Reason for console version appearing before PC

[Grandpa]

Since they've been running around firing all of the apparent gamers at their company, the only people left to do QA are the suits. They see a pretty spalsh screen (ok, some of you Xboxers had trouble getting THAT far) and declare it "working".

 

LA kind of reminds me of General Motors, cir. 1986 - 1998