Are Complex Games Doomed To Have Buggy Releases? 362
An anonymous reader points out a recent article at Gamesradar discussing the frequency of major bugs and technical issues in freshly-released video games. While such issues are often fixed with updates, questions remain about the legality and ethics of rushing a game to launch. Quoting:
"As angry as you may be about getting a buggy title, would you want the law to get involved? Meglena Kuneva, EU Consumer Affairs Commissioner, is putting forward legislation that would legally oblige digital game distributors to give refunds for games, putting games in the same category in consumer law as household appliances. ... This call to arms has been praised by tech expert Andy Tanenbaum, author of books like Operating Systems: Design and Implementation. 'I think the idea that commercial software be judged by the same standards as other commercial products is not so crazy,' he says. 'Cars, TVs, and telephones are all expected to work, and they are full of software. Why not standalone software? I think such legislation would put software makers under pressure to first make sure their software works, then worry about more bells and whistles.'"
Refunds for broken merchandise. (Score:5, Insightful)
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In practice not many people would cash in, since it would motivate the company to release patches to fix bugs.
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Re:Refunds for broken merchandise. (Score:5, Insightful)
What power do you -we- have? Boycotting is not an options...
Oh, to have mod points to mod you "-1 stupid".
Boycotting IS "an options". Don't buy crap. Period. It does not affect me in the least that everyone else around me is wasting their money on crap. They could be stuffing their closets full of dogshit, and it wouldn't affect me. (Assuming they kept the containers sealed so as to keep it in mint condition and preserve the value.)
I don't buy garbage games from garbage publishers. Boycotting does work for me. It's the power that I have. I'm not required to buy the latest whiz-bang game. I'm not required to buy every game I see a commercial for. I'm not even required to buy a game RIGHT AWAY! I know. madness, huh?
My money goes to good games. I'll happily wait 6 months to find out if it's a good game or not. Now, this doesn't penalize game makers for buggy games, but at the same time, I don't have to deal with buggy games.
there is nothing that we the informed customer can do to fend them off
The informed customer can not buy their games. That's what I do. Until they legislate that I'm required to purchase their crappy games, they really don't affect me in the least.
By any chance, you aren't a slave to hype and buying the newest game all the time, are you? Because that's where I normally see such bitter complaints about buggy games...
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I guess I don't understand your problem. Are you on a crusade to purge the world of the evils of crappy games?
we're powerless to stop the trend of pushing betas onto us
Nobody pushes betas onto me! According to you, they don't push betas onto you either! Sure, they push betas onto other stupid people, but where's the problem?
You and I may never purchase a game again, just like neither of us would buy a tiger repellent rock. I guess I don't understand where your outrage comes from.
Throughout history there have always been suckers. 2000 years ago t
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Well, apparently stupid me... and like 8 million other people.
To be blunt, yes. I didn't have any issues with the game, because I didn't run out and buy it. Why? Because I don't buy shitty games. How do I know if a game is shitty? I wait for folks like yourself to figure it out and tell me.
You make my point for me. You're one of the millions who don't have a problem with risking your money on garbage. The fact that you're part of this group doesn't bother me at all. I'm not. I'm not going on a crusade to try and get you to change your ways. Some people have b
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I don't think you get it.
By and large commerce would grind to a halt if companies were allow to produce total trash, sell it off to people and completely ignore any responsibility for what they delivered.
That is utterly untrue. All it takes is for one company to produce a quality good, and that's it. The problem isn't with the companies - it's with the consumers.
If all the wine was poisoned, wine makers would go out of business. We'd revert to drinking other beverages, or making the wine ourselves.
We're not talking about life or death here. These aren't things necessary for survival. These are luxury items which are payed for out of an expendable budget. If nobody
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You don't make any sense at all. There's a big difference between "the bulk of the market" and "what you have to choose from". While the bulk of the market was selling big SUVs, I bought a little toyota. While the bulk of the market was focused on mass-marketed, talentless pop stars, I bought other music. While the bulk of the market focuses on mass-marketed, alpha and beta versions of games, I spend my money on solid, well constructed games.
You're dead wrong. What's made in a free market is NOT wh
Re:Refunds for broken merchandise. (Score:5, Insightful)
nothings wrong with it...
But do you really expect the to? Get ready for the requirements on the box going from :
512MB RAM
P4 or better
1GB disk space free
to :
512 MB DDR2 533MHz Rambus RT32Q-12W/P series RAM
Asus MB983-001GIGM/S-4 Motherboard with AnusTech 56chipset and SuperHD-VGA 512Graphic2.0
With Seagate 120GB 7234.42rpm disk and Windows XP SP3 with no other software and all updates except Office excel ones and Adobe Reader4.3, and a shortcut to Notepad at position (34,102) on the desktop with that spiffy desert wallpaper. Also required Network interface card NT-IKK100M with a blue and red striped 1.56m cable that's coiled around the couch leg at 125deg.
Apparatus must be used in a constant 26.3 degrees with relative humidity of 20% and 1024mbar pressure.
This is just fucking idiocy. Any half decent company is going to give refunds (or fix the bugs) if they care about their customers.
