Colonial Marines Developers Should Own Up to Screwing Up

Yahtzee Croshaw

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Colonial Marines Developers Should Own Up to Screwing Up

It doesn't help the industry improve when its developers start blaming each other when a game crashes and burns.

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Erttheking

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Eh, I still think that the share option is an awesome idea. But then again I'm an extremely lonely person that would take any excuse to spend more time with my friends who I see once every week due to them living in another town.

Also Colonial Marines and the PS4...don't really see the connection there. Probably should've saved the PS4 for a different article Yahtzee.
 

SonicWaffle

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We, as gamers, are a lucrative market. Advertising is not going to decrease - it is going to become more and more pervasive until it becomes so ubiquitous that we mostly stop noticing it, as it has in other mediums. Complaining about the share button seems a bit pointless to me when we have entire games that consist of nothing more than being rewarded for recognising brands. It's consumerism gamified.

The share button is the future. Not one we may like, but not one we can really do anything about either. The marketers have woken up and seen video gaming as a legitimate way to sell products, and you can bet your bollocks they're going to try everything they can think of to do so.
 

Grach

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In soviet russia, games play you!

THERE, I SAID IT ALRIGHT
YOU ARE ALL FREE NOW

OT: I didn't know the PS4 allowed you to take control away from a player. I suppose that this is if the player and the spectator agree on doing it, otherwise it's trollin' gold and a lulz river waiting to happen.

Also, I really don't get the appeal of having a dedicated "Share" button. After all, it's only a glorified pause button, since you could just do this: Pause-> Menu-> Sharing options. There. Having that option saves you the small feat of selecting an option and pressing a button.
 

Kargathia

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erttheking said:
Also Colonial Marines and the PS4...don't really see the connection there. Probably should've saved the PS4 for a different article Yahtzee.
That would be operating on the assumption he doesn't deal in non-sequieturs. A notion both misguided, and rather funny.

Anyhow, share button. This is one of these things that certainly caters to an existing demand, but is still going to be annoying - just because people are idiots.
The breed of people posting pictures about their wholly unremarkable lunches, napping cats, and pooping sessions will make this feature a slam dunk - and I will be out there telling people to start contacting me by snail mail.
If it's not important enough to take the time for that, don't bother.
 

BrotherRool

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Oh but Yahtzee, you might say. You can use the "Share" button to post videos of your gameplay. That's pretty much the same as those Let's Play videos you love so much, and indeed occasionally create for your Youtube channel. Perhaps, but the vital aspect of an LP is that the creator has no vested interest in making the game look good. LPs are, at heart, a point-by-point criticism, ideally, and all Sony want this feature to be is free marketing.
You know thats not a valid criticism right? If someone introduces something useful by mistake when they really wanted something else, that doesn't actually effect the person using that feature.

Also I've had friends help me out with parts of a game and I've gone round friends houses to help them with parts of a game. But it's only fun if you're talking and hanging out at the same time, so they better push mike support better this time

Grach said:
Also, I really don't get the appeal of having a dedicated "Share" button. After all, it's only a glorified pause button, since you could just do this: Pause-> Menu-> Sharing options. There. Having that option saves you the small feat of selecting an option and pressing a button.
^This. I think the share functionality and features are probably neat and will be cool for some people (especially if it lets you record mike audio) and having a processor so it can do stuff like that and background download games without using up hardware power for games isn't bad. But what was wrong with menus? It's not like it's going to be so popular and used so often people will feel pained by having to press the start button
 

Deacon Cole

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There isn't a single company in the history of the world that has made any money off of assigning blame.
 

themilo504

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I wished that games stopped demonizing communism just once I would like a game to say that even if it didn?t work communism had some good ideas and that capitalism isn?t perfect either.

I find the idea that a game can?t be art if it isn?t made with a single artistic vision very stupid so I don?t really care if they pass around blame like it?s a ball made of lava.
 

Canadamus Prime

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You know what these companies need to do? The need to publicly own up to a games failure and then behind closed doors they can pass out blame if they so desire, but if they do that they need to ensure all that behind closed door stuff stays off people's twitters and facebooks and whatever else; you know in the interest of maintaining the illusion of professionalism.
 

Ford-Prefect

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DVS BSTrD said:
Yahtzee Croshaw said:
It doesn't help the industry improve when its developers start blaming each other when a game crashes and burns.
In your day people stood by their games because these were actually their games, not a Licence that publishers passed between developers for the sake of convenience.
Spot on, is all this blame game for the consumer or potential future clients?
 

