and it's libraries. Is there a point in doing that stuff yourself? Are you saying if you develop for XBox 360, you have to code your own I/O code? And is physics engine code tied to a certain platform? Why?

  • PORT to Linux!! (Score:4, Informative)

    by notanatheist ( 581086 ) on Tuesday August 18, 2009 @11:40AM (#29106383) Homepage
    Am I the only one here wanting that? Seriously!! It's not like linux doesn't run great on high end hardware or anything. So, don't worry about the poor little consoles for a moment and PORT to Linux!!

    • Re:PORT to Linux!! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Desler ( 1608317 ) on Tuesday August 18, 2009 @12:45PM (#29107387)

      It's not like linux doesn't run great on high end hardware or anything. So, don't worry about the poor little consoles for a moment and PORT to Linux!!

      Yeah, clearly Bungie was stupid for targeting Halo 3 for that crappy 360 and selling 8 million copies in 3 months when they could have gone straight for the Linux gaming market and have garnered 15 sales in a year.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Delwin ( 599872 ) *
      There's no money in linux games. You need to sell enough copies to pay for the dev time to port it.

  • It depends on where you start (Score:5, Interesting)

    by malevolentjelly ( 1057140 ) on Tuesday August 18, 2009 @11:41AM (#29106393) Journal

    It's very important to point out that the porting task has everything to do with where you start. The PC is simply not the best development environment anymore, the Xbox 360 is-- and even Carmack would agree with me, here. You can get a game going really fast on 360, then it's a bit less difficult to go to PC. We can call this the best case scenario. Rapid time to market with superior development tools on 360 with familiar API's for cross-platform development on PC, along with similar TCR requirements between GFW and 360.

    Let's say you started on the PS3, though. Maybe you took the time to learn the architecture and really take advantage of the cell architecture, so your game is basically hardcoded around the flexible pipeline and mass pararllelization, now it does things that even PC games cannot. Porting it to the 360 might not be so bad, but going to the PC is going to be a rough letdown. It feels like a dog when porting a console game.

    So maybe your game started out nicely organized and clean in design, but in that last few months before release while your publisher is driving you up a wall to release, you're going to have so many hacks and messy revisions to the model to ship within your ridiculous timeframe- plus all the devs are tired and need vacations and such. Suddenly, the game is not so portable. It's the same for any platform, really- you go balls to the wall optimizing our game for the platform and you're going to spend a lot of your smooth portability.

    Pay no attention to the "specs" of consoles vs. PC, it's basically meaningless. Consoles often run games almost directly, plus they have all sorts of architecture enhancements and little hardware tricks you don't find in PC's. A PC needs to have brutally more power to really match the sort of speed and power you can squeeze out of a console.

    Let's say you developed on nintendo wii first... well, it's game over already, you just developed a last-gen, almost Xbox-looking game and tied it to the wiimote. Good luck porting that. That's part of why American studios don't throw big games at it, because it's too limited in power and the publishers just don't want to risk it. There are too many "hardcore" games, which need to push the envelope. The Wii is basically doomed to casual games and childrens' games because of this, because the marketing figures will always point it in that direction--and that's what really runs the game industry.

    Technically speaking, you can probably see why people like the Unreal Engine or Source Engine, given the fact that all the porting work is done for you... well you still have to deal with the insane, i mean ABSOLUTELY insane requirements each console has for release... everything from trademarks to menu formats to the way control is expressed in the interface. The amount of attention to detail necessary blows away months of work. Consoles are not a free-for-all, you have to use the hardware in a very specified way.

    In short.. yeah, it's rough. More difficult than most people will ever really know.

  • They are all PowerPC variants.

    Some of us have to ship the same product on x86, MIPS, PowerPC and ARM from the same source base. ex: Cisco's CUE. While I admit the APIs for the graphics architectures of the different consoles are radically different, sometimes I can't help but wonder if some of the complaints from game developers are the typical exaggerations that everyone makes about how hard their job is.

    • The API arguement between consoles and Windows-based PC's rings hollow, because game developers use game engines.. a further API abstraction beyond specific architectural issues.. the PC's graphics hardware has all the capabilities of the consoles, plus a whole hell of a lot more.

      • Someone has to write the game engine, if it is shit on certain platforms because it wasn't ported well then the games using it will suffer obviously. Even between the three game consoles the ports can be pretty dramatically different, not even compared to a PC port.

        PCs have a bunch of additional problems in that you cannot easily predict what combination of features customers will have on a PC. Many popular PC games run on video cards that are inferior to the capabilities of the Xbox360 and PS3. Inferior in

  • Let us use a damn mouse and keyboard (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Yvan256 ( 722131 ) on Tuesday August 18, 2009 @11:52AM (#29106563) Homepage Journal

    All three consoles now have USB ports. Let us use a mouse and keyboard with games that are appropriate for this kind of setup (FPS, RTS, etc).

    You don't play MegaMan with a godamn keyboard and mouse and you don't play Starcraft with a godamn gamepad.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jdgeorge ( 18767 )

      Or if you have a PS3, you can use a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. Either way, it would be nice to see keyboard/mouse support in more games.

    • Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)

      by BrentH ( 1154987 )
      Damnit, my car has a USB port, let me use my goddamn arrow keys to steer my car!
    • That's a good point to bring up. From what we've seen this generation it's really a failing of the dev studio, not the console manufacturer as well. Unreal Tournament 3 for PS3 for instance had no problem using a mouse and keyboard but inexplicably Epic decided not to do the same thing for the 360. Anyone with a 360 knows it already accepts a keyboard hookup (I use one myself) and should have no problem accepting mice (or other devices) even, it's in the studio's hands.