Those who don't will vanish and the suckers who bought their stuff will lose their money (much like the morons who buy rolex watches from email or the spastics who send their life saving to nigerian princes).
This is just going to fuck the smaller operators over who don't have the resources for testing every combination of software/hardware. As a example, a "normal" piece of software will be available on :
Win XP
Vista
Win 7
Win2k
x2 for 32 and 64 bit. And various combinations of Admin user, UAC on, regular user limited etc.
Then add Various flavours of server type deployments (Windows server 2000,2003,2008, citrix, TS etc).
Now add various doc management systems (eg sharepoint) integration.
Then sprinkle some scanner, printer and networked hardware deployments.
And this isn't even considering what other applications are going to be interacting with the system and issues with PS,PCL and GDI printing/drawing commands.
Fuck me... this is from experience... I need a beer now. And this is for a simple desktop general office productivity app.
The app code is tested and the app is tested, but there's no telling what the hell kind of environment it's going to be deployed in.
While we're at it, why not require that all software sold needs to be mathematically proven to be correct. That'll be easy right?
Hmmm.. I feel kind of better now...
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Why do you think this would be unfair to small software companies? Do you think they have a right to make money by selling software that doesn't work to people with hardware configurations they never got around to testing?
I don't think preventing customers from getting screwed is the same as screwing the company.
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Because smaller companies have smaller budgets to test on than larger ones.
Simply the licensing costs of a lot of software is prohibitive. If you're selling something on the scale of hundreds of millions of dollars per year in revenue, fine, you can afford it, but small companies simply can't afford to do this - on various levels :
1. Licensing costs - some licenses work out to 1000s of dollars per year. Multiply by different versions/products maybe 100k/year
2. hardware costs - said small company now needs e
Re:Refunds for broken merchandise. (Score:4, Insightful)
For example if an app I wrote causes a BSOD because it triggers a bug in another companies code (eg MS) then good luck getting them to fix it. I have to change my code (which worked) in order to put in a hack to bypass someone elses bug - possibly making me liable for bugs that I had to introduce because someone else didn't fix theirs.
This is the biggest problem I can see for small companies.
I've just spent two weeks resolving out a bug caused by a number of specific Anti-Virus software products doing network intercepts on Windows systems (which were covertly (my to my annoyance) silently buffering networking traffic from my app).
Fortunately I have the tools needed to identity and resolve the issue here, because I work for a large company (though our product is not a commercial one, and has a small target user base). However, small companies don't have the resources to spend all the time (and money) required to compatibility testing with crummy or esoteric third party software which behaves poorly.
I agree that refunds are the right course of action. Though I believe most regions in the world have already robust enough legislation if it were enforced, additional laws to make liability of software vendors clearer would be fine with me.
Forcing QA processes is surely not the way to go - you can't legislate for it as it's too complex. Perhaps you could have minimum requirements for certain types of specific software however (like 'best practice' guidelines). I'm thinking software where public safety is an issue, perhaps where a large number of financial transactions are involved.
Like other standards / accreditations (like ISO) people don't necessarily follow it (and almost never all of the time), but even so that sort of thing can still have a positive impact on how an organisation behaves. Forcing companies to publicly and openly disclose their QA / testing and bug fixing policies/processes in a fixed format could be a good consumer benchmark, for example (were the right criteria specified).
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When you write that "I've just spent two weeks resolving out a bug caused by a number of specific Anti-Virus software products doing network intercepts on Windows systems", this sounds very much to me that this was a problem with the AV software and not your software. Not knowing all the facts, but you may very well be doing a disservice to your software product if you implemented a fix to workaround a problem not of your making!
Kudos on fixing that though - sounds like it was a tricky issue to track down.
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That's a bit like saying that because Joe's hotdog stand is owned and manned by one man (Joe) that he should be able to give me a hotdog that causes me to contract gastroenteritis but Joe should suffer no legal sanction, while if McDonald's gave me gastro then it's perfectly alright to sue the crap out of them.
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Why the concentration on hardware? Most software runs on an OS. The OS deals with abstraction. If you need a certain performance on hardware (i.e. graphics card), then you state that it requires that power or greater.
On the whole, you don't need a lot of hardware testing across the board. If things don't work, that'll be an issue with the driver, and as such, it's an OS/Vendor problem. The API you use on the OS is stated to work in a particular fashion, and if it doesn't, you nag the OS vendor to nag t
Re:Refunds for broken merchandise. (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe if you read the fine article before jerking one off, you'd be able to answer your own question.
On a PC, the vendor can't control the environment in which their software is run. Something else on the machine completely outwith their control could nobble their app, for example, Google desktop stopping Demigod from launching. I say "for example" since that's the example given in the article that you didn't bother to read.
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Ok, but what's the downside? Computers are complex, and if a customer can't use a program for whatever reason they should be entitled to get their money back. That's how it works for other products, I don't see what makes software special enough that the same rules shouldn't apply.
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That is the most pathetic car analogy I've ever seen on a site full of lousy analogies. Does not being able to park your car in the garage magically make it none-functional? I don't think so. I don't even have a garage and my car works just fine.
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And I can return a shirt if my wife decides that it is the wrong color, so I don't see where this thread is going. If the product is not useful to me, I'm allowed to return it in any other context. I don't have to provide a reason. "I don't want it" will be reason enough for all the returns on Dec 26.
