Why Do People Buy Broken, Buggy Games?

[Marshall Honorof]

Gamers who get up in arms about buggy launches are not representative of the overall market, and publishers know it.

Why Do People Buy Broken, Buggy Games? : Read more

 

[junkeymonkey]

and not only that they got to rely fully on a 3ed party like steam for anything plusss there content and malwre [that I bet works just fine] never catch me paying for a game that a 3ed party has more control over my computer/game than I do [suckers]

maybe if you send them more money they may try to give you a patch or better support ?? cause in the end with out them you got nothing but there client on your drive

 

[Xivilain]

Compare the game industry with the movie or music industry. Imagine if your favorite artist released an incomplete album, with half-baked ideas. Or tried watching the third Hobbit film by Peter Jackson, only to see glitches like Bilbo falling through the [middle]earth to his death 15 minutes in the movie, rendering the rest of the film, UNWATCHABLE. - - - This is the kind of shit video game players are dealing with. - - - We voted with our wallets, because there was an EMBARGO on public REVIEWS of the game [up to 12hrs after launch], and we had no other way of finding out if it was GOOD OR NOT. - - - No other industry can get away with the same B.S. as the gaming industry. No one.

 

[neiroatopelcc]

I've worked around the problem by simply stopping to preorder games. I burnt my fingers with Thief, Elder Scrolls Online and Sims 4 this year. And only ESO tried to mend the problems. For Thief it took me 4 months to find a solution that enabled me to complete a mission without the game crashing (tech support was of no use).
So I've simply decided to get alternative versions of a game and then decide to pay for it or not at a later time. For that reason - if farcry is on discount on steam tomorrow when the sale starts, I'll pick it up, because I know it's a good game.
And in about a week I'll know if preordering the crew was another mistake to pile on top of the first three mentioned. Won't happen next year.

 

[red77star]

Here is a rule I go buy. I never pay for a game more than $9.99 because it is not worth it. I get all my PC games via Steam when price drops below $10 or they have it for <$10 on some sale otherwise thanks no. I just got Far Cry 3 which runs great and I figured don't want to pay $60 to be a beta tester for Ubisoft or some other company along with AMD and Nvidia until they patch game and release decent drivers for it. There are so many awesome games out there you can pick for <$10 like Far Cry 3 I recently got. I will buy Far Cry 4 when price drops < $10

 

[Lmah]

I learned my lesson after Watch_Dogs and Thief, will never pre-order again under any circumstances. Sometimes games are never fixed, look at Metro Redux releases people still can't even play the games. Wasteland 2 still has no exclusive fullscreen support.

Game developers need to shape up, in the 90's developers had to release a good product from the start, seems like they have been getting really lazy since the internet is more widely used now, so they can promise to fix games with patches and never come around to it. Just like these Early Access games, they get people to pay for it and have no obligation to ever completely finish making the game since they can sit in Early Access forever and still collect money.

 

[soccerplayer88]

Unfortunately I think games are becoming viewed more as investments instead of actual games. I have 5 early access/alpha games at the moment over half of which have been released over a year ago and still not complete.

I have personally changed my policy to not buy those types of games anymore as well as avoiding preorders. As most people already know, speak with your wallets. Developers only listen when money is involved.

 

[Merry_Blind]

All this crap is one of the reasons why I came back to Nintendo after all these years of gaming on other platforms. These days, all I see on video game news is disappointement and people mad about buggy or underwhelming games. Meanwhile, I'm just here, happy with my Wii U, buying flawless exclusives day 1 all year through.

I hope people are already tired of all this and will get Wii Us this holiday season to rince the bitter taste they have with some sweet, sweet Nintendo magic.

 

[tobalaz]

Why do people pay so much to be "Beta testers" at retail launch?
Content.
If you don't preorder, you miss out on content that is sold as a preorder bonus.
Yup, that's right, if you don't volunteer to be a full priced beta tester you LOSE part of the game.
Total BS

I think most of us adults are to the point we can wait for a game to run correctly before we buy it anymore, but kids have to have the latest and greatest NOW, and mommy and daddy are always going to run out and buy buy buy for Jr.

 

[Merry_Blind]

@Marshall Honorof

Speaking of which, I think it would have been more than appropriate to mention Nintendo in this article, as they are one of the few examples of developers that constantly release technically flawless games on Day 1.