      To a degree I understand why you

  • From the porting cave... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by tylersoze ( 789256 ) on Tuesday August 18, 2009 @11:54AM (#29106601)
    I confess I'm a game porter, I'm deep into the bowels of finishing off a port of the original Call of Duty to Xbox 360 and PS3 at the moment. Most of the time the ports are outsourced to companies like ours rather than developed in-house by the original developers. We usually have a short development schedule and are pretty much stuck with the code as is, as excellent or crappy as it might be, and we do our best to make what we can from it. I actually find it very intellectually challenging and fun. The schedules are short, and there's always a new project to look forward to while being stuck in the muck of the current project. :) I get to look at a lot of different source code from a lot of different games and learn something new each time usually. Each project is different, sometimes it's easy (if the code is designed well or uses middleware that's available on the platform we're porting to) or a complete nightmare (very platform specific or the middleware it's using isn't available for the platform). At this point I've ported to or from just about every platform out there. Xbox -> PC, PC -> PS3,Xbox, DS -> iPhone, PC -> Mac, etc.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I'll back you on that. I worked on a port of a PC game to the DS a few years ago. Basically the budget and schedule was the minimum possible to get a successful project. For about half the project we were doing 70+ hour weeks. The lead programmer did significantly more than the rest of us. The final candidate milestone was about a week after the beta milestone. We basically got everything working in the minimum acceptable state just days before we hit the beta milestone. We had enough time for just a little

  • I For One (Score:2, Flamebait)

    by popeye44 ( 929152 )

    Would as soon see 10 great pc games a year as another 100 ports with absolutely SHITTY controls. I can live with poor graphics. occasional bad camera. Controls MUST be designed well and with ALL options for a PC.

    For example. I believe Devil May Cry "or a similar port" Had a GAMES FOR WINDOWS logo on it. I attempted to play it with Keyboard/mouse and it was horrid "unable to play game breaking." So I got my PS3 controller and plugged it in. The Assholes who developed it only allowed a Xbox Controller scheme

  • The only game port I know about are when companies say they will port a game for Linux, may as well send the announcement straight to /dev/null ! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_Nukem_Forever [wikipedia.org]

  • One of the reasons I stopped taking the Mac even remotely seriously as a games platform - the butchered ports of Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights.

    BG lost multiplayer and voice sample customization, required all four CDs and swapped continually, even on fast-for-the-time hardware.

    Bioware or whatever company was subcontracted to do the dirty work couldn't be bothered to port the DM toolset.

    iD and Blizzard games are feature-complete between platforms. The problem is obviously on the developer (or the port

  • Cry me a river .. Back in the day we had to port arcade games with real sprites and dedicated sound chips to computers with 1 bit per pixel graphics and 1 bit sound (seriously). Oh, and controllers? You'd get the "key down" but not the "key up". Now get off my lawn :)

  • I know it sucks to port games to a new platform with nothing in common, but I hope that someday the game developers can port some Windows games to Vista. And yes, I've tried Wine but sometimes it has as many problems as Vista.

  • Convergence. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MaWeiTao ( 908546 ) on Tuesday August 18, 2009 @01:45PM (#29108421)

    I find it amusing that the final paragraph states that PCs is being taken at least as serious as consoles for gaming. Remember when this generation of consoles was first introduced? The talk then was that PC gaming was doomed.

    It's been the same sort of nonsense the last few generations. People get excited about these new consoles and because they offer a technological leap over the previous generation they start expecting some sort of revolution. Once the consoles have been around a while people start noticing PCs again.

    Consoles naturally have to offer a clear technological leaps given their relatively long life expectancies. PCs, however, never stop progressing so that within months they surpass anything consoles are capable of. And actually, at least with this generation it was more consoles caught up to the capability of PCs than that they actually surpassed them.

    I expect that eventually the market will move towards a more unified platform. Given how complex games are getting developers will be pushing hard for something like this. And hardware makers are being put into a difficult spot where they basically have need to be confident their console will be successful because if it isn't developers will abandon them. Look at the challenges facing would-be competitors the handheld market. And it's almost pointless to even compete on hardware at least for consoles. I say competition will come from the games themselves and motion-control peripherals. Perhaps not for the next generation of consoles, but eventually.

  • The problems with porting games really come down to getting through customs. If they would just declare everything, and not try to sneak in those exotic fruits, everything would be okay. Maybe next time they should just fly in, instead of sea passage...

  • NOT just games (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dpbsmith ( 263124 ) on Tuesday August 18, 2009 @03:36PM (#29110151) Homepage

    The problems with ported software exist with all software, they are just much harder to hide in games.

    An awful lot of software that appears to be available on more than one platform is smooth, sweet, and stable on one of those platforms, and weird, clunky, and unreliable on another. Things like odd screen refresh bugs. Sometimes, applications that just don't look or act like good citizens of the world then run in. Sometimes, the application will seem to run all right but there's some difference in buffering or caching or memory management strategy, and on the "bad" platform it will have a tendency to freeze up mysteriously for unpleasantly long periods of time, or crash. Or work fine when installed in the exact place the installer puts it by default but act funny if you put it somewhere else. Or fail to follow the proper OS conventions for where preferences and configuration settings and other persistent program "state" should be placed. Or show you a literal view of your disk volume and directory structure instead of the slightly abstract view that "normal" programs show (e.g. "Desktop" at the top, root level in Windows).

    I think it's wonderful that gamers are able to yell and scream and try to exercise some market discipline about this. I think it's because a game you don't enjoy is valueless. Alas, when it comes to "productivity" software it's hard to quantify things like "feels klunky."

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