Why should a game that won't even run on the recipient's computer be any different?
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Sellers *choose* to allow returns for buyer's remorse because it is good PR. They are not legally obligated to do so. Similarly, I can *choose* to give you a refund if you don't like your game, but I don't *have* to. If the product/game is defective, then yes, there are legal issues to force me to refund your money. But I'm not aware of any laws in the US forcing me to accept returns for any random reason.
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Maybe if you read the fine article before jerking one off, you'd be able to answer your own question.
On a PC, the vendor can't control the environment in which their software is run. Something else on the machine completely outwith their control could nobble their app, for example, Google desktop stopping Demigod from launching. I say "for example" since that's the example given in the article that you didn't bother to read.
That's fine. I wouldn't expect a refund in such a case.
But what about all the assorted bugs that wind up being the developer's own fault?
I remember some Myst sequel that absolutely refused to run on my computer because my optical drive was labeled M: instead of D: or E: The developer acknowledged the issue and made a patch available shortly. But it sure seems to me like they shipped a broken product.
Piracy. (Score:3, Insightful)
What exactly is the downside to forcing a company to give refunds for the broken merchandise that it sells?
Well, the industry would say piracy. I might buy Call of Duty, then, said it was "broken", and returned it. Granted, this should be the norm, but the industry would see things differently. This is why the shareware model is nice. You can see if the game actually works before you pay for it.
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Isn't that one of the purposes of demos? Of course, when games like Modern Warfare 2 start being released without demos, something is wrong.
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Uh... then refuse to buy without try? I made it a policy for me if there's no demo, it's not worth my money. If they're not convinced the game could interest me past its demo stage, if they fear that hour or two I could play a demo will be "enough" for me, it's certainly not worth spending 60+ bucks because the game probably won't give me more entertainment than this hour or two.
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Isn't that one of the purposes of demos? Of course, when games like Modern Warfare 2 start being released without demos, something is wrong.
It's been a long time since I relied on a demo to give me a good feeling for the game.
Many developers/publishers never release a demo of any kind.
And the demos that do get released are frequently not representative of the finished product. They'll focus on a single map or level that's been polished to perfection... But the final release will be full of bugs and issues. Or there'll be artificial limitations in the demo that keeps you from trying out key elements of the finished product.
The last game tha
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Sometimes it's even the other way round. In the case of Arma2 [wikipedia.org] (an example I know of, there might be others), the demo has a number of problems that have been long since fixed in the final game. It does show what the game is like but certainly not how it handles.
They should update it but apparently haven't gotten around to doing it (small company and limited resources apparently).
First impressions can be damning.
I recently picked up S.T.A.L.K.E.R. [wikipedia.org] on Steam when it was on sale for just $5. I'd been wanting to play that game for a while, but had been avoiding it because of how buggy it was.
This impression - that the game was terribly buggy - came from leaks and early reviews. I had been given the impression that the game was borderline-unplayable. And while I did run into a few issues, that is no longer the case. I had a great time playing through that game.
If I had known that the
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Higher price? Or what else do you think would change?
What will happen? Well, as any programmer will tell you, it is virtually impossible to create error free software given the time frames that you're given to develop in. Sure, gimme twice the people and 5 times the time and we're talking. That results in about ten times the cost. Want to pay 500 bucks for a game? Didn't think so.
So what will happen? Software will go the same way every other merchandize went. Its price will go up by about 10% and the qualit
Re:Refunds for broken merchandise. (Score:5, Insightful)
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True, but it was a shiny turd on the PC and needed a patch to even run in some cases. I loved it once they got a patch to make it work, but it didn't work out of the box.
Q. Do complex, nonuniform ___ have imperfections? (Score:2, Insightful)
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And the definition of "work"? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Cars, TVs, and telephones are all expected to work, and they are full of software. Why not standalone software?"
What's the definition of work anyways? Most products sold nowadays suck. I just got rid of a laundry machine that was 40 years old. I'll be lucky if the new one lasts 1/4th as long. I bought a LCD monitor that worked until the 1 year warranty was up. My cellphone functions, but its software is crummy and buggy. It even freezes up sometimes. (No, it isn't a smartphone.)
Software is more like writing a book. Some books are written with superior quality "code." The "computer" reads that code, and depending on how well that code was written, the "computer" can read it more quickly and determine the proper function faster. (In this case, correctly interpreting the knowledge inside the book.) Some books are total shit. For example, just about every book that's used in education. Especially ones written by professors. They don't "work."
I do have one sentiment. I absolutely think that games should be returnable. But that's from an idealistic standpoint. I fully understand many, many people are going to play the game all the way through then return it to Wally World.
Is this inexcusable? (Score:4, Insightful)
What we're looking at here is offshoring a lot of highly specialized work to essentially shops in the third world that have not the same level of expertise, and we get crap at a cheaper price. We compete in the west not by improving the quality, but, by making things cheaper themselves. So, we have less testing, less documentation, just code and ship and little for iterative development. Plus, we have more corporate style methodologies that reward the schedule more than the product. Pretty much, if you build stuff stupid, you get stupid stuff.
