Made it into Gamespot's Burning Questions What do you know, I put this question in thinking it was a burning issue, didn't make the the following feature, but it made the one after that! http://www.gamespot.com/features/burningquestions/ And for all who're hoping I'll cater to those unwilling to click hyperlinks, heres your lucky day: You Can Patch my Game, but Can you Patch my Broken Heart? I bought Rome: Total War, and the reviews gave it a respectable 9.1. There were a few problems regarding AI (A battle consisted of setting up, 30 seconds or less of combat, and 85 percent of the battle ending up in killing 2000 fleeing men with your 108 calvary.) Now, Creative Assembly is supposedly following the "two patch rule". They gave us 1.1, which essentially did nothing but nerf elephants in the most tiny of ways, and "aid" multiplayer connectivity, which STILL sucks. Then they said they were coming up with a "quality" patch, which really solved only a few issues, then added A LOT MORE problems, and now they refuse to put out another patch, and probably expect us to shell out money for Barbarian Invasion to fix things up. My question is, what's up with companies giving a substandard product where the problems can only be seen after weeks and months of playing (I'm sure JO only got a few days at it), insert more problems into the game, and refuse to give further free support when we're supposed to get a perfectly functioning product just to milk more sales for their EP. Hell, Blizzard just released ANOTHER Starcraft patch not too long ago. Michael Liao San Jose, California Strategy games? Patches? Yeesh, this sounds like a job for Jason Ocampo. "Ah, patches, the necessary evil of PC (and soon, console) gaming. There are plenty of reasons why games ship with bugs, but when you get down to it, the main reason is money. Salaries for programmers and artists are expensive, so publishers and developers have to draw a line somewhere and ship a game. Why don't they simply keep working on a game until it is bug-free? Because it's not that easy. Regular PCs are a nightmare of potential hardware and software conflicts, so the best that developers can do is nail down known problems before launch, and then deal with unexpected problems after launch with a patch. So why don't they keep issuing patches for a game? Because the decision to issue a patch usually belongs to the publisher, since someone has to pay for it. Let's say you have a team of 20 or 30 developers spend a month working on a patch. That's anywhere between $50,000 and $100,000 in salary that has to be paid. Developers don't have that kind of cash, so the publisher has to pay for it. The publisher takes a look at the sales numbers and does a cost/benefit analysis, and if the value of a patch is more than the cost of the patch, then you'll get a patch. And patches don't just cost money, they also cost time. For example, patches need to be tested by the publisher's QA team, and that means taking the testers off an upcoming game (and increasing the odds of a bug slipping by in that product) so that they can test the patch. Blizzard can afford to keep patching Starcraft because it was a phenomenal success that made an obscene amount of money. However, it's one of those rare exceptions in the industry. Most games struggle to make money, and publishers make a conscious decision to only fund a patch or two for each game. In fact, it's even budgeted ahead of time, because publishers know that PC games always require a patch. So unless the game is a huge hit, don't expect more than one or two patches for it. After that, it's far more cost effective for the publisher and developer to work on a brand-new game or expansion that will generate new revenue, rather than burn money on a product that has already generated most of the revenue that it was going to generate in the first place." -- Jason Ocampo Heh, this is pretty big for me, got the message out about patches, and well...I got onto Gamespot, so I guess I could consider myself semi famous at the age of 15.