 

[majorlag]

I learned a long time ago, to never buy games at release.

Last time I did that was a week long gaming session playing multiplayer Heroes of Might and Magic III. IV came out, took the day off, ran to Best Buy, Friend and I bought a copy and went over to my friends LAN party, both installed the game, launched, and was like, ummm, where is multiplayer!!??? HOMM 2 and 3 both had this feature at release, don't recall if 1 did. It took them 6 months! to get the patch out to do multiplayer.

I will never buy a game on day one again. I find a permanent evaluation copy and try it, if I like it I buy it. I did end up buying HOMM V complete that came with IV and its expansions.

~Majorlag

 

[techguy911]

Just about every new game released is buggy and half finished why they need money and don't care about customers look at sims 4 it was half a game and very buggy, its pretty sad when there are multiple addons need to get the game working as advertised.
I have bought games for PS3 that kept crashing and need multiple patches just to be able to play the game that should never happen on console games.

 

[junkeymonkey]

this is where you got the shaft see they ''rent'' you a game that mandatory you will install there content as well you pay for it and well it don't work out to well . knowing you desperate and will agree to anything and pay them to do so they dangle another game at you with all the good hype suerly this one is better so you pay them for there content and find it the same old thing and you keep doing ths over and over .. they got your money and you got nothing like this guy

Andrew Sawyer - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare - PC (Video Game)

Forces me to install Steam despite being packaged with 6 discs. Nowhere when I purchased it does it indicate I would have to install Steam. Why would I buy a hard copy when I could just download steam and buy it there?

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so as I said you pay for a game that unless you kiss that 3ed party a$$ you may not get to load or play it ?????

so what does he got for his money with out the 3ed party?? looks like 6 may as well be blank dvd's for 60 bucks

I guess its true '' a fool and his money are parted '' and they got your cash and you got nothing with out them ... and don't forget like in steams eula to make changes or add and remove content security settings ''with out limitations'' --WOW

 

[AnUnusedUsername]

I don't understand why bugs bother people so much. Every type of software has bugs, you just deal with them and move on. It's extraordinarily rare for a game to ship with a bug that actually prevents you from completing it, the only one I know of that did that was for the sega saturn, more than ten years ago.

Sure, games like fallout 3 crashed a lot, but so what, it happens. A game being stable or not has absolutely no impact on whether the game itself is good or not. A classic example would be Morrowind, almost universally regarded as the best in the series, but it was terribly buggy and many of those bugs were never fixed (except by modders).

I wonder if the people upset about bugs grew up with console games, which have always been more stable since they only run on one platform. Bugs and crashes have been commonplace for PC since their inception, it just comes with the territory. Now that the consoles are little different than PCs and games are even more complicated, of course things will be buggy.

You can get upset at a company for releasing a game early I guess, but I don't see why. You can buy on day one and still enjoy a great game (assuming it's good of course), and deal with the occasional flaw, or buy a few months later at a discount with no flaws. The alternative is buying it a few months later without the discount and still with some flaws (since release will naturally find way more bugs than QA possibly could). Seems to me releasing early is a win/win.

 

[panzerknacker]

Common people, just don't buy that shit, what's the problem. I don't get why all these people are so thrilled about games like Far Cry 4 or Assassins's Creed Unity. To me they are just the same old games with better graphics, gameplay arguably got worse. To me there is nothing 'next-gen' about these games at all.

Stop fooling yourself and play Crysis 1 again or something. That game is even today more next-gen than Far Cry 4 in almost every aspect. If you want next-gen gaming get a Nintendo Wii U, Smash Bross for example introduced some cool stuff that I can't help giving a more modern feel than any game on the PS4 or X1. And it's pretty bug-free.

I am a gamer that does not accept any of the stuff mentioned in the article, that's probably why I have not purchased a single game in the last 4 years. If I am going to pay for something I expect something from it and I know that I will be disappointed. It's the only thing we can do guys, vote with our wallet. If we keep throwing money at companies like Ubisoft, EA and Microsoft, stuff will only get worse. They just need to learn the hard way that they need to come up with quality products.