Maybe there will be a shakeout where we realize that consumer IT is much more demanding than corporate IT is, and that methodologies that work fine for corporate clients, like Agile / SCRUM, or Waterfall, don't really apply so much to consumer products. A consumer product is done when it is done.
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A consumer product is done when it is done.
Ohhhhh now. As anyone who ever worked in production can tell you, a consumer product is done when beancounters or marketing say it's done. Not when it's done. I doubt you will find many developers who actually ever got enough time to actually release a product when it was "done".
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Ohhhhh now. As anyone who ever worked in production can tell you, a consumer product is done when beancounters or marketing say it's done.
the difference is between projects that cost $100,000 versus those that cost $1,000,000. All that $900,000 of stuff actually tends to give you the deeper q/a bench and everything else.
To wit, you would expect a multimillion dollar game like Madden Football to actually work, but not necessarily a cheaper knock off football. Sure, both may be superficially similar, but th
Games or all software (Score:2)
You comment on software all the way through, and then talk only about games when you mention returns. Similarly, the summary has Tenenbaum talking about software but Kuneva talking only about games. What makes games special? Why should they be held to a higher standard than drivers, IDEs, spreadsheets, etc?
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For example, just about every book that's used in education. Especially ones written by professors. They don't "work."
I know this is probably off-topic, but I must ask, as a young student, why do say that?
Is it because they are usually expensive and required to a course (that's taught by the professor who wrote it)? Because they may be hard to follow? Or is there another reason?
Although I'm forced to say that I only had one teacher ask us to buy books/notes wrote by him. I do have one that give us the book (for both courses he taught) for free (it was my physics teacher, he really likes open-source I guess :)). Although th
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On top of that, my statutory rights also allow me to return any product (working or not) within 7 days [oft.gov.uk] if they are bought "sight unseen", i.e. over the Internet.
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What I am saying is, if the product performs well in its standard environment, a customer can't ask for money back. You cannot use a phone under water and say it broke.
That's a ridiculous comparison. What is a standard environment for a computer? No one runs a game with no software other than the OS installed. Do you think software companies should be allowed to start dictating to you what other software you're allowed to have installed on our system?
Also it's a terrible comparison because putting a phone in the water can physically damage the phone. No one is saying you should be able to microwave the DVD the game comes on and still be able to get your money back.
Re:And the definition of "work"? (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of people do this all the time. It's called a console.
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A lot of people do this all the time. It's called a console.
Yup. And one of the major reasons I hear all the time for people preferring a console, over a PC for gaming, is that things generally work. Sure, some glitches and bugs here and there... But normally you can expect to buy a game at the store, throw it in your console, and play the thing without too many issues.
Re:And the definition of "work"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Which brings us back to the problem of developers pushing out shoddy code now since they know they can fix it later. In the "good old days" of console gaming, before every system had internal storage and internet connections, if a game went out the door full of bugs that was it. Once the word got around that the game was buggy and/or unplayable, people wouldn't buy it and the developer/publisher would pay dearly for that mistake. This healthy fear of a product failing in the market due to bugs and poor code was usually enough to push developers to do the best possible q/a job that they could, even if it meant delaying a game release.
But now that every game console has the ability to support patches, the developers/publishers have begun to rely on this as a crutch so that they can save time and release on some pre-determined schedule and/or save money by not bothering with full q/a attention.
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Broken games still get shipped all the time.
In the old days when magazine reviews were still relevant, it really wasn't that uncommon to read reviews that basically came down to "great game, but we can't recommend it due to this bug or that glitch." And with systems that didn't allow patches, getting those kind of reviews could be devastating to a game.
Nowadays, even with the certification processes, some of the biggest AAA single-player games are shipping with game stopping bugs [kotaku.com] that would have been bad e
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A lot of people do this all the time. It's called a console.
Yup. And one of the major reasons I hear all the time for people preferring a console, over a PC for gaming, is that things generally work. Sure, some glitches and bugs here and there... But normally you can expect to buy a game at the store, throw it in your console, and play the thing without too many issues.
That's the way it should be, and it's why I prefer console games. (Consoles are generally cheaper than gaming PCs, too, but I digress.) Unfortunately, that didn't stop Bethesda from releasing DLC for Fallout 3 that was so buggy the game was essentially broken. Out of 5 of the DLCs released for Fallout 3, only two (2) played without bugs: The Pitt and Operation Anchorage. The other DLCs ranged from occasional crashes (Mothership Zeta) to constant freezing that made the DLC impossible to play (Point Looko
Andy Tanenbaum (Score:5, Funny)
AST:
'I think the idea that commercial software be judged by the same standards as other commercial products is not so crazy,' he says. 'Cars, TVs, and telephones are all expected to work, and they are full of software. Why not standalone software? I think such legislation would put software makers under pressure to first make sure their software works, then worry about more bells and whistles.'"
Next he will be claiming that it is safer to use a properly modular operating system.
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depends on the vendor (Score:2, Informative)
I think the vendors that constantly have buggy initial releases are the same consistently.
EA? I expect a buggy release or a release that doesn't run well or at all.
Blizzard? Mostly ships pretty functional games or expansions these days. Blizzard has enough money and enough of a following that they don't have to shove software out before it's ready. Their recent betas seem to have fewer bugs than other studios' releases.