FFP2

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DVS BSTrD said:
Honestly the share button doesn't even bother me unless they removed something else to make room for it. And I'm pretty sure they didn't.
Didn't they take away the dedicated Start & Select buttons?

OT: I really don't get the whole "share" button thing. Hands up, how many people on consoles upload LPs to YouTube? How many of us post on FB/Twitter about what we're currently playing?

Compare that to the install base of consoles. A majority of the people buying a PS4 will be using it to play games, not make videos.
 

Eternal_Lament

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Some features I like, some I don't. I won't have a problem with the share button if it doesn't obstruct gameplay in any real fashion, and I could actually see a use in it if it allowed me to take screenshots or videos as they happened, and not fiddle around with a menu. However, I would also like the option to disable the feature if I find it being used to much by accident. I wouldn't really be using it for social media though, only really for times when I think something awesome happened in game or if I were to document an odd glitch.

As for the possible LP's sort of being an accident...I don't really see what the problem is. Okay, it could be obtrusive and annoying if there's some big Sony watermark in the middle of the screen when not playing through a specific service, but assuming that there isn't something like that then the inclusion is at worst a feature you'll never use. Now, if Sony starts cracking down on people using the record options with legal threats or something like that then we have a problem, but I assume that they included the feature knowing full well it could be used for novice LP's, regardless if that was it's "original" use.

The spectating/helping aspect though is kind of stupid. Neat from a tech perspective if they pull it off, but I really don't see the point. If I'm on my console, I'm not lurking to see if my friends need help; I'm going to be playing the games I want to play. If my friend needed help or I did, I'd rather we do the thing in person, that way we can actually enjoy the fact that we're helping someone else rather than feeling like we're doing someone else's work.

Captcha: lollerskates

Clearly the console that'll win in the next generation is that which comes with a free pair of these.
 

Falseprophet

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the antithesis said:
There isn't a single company in the history of the world that has made any money off of assigning blame.
Untrue. Here in Canada, Maple Leaf Foods was involved in a listeria outbreak a few years ago. They instituted a voluntary (i.e., not government-mandated) recall of products from the suspected plants, and then their CEO personally apologized to customers, taking responsibility [http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/small-business/sb-growth/day-to-day/the-best-legal-advice-is-often-an-apology/article626797/], and said he was ignoring the advice of his lawyers and accountants and would be paying out fair and just settlements to the victims and their families.
While sales initially plummeted in the wake of the outbreak, within a few months they were almost back to normal.

Video games are a different matter, of course. If they're actually art, then Yahtzee's right: someone should have a unified vision for the thing, and that person (or persons) should stand by their art at least until they start their next project.
 

geizr

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Social features aren't bad, per se, in my opinion. What's bad is haphazardly slapping social features (and multi-player) onto every shit-gargling (to use a Yahtzee-ism) game, regardless whether the feature makes sense for the game design and concept. It's like there's no sense of design or craftsmanship in the game industry anymore. Just slap some shit together and hope, by some arbitrary miracle, it sells.

ADDENDUM: I should better constrain my above criticism to be directed at the Triple-A game industry, rather than the game industry as a whole, because once you go outside the Triple-A regime, things really do seem much better, in almost every regard. It's just the Triple-A segment that's become broken and dysfunctional, in my opinion, and I think that's an inherit consequence of the non-sustainability of the Triple-A business-model as the primary model for a game developer. Triple-A games are too expensive (in terms of total resources, including time) and too risky to sustain in a rapid-cycle, continuous fashion. Seems like there needs to be a good mix of smaller releases to give everyone time to recover from the release of such a game (the developers need time to rest and get some sleep, and gamers need time to find more money).
 

Mahoshonen

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Falseprophet said:
the antithesis said:
There isn't a single company in the history of the world that has made any money off of assigning blame.
Untrue. Here in Canada, Maple Leaf Foods was involved in a listeria outbreak a few years ago. They instituted a voluntary (i.e., not government-mandated) recall of products from the suspected plants, and then their CEO personally apologized to customers, taking responsibility [http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/small-business/sb-growth/day-to-day/the-best-legal-advice-is-often-an-apology/article626797/], and said he was ignoring the advice of his lawyers and accountants and would be paying out fair and just settlements to the victims and their families.
While sales initially plummeted in the wake of the outbreak, within a few months they were almost back to normal.
That's different from what the antithesis is talking about. Your example is when a company does the responsible thing and owns up to its goof. Their customers respect their honesty and contrition and are much more likely to return once things have settled down.

the antithesis is talking about quite the opposite - trying to blame another entity for a goof you were involved in. It sounds the same as someone grabbing for excuses when they get caught doing something wrong - it sounds desperate, and that they have learned nothing from the incident. In the case of Gearbox and all the other related companies, the complete lack of self-criticism does not provide confidence that the same thing isn't going to happen again.
 