Keep yourself under control, resist the hype. You can laugh at the others instead of needing to get angry on forums and stuff like that, waste of your time.

 

[junkeymonkey]

what has steam -uplay- origin done for pc games ?? nothing all you get with them is there access to your hard drive thats it .. did pc games need them before ?? no.. was there a issue with that ?? no .. did it stop cheats?? no .. did it stop Pirates ? no.. was I able to get updates and patches before ?? yes ,, did I get to play on servers or run my own server?? yes .. did I have the full ready to load and play game fully on the disk with out the need of them 3ed party's or internet ?? yes ..so where is any benefit from having them installed just to load or play a bug ridden crap game ???

all I see from these mandatory steam type clients is that get access to your hard drive

 

[chenw]

Steam etc allowed me to buy games I otherwise would not have access to without (being based in a non-English Speaking Asia country, getting English games is nigh on impossible). I also hated CD/DVD formats before because you can never make perfect backups of your discs (Copy protection), so if your Disc dies, you are SoL. Steam lets me buy and download the games anytime, anywhere, which is a big plus.

I don't think that even if steam didn't exist, this whole industry's attitude of "we will patch it later" will go away because Xbox live and PSN are all using the same kind of distribution system, so this problem with always exist unless Steam, Origin, XBox Live and PSN simultaneously die and the game industry completely revert to the old discs format.

IF that happens though, I suggest getting your BD's ready...

Jokes aside, this is kind of the reason nowadays I don't really buy titles before launch anymore, I'd rather see where the game is going before buying the game.

 

[lordjakian]

"It's extraordinarily rare for a game to ship with a bug that actually prevents you from completing it."

The article starts off with "...when they first released, there's a good chance that you were sitting on a $60 paperweight until the first patch hit." You can look at something and say it is Extraordinarily Rare, but then you see another one go by. At this time, AnUnusedUsername, you might get away with saying it's Extraordinarily Rare to see two of them. When a third one goes by, even naive people may begin to press their eyebrows together as you keep calling it Extraordinarily Rare.

AnUnusedUsername, ever hear of SimCity? Skyrim got me on my Playstation Save file. There are more modern games out there like this. It isn't even a matter of games so much as a matter of developers. Find a bad developer and you can easily find the problem games. Look how Sega has treated the Total War Franchise since they bought out Creative Assembly. Rome 2 Total War fits EXTREMELY WELL with what this article says. It was the most hyped and preordered game in the series, sold more than a million copies. A million copies that turned out to be what you call an Extraordinarily Rare thing, released with game breaking bugs.

You are abusing the words Extraordinarily Rare. Let me explain it in this now somewhat universal way. If we were playing an RPGMMO, Extraordinarily Rare, that would be a Purple color item, with Rare being an Orange item, Uncommon being a Blue item, and Common Vendor Trash items being Grey. There is nothing Purple or Orange about games having game breaking bugs after release nowadays. These games with gamebreaking bugs upon release are either Blue or Vendor Trash Grey. Sega and EA developed games are especially Grey upon release.

 

[Sao Paulo BR]

Nice material. But not only such games sucks nowadays.
I had to restore my Win 8.1 Pro x64 machine image to two weeks back in time, just because of Nvidia 344.75 driver update, just released . As soon as I got this quite fresh video driver installed (today), my preferred game stopped working. I lost three hours looking for the issue and nothing showed up.
Per Lord's grace, my image restorer suite works dependably and put all back to place in just five minutes. Keeping old driver now, although working perfectly.

 

[Christopher1]

I've worked around the problem by simply stopping to preorder games. I burnt my fingers with Thief, Elder Scrolls Online and Sims 4 this year. And only ESO tried to mend the problems. For Thief it took me 4 months to find a solution that enabled me to complete a mission without the game crashing (tech support was of no use).
So I've simply decided to get alternative versions of a game and then decide to pay for it or not at a later time. For that reason - if farcry is on discount on steam tomorrow when the sale starts, I'll pick it up, because I know it's a good game.
And in about a week I'll know if preordering the crew was another mistake to pile on top of the first three mentioned. Won't happen next year.

My rule of thumb today is to NEVER buy a PC game in the first month it is out. If you do, you are asking to get hit by day one bugs, which are kinda understandable considering the massive amount of PC hardware out there today.