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The difference is that EA throws their money at acquiring competitors, and then spends as little as possible making sequels. The bad sequels eventually kill the brand name of the title, but not before they rake in massive profits.
10 Acquire company with solid title
20 Sell crappy sequels, earning major profits off the soon-to-be tarnished brand name of that title.
30 Goto 10
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I think the vendors that constantly have buggy initial releases are the same consistently.
EA? I expect a buggy release or a release that doesn't run well or at all.
Blizzard? Mostly ships pretty functional games or expansions these days. Blizzard has enough money and enough of a following that they don't have to shove software out before it's ready. Their recent betas seem to have fewer bugs than other studios' releases.
Blizzard?!? They haven't shipped a game in nearly 5 years! ...and WoW was patched near constantly for the first year of its life.
Expansions, maybe - but games? It's been a long time!
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Blizzard's course is pretty ingenious when you think of it. They set a release date that they won't hold. Probably even deliberately. They will continue to spin the game and you will have people get all hyped up about further release dates. They release trailers and teasers and maybe even a demo or two where you can play a level. Then long nothing while the boards overflow with anxiously expecting customers. Every time the interest dwindles a bit a new press release, a new release date or a new demo is rele
Yes and No (Score:2, Insightful)
Laws that would force software producers to run proper QA testing is a stupid idea. If you deal with software, you learn after a while that "working software" is a sliding scale. It is unrealistic to expect any modern software to be completely bug free, similar to how you had to accept a small number of dead pixels on cheap LCD screens. On the other hand, many modern phones are released with OS:es that crash during calls (*cough* iphone *cough*) which I think is totally unacceptable.
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While it is unrealistic to expect things to be bug free, most game developers have a lot to learn about quality and good development practices. You'd be surprised of how incompetent some game developers can be and how many sane coding practices they routinely sacrifice on the altar of premature optimization. Factor in time pressure encouraging the usage of quick and dirty solutions as well as often a lack of proper testing coverage across enough different hardware/OS configurations and you have a recipe for
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You know what's "stupid"? Making ridiculous strawman arguments. Quote anything in the article that suggests "laws that would force software producers to run proper QA testing". Go on. I'll wait while you find someone to read it to you.
Isn't there a difference? (Score:3, Insightful)
Isn't there a bit of a difference there between the examples (TVs, DVD players, etc) and PC software? Everything else is a self-contained unit with no dependencies on anything else or (in the case of DVD players) accepts things that are within tight tollerances (and if your disk isn't, then it'll skip, but that's the disk's fault).
Software, on the other hand, has no control over the environment that it is put in (unless it is an OS X app, which is somewhat consistent), with huge permutations of other software, hardware components, and dodgy background processes, plus user fiddling. It isn't quite as easy to get things flawless in that situation (although some companies can improve on what they do now).
Also, how will this relate to OSS? Will I never release a final version of my app because I can't afford the liability and so it'll always be in beta because there could be bugs left?
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You sell game for $X to N users, but it doesnt work for C users, so your GROSS is $X * (N - C)
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The legal liability of producing an "inferior or incomplete product". The summary says about "legal and ethical issues", which are irrespective of price. If they bring in legislation to say that "all software must be held to identical standards to stand-alone equipment, despite the fact that software operates in a completely uncontrolled and not entirely forseeable environment" then OSS could well be caught within the same net and be royally screwed in all nations that implement the law.
Finally, consumer protections for software (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not just games: most consumer electronics nowadays are a mix of software and hardware and often enough it's the software part that is released unfinished (read: buggy).
Software on non-life-critical applications has been given a free ride for two long - if it's not acceptable that a DVD player refuses to start at odd moments or randomly stops working, why would the same be acceptable in a computer game (which is just another for of entertainment) or an OS?
As somebody working in IT, who has worked in the industry in both IT Services and IT Products, I've seen again and again the main behaviours that lead to buggy software releases:
a) No real software development process resulting in unpredictability with regards to the real finish date.
b) Bad requirements definitions, stuffed with incomplete, inconsistent and unclear "desires", with way too much time wasted in "would be nice" requirements leading to last minute requirements changes as people discover the missing/bad bits.
c) Little or no real testing, mostly done by amateurs (or worse, developers).
d) Hard deadlines set by sales and marketing which, coupled with the points above, results in releases of unfinished products.
The reason why this happen is very simple: companies can get away with this, so management (from top to bottom) can get away with being disorganized, unstructured, "shoot-from-the-hip" cowboy-like, non-proactive and outright incompetent.
(yes, I AM sour about this)
Funny enough, buyers of software products and services are so used to be royally done by the industry that some of the worst offenders in this space are actually the larger IT companies, not the smaller ones: in a playing field were buyers expected and valued quality in software, the higher-quality companies would outcompete and outgrow the low-quality ones, and yet what we see is the opposite.
"Fitness for purpose": exactly what is it? (Score:3, Interesting)
if it's not acceptable that a DVD player refuses to start at odd moments or randomly stops working, why would the same be acceptable in [...] an OS?
How do you define "Fitness for its purpose" when the purpose is defined differently by each individual user? That's both the power and challenge of software: it can do anything. General-purpose OSes are meant to let you do anything.