Therumancer

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Well, that's the corperate mentality in action. A system by which things are done collectively by a self-perpetuating bureaucracy so that no one person or group of people can be singled out as being responsible. Passing the buck happens until people get tired of paying attention to the game, and then things fade away. In the best cases you might get some sacrificial lamb staked out by the big wigs, someone who usually didn't have much of anything to do with anything other than to be around as a potential scapegoat.

The problem here of course is that everyone involved in the system probably believes they are genuinely blameless. The guys technically at the top of the food chain probably having no direct control or interaction with the project itself. In many cases the problem is probably some guy early on in the process getting lazy and dialing it in, leading to people working off of that work having their own stuff compromised by default, but by the time it gets so bad that it's destroying the project it's hard to find who the initial culprit was, and by that point it probably doesn't matter anymore anyway since there is no way to fix it without starting over again.

That said, it's also just as likely that the Devs did exactly jack until the last minute and then rushed. Going back years I read a number of rather damning exposes on the entire process, and how it works, which continue to piss people off today when I relay them. One big point of this being that it's wrong to always demonize the publishers for not having a "hands off" approach because left to their own devices Devs are as likely as not to spend all the money,
living off of it, and produce very little. The money going to development going towards human resources and paychecks without much guarantee of what the people are doing with it or even working. A couple of situations where you might notice this trend are with Duke Nukem Forever, where like 30 million dollars was paid to the developers over a period of years with nothing but demos and concept art being produced, and nothing left of the money being used to pay the developers that "worked" on it to be recouped. EA Louse had similar accusations about "The Old Republic Online" (the accuracy of which was a mixed bag) where despite millions upon millions of dollars being sent to the project Bioware actually did very little, being most proud of their "sound design" and needing to have other people rushed in at the 11th hour to try and build an actual game, where ToR-tanic went after that is a matter of record at this point and the list of problems could fill numerous threads with fights and arguements.

The point of course being one where pointing fingers at any paticular person or recouping losses from a bureaucracy is nearly impossible.

To also throw in a Yahtzee-type analogy, let's say your a disgruntled employee who has been fired without cause from a large company. Try and find the person who is responsible for firing you... it might not be as easy as you might think (though sometimes it can be). Your supervisor or manager might have gotten it passed down from upper management, who got it on human resources letterhead, going back to another whole department with it's own network of pencil pushers, and it might very well come down to something being rubber stamped based on a computer algorithim based on wanting to fire everyone with X amount of time and benefits withotu a perfect record so they can bring in shared labour from foreign work exchange programs in shifts to fill your job. It might not, but it could be. So let's say your unpacking your guns to go and avenge the end of your life (losing your house, not having had enough to eat for two weeks, etc...) and take out the person who ruined your life. Who do you shoot? Your supervisor? He just got a memo and was following orders. His boss (management) he just passed the memo, Human resources? The secretaries got their orders up above. The President or Vice President of HR? You might be shocked to learn he doesn't even has any idea who the hell you are since he hangs out playing golf all day with the other prsidents and VPs. Viewed that way you can sort of see why your typical disgruntled employee at a big company decides to hold everyone equally responsible and ops for bombs, or to take out anyone with the most general involvement from executives, to ratty former-co workers, to secretaries who might have pushed the paperwork.

Okay, well that's kind of disturbing to even spell out (and goes beyond Yahtzee in most cases) but the point here is that yeah... I can kind of see how it might be true that Gearbox and company might not have any idea WHO is responsible for a lot of differant reasons. Welcome to corperate America.

Saying that there should be a clear guy in charge who is responsible sounds good, but understand that if your going to work for a job like this with a ton of variables, the first thing your going to want is job security and protection from things like this (honestly, you would, no matter what you say right now) and a big part of this is that protection and a degree of autonomy goes with any kind of desician making position right now. Also on the "darker" bit I mentioned that kind of scenario is also why those who are upper management and wind up making a lot of desicians about employees try and make sure they are as far away and as detached as possible from those employees as possible, perhaps even operating from offices intentionally kept well away from the site of their business.