They're also big enough (i.e. consisting of a large number of interacting components) that if you want to define exactly what users can and can't expect (and can/can't do), you'll end up with either an insanely long list, or overly broad items on that list.
Either "No warranty u
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A DVD player should work all the time. As a manufacturer, you have total control over the system (both software and hardware).
The issue with "pure" software is you really don't know what it is going to be running on. For a PC, there are millions of potential hardware and software configurations. Most of these combos behave the same (to the program), but not always. It is literally impossible to test all configurations.
Agreed, but (Score:2)
1- First difference between software that turns on my PC, and software in my dishwasher: in one case, the manufacturer controls everything, in another, the software runs in an unknown, possibly weird/tricky/otherwise buggy platform. Unless you're Apple, and Apple definitely should offer the same warranty as dishwashers.
2- Second difference: if my dishwasher's software craps out, my whole dishwasher craps out. If my PC software is broken, only that specific piece (hopefully) won't work. So whatever warranty
AST (Score:5, Informative)
So Andy Tanenbaum is now a mere "tech expert"? That's a big step down from "CS god."
For the uninformed, ast wrote a kinda good book on operating systems called "Operating Systems: Design and Implementation." I believe this one guy from Finland wrote an OS called Linux based on another OS called Minix discussed in that book (and even got into the flamefest of the century with the Finnish guy!). And then there's a bunch of other stuff you may or may not know about, such as the Amoeba distributed OS, a free anonymous p2p network called Turtle, and probably a few other knick-knacks along the way.
Seriously, give the Man due credit.
Mr Tanenbaum, the hardware must be fixed first!!! (Score:2, Offtopic)
Mr Tanenbaum, as I have told you in an email, modern CPUs lack any hardware support for modules within a process! that's a major flaw that does not allow for proper isolation of modules within a process.
You said that "it will be a hard sell to hardware manufacturers" when I proposed you to promote this idea. But it's so easy to make! the hardware extensions required for modules within a process are minimal - mostly extensions to page tables; existing software needs not be modified!
Of course, this is not a p
Even *Simple* games can be broken (Score:3, Interesting)
Have any of you played Guitar Hero 3 for the Wii?
It's a fairly simple game, right? You have an .mp3 file, and paired with it you have a file containing a list of tuples (time, subset of buttons {1,2,3,4,5}), then you "play back" those two files simultaneously and see if the users strums while holding down the correct subsets within some well-defined window of time.
You can put the game in a "broken" state (requiring you to back out to the main menu); I don't recall exactly how, but I think it's when you, from practice mode, change the practice speed, you get dumped back to a dysfunctional practice mode screen.
If you tell the game your monitor (TV) has a certain delay, when you practice at less than 1x regular speed, apparently the game thinks it should not just scale the time differences in the list-of-subsets file but also that your monitor takes longer time to show pictures. Morons.
And the menu structure is big, menu items are inconsistently named, and the structure itself is poorly aligned with what people want to do. Bad usability. Example: I want to give up on a song, so I choose quit; "Do you really want to quit; unsaved progress will be lost?" (wtf, there's no way to actually save progress...). Well, "Yes I want to quit". "Ok, where do you want to quit to? Main menu, song list, or retry this song?" What??? If I wanted to retry the song, I would have selected the "retry song" menu item. The only reason having a choice here is good is because it takes so unbearably long to navigate from the song list to the main menu.
And couldn't they have added an option to compensate for broken TVs which not only have picture lag, but have slightly desynchronized audio and picture? Would that really have been too hard? (Well, apparently...)
For such a brilliantly designed game play, the implementation (and the design of the things that go around the game play) is unbelievably crappy. I'm seriously doubting whether they tested it.
(And what was that thing about shipping discs with mono audio?)
Seriously, avoid GH3/Wii. If you must show off by completing (or FC'ing) TTFAF on expert, do it some other platform. It's for your own good.
Then, mr Tanenbaum, fix the programming languages! (Score:2)
It's a total shame that, in this day and age, and after millions of hours spent by academics on programming languages, to use a language like C or C++ for games or desktop apps that require performance.
Yes, I know, I have told this many times on /., and the standard answer is "it's the programmer, stupid". Well, it may be so, but writing bug free software requires god programmers. If there were better system programming languages, programmers would not need to be gods.
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Let me see if I can translate your post:
"C and C++ are the root of all EVIL! Bad programmers are not stupid or incompetent, it's just impossible to write good software, especially when using (EVIL!) languages like C and C++. Software companies have never hired incompentent programmers because they are cheap; all programmers everywhere are as good as they can ever be. There has never, ever, (EVAH!) been a piece of software which is bug free, or at least close to it. Bug free software is impossible. And
Question with a question(s).... (Score:2)
Is Windows "doomed" to have buggy releases?
Is Ubuntu or any other Linux distro doomed to have buggy releases?
Inasmuch as Windows, at least, has ALWAYS had buggy releases, I guess that means the answer to the question in the title is "Yes, Virginia."
But seriously, since when has any of the above been considered truly mission critical, in the sense that it MUST work exactly as expected from its very first execution in the field? I think somebody has some pretty
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You'll note that I never said refunds should be against policy. If software fails to perform adequately, it's still reasonable and fair that you should be able to demand your money back, regardless of abject fears you might be a pirate (unless they can PROVE you are). The ability to demand a refund is a MINIMUM check/balance that should always exist in a capitalist economy.
By my reckoning, you should have been due refunds for those two games, if you had asked for such. Apparently if they'd been Stardock
My two cents as a software developer (Score:5, Interesting)
The quality of the code is a function of its cost, too.
For example, the code written for NASA hardware (i.e.: space shuttles), have more documentation than the size of the hardware itself (so, we're looking at a large pile of documents next to the shuttle). It's tested for years, it only works on tested CPUs (i.e.: 20 years old proven 8086s), and the actual "waterfall" method (which is generally a disaster for any other project) is properly applied.
That total brings the cost of each source code line to average $1000. (Same for medical appliances, etc).
The cost of a commercial off the shelf software is much (much much) less than $100.
But, even under such strict control, we had to debug the Mars rovers due to unforeseen bugs during their initial flight.
Anybody here on Slashdot can do the math, and fill in the gaps to calculate the future price of games (for a reference they are $60/unit now).
Re:My two cents as a software developer (Score:4, Insightful)
your point still stands, though.
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For example, the code written for NASA hardware (i.e.: space shuttles), have more documentation than the size of the hardware itself (so, we're looking at a large pile of documents next to the shuttle). It's tested for years, it only works on tested CPUs (i.e.: 20 years old proven 8086s), and the actual "waterfall" method (which is generally a disaster for any other project) is properly applied.
That's the version NASA puts out, anyway. I know someone who's worked on the shuttle's backup software and tells rather a different story. Code written in 1970s, documentation written in 1980s; when the coders updated the code they would tell the documenters about it, but it was pretty informal; documentation converted from typewriter output to one electronic format without careful checking (introducing errors in guidance formulae which weren't noticed for 15 years, dropping footnotes, etc); then outsourced
The truth is. (Score:2)
I don't know what is the truth, but heres my humble opinion:
Any program, except the most simple one, has bugs. The ones that haven proven matematically that have zero bugs, are both the judge and the plaintiff.
On commercial software, the target is to solve problems quick. A quick and cheaper solution now, is better than the theorical perfect solution that can come in 4 years, but not so, because it never delivered, and is unusable anyway.
In mathemathics and science.. it may make sense to create stuff that i
No. (Score:2)
No. Half-assed, rushed-to-release games are doomed to have buggy releases, regardless of complexity.
And now that all the damn consoles have net access and non-volatile secondary storage, it's not unreasonable to expect that they'd find some way to fuck up Tetris at launch.
Buggy or Beta? (Score:2)
The best programmers can make mistakes, shure, but when you start deliberately selling betas and turning them into final versions later, just so you can cash up earlier, at the expense of the customers satisfaction, that goes too far, imho.
yes, please (Score:2)
And I speak as someone who makes games as a hobby. The poor indie developer who is always cited as being pushed out of the market by legislation.
But frankly, it's the big companies that make the profits from this non-existing consumer protection. It's more than high time to change that. I want to buy software and be sure that it works. Sure, it still may not be a great game. And it would be overkill to not allow for some bugs. But there've been several cases of games shipping that couldn't even run without
All software has bugs (Score:2)
All software has bugs. It's just a matter of how serious they are. The Showstoppers. The question shouldn't be Will there be bug-free software, but whether or not developers can reduce the severity of bugs to a tolerable level. And most game companies think they've done that--until they're caught with their pants down.
* The internet has allowed game companies to use (and even expect) the public to do the debug/beta testing work that they used to pay for and what used to push out release times.
* A release lo
Re:What about Betas? (Score:4, Insightful)
The reality here is that they are not paying for the ordinary quality control process because they can legally get away with it. It has nothing to do with retail pricing.
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That's actually pretty sensible law, but how "much" is "little" or "much" when taking the price as a gauge for quality? Cars tend to be quite expensive despite a low material cost. Software is, relatively speaking, a lot worse (the material value of the carrying medium is negligible when looking at the price tag). Does this "price vs. value" consumer protection take into account how much work is associated with the product, or the liability, or the raw materials, or...
Essentially, how does it figure out the
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Are you an imbecile?
Hint: both questions have the same answer. If you pay for a "beta", the price paid should include a subsequent upgrade to the released version, or a full refund if no release is forthcoming in a stated time (the expiry date of the beta, perhaps). Looking at it a different way, you have pre-paid for the released version, and the beta is given as a freebie.
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If it doesn't include Beta releases, then everything everyone makes will be labeled a Beta until kingdom come.
There's a reason why most Linux tools, even ones with a decade in use, have a version number 0.something...
But here's a solution to unlimited betas a commercial product: Just simply "outlaw" selling beta products. They will have to stamp something 'release version' if they want to earn a buck.
Re:Mass (D)Effect (Score:4, Insightful)
I bought Mass Effect only to find out that the game simply does not run. My computer is as close to flawless as it could possibly get, it's been running for years and has successfully played many games with many different engines, I have done workarounds for crashes and bugs and all sorts of things, it's a tried and true PC.
Just an anecdote from the other side of the fence, and not saying this is necessarily your case. Certainly not defending Mass Effect, I've never tried the game personally.
We've had numerous users report serious defects in our products over many years, and faced all sorts of threats and insults, only for the fault to be eventually traced to the user's "tried and tested hardware." Each program that you may use exercises different components of your PC in different ways. Sometimes subtle differences can make a massive difference in results; the difference between working fine and not even starting up. Should the developer pay because you have some mildly faulty ram?
We've also seen vastly different behavior from hardware/drivers built to the same spec but sourced from different manufacturers, or from the same manufacturer but over different periods. Sometimes these deviations are within the spec but not covered by reasonable testing; often these deviations are outside the spec completely. Should the developer pay because one or more of your components do not follow the specs, or deviate significantly from what was standard practice at the time the software was developed?
As a user, I have to agree that it sucks when products don't work as advertised. I agree that there should be a mechanism for complaint against any vendor, whether their product be physical or virtual. But I'm not sure that I agree that there should be an absolute right of refund at the user's discretion. That's just open for abuse - whether deliberate or incidental.
I'm also not particularly fond of DRM and yet that would seem to be the only way that a vendor could offer true "returns" of a software-only product.
It's probably worth noting that I'm not claiming that all bugs are the user's fault; but it's certainly not the case that all bugs are the application developer's fault, either.
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Call it a programmer's intuition, or just calculating chances. If 100 games work on a system and 1 doesn't, there's a good chance it's something to do with the game.
This is the first assumption that you'd jump to, but there's no real evidence that it's true. Perhaps the "one game" simply uses more ram than the others, and thus hits a "faulty bit" in one of the ram chips. Perhaps the graphics drivers have an off-by-one condition that causes them to over-read a vertex buffer and into unallocated memory. Even on "identical" machines, this may not crash unless the application's allocations match an exact pattern that causes the bad read to touch an unmapped page. We've see
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Should the developer pay because you have some mildly faulty ram?
Other product vendors have to pay if the customer decides they don't like the color of their purchase. So yeah, it's the cost of doing business.
It's understood that computers are complex and not every program will work in every situation, but why do you think the vendor is entitled to the money of someone who for whatever reason can't use your product? It would be a lot to ask to required the vendor to figure out what screwy component is causing problems and to make their product run on everyone's computer,
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The core of the problem is that games are today not much different from many other applications: They don't have a single manufacturer anymore.
Games in the old days had one maker. It wasn't even uncommon to have a single person writing it. And you will notice that these are usually also the ones that worked the best.
Later you had games that were done by a team of people who often had no idea what the rest of the team did. Programmers that had no idea of graphics, graphics artists that couldn't write a line
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You should have used the cracked executable for Mass Effect that didn't contain the DRM.
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Other games on the same rendering, physics, and sound engines run fine on his system. The problem isnt with the drivers, although sometimes driver makers FIX THE BUGS IN 3RD PARTY GAMES.
The problem is almost certainly the copy protection mechanism.
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The problem is that Mass Effect may or may not work on anything earlier than Vista, and figuring out why and/or making it work is next to impossible if you're lucky. If you have Vista (or , I assume, Windows 7) it will work.
Shit, and it should have been made clear, but if you look at the packaging it will say it requires DX10, which was Vista only (XP versions are dirty hacks)
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Mass effect worked flawlessly for me on multiple computers of varying specs (No ATI cards though) From a bottom end, to a mid range to a ultra high end computer.
It's something with your setup, not the game.
Re:Mass (D)Effect (Score:4, Insightful)
They were tested and verified; thousands and thousands of other people played Mass Effect with no problem. Nobody is using you as a Beta. It is not possible to test all combinations, and moreover the fix, when you find one, will be on your end, because if it were the code everyone would be experiencing the same difficulty. The inability of even technically competent gamers to grasp this basic point is the best argument against enforced refunds in my opinion. People are able to tell when a phone doesn't work; with a game all they know is that it isn't working. You can't tell where the problem lies, so you just blame the game reflexively. Natural, but very often wrong. If the company wants to give you a refund that's fine but you'd both be better served if you weren't so adamant that the game was the problem and actually worked to find the real culprit; you might get to play a great game and the company would retain your money and your custom.
You do realize that every single game that runs fine for you is running terribly for someone else. If a bug isn't very widespread it probably isn't the game's fault. Some games really are buggy messes but Mass Effect isn't one of them.
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Does your car service level agreement promise 20 years of parts manufacture? ...I thought it might not. Even if a deal like that is available, it wouldn't be if cars improved at the speed computing does.
Car parts will only be made as long as there's demand, same goes for software support. It just happens not many people want support for 20 year old software. That is NORMAL business practice.
Re:Blizzard releases? (Score:4, Insightful)
No company is perfect, but there is always one company that ends up the flag bearer for PC game releases. Last decade, it was Origin. These days, I'd say the company that has the best processes for getting games to the PC would be Blizzard.
I don't intend this to sound fanboish, but they have had some very smooth release cycles in recent memory. Last year's release of WoTLK for example.
You failed. Blizzard hasn't shipped a game in 5 years. Expansions for WoW, yes. Games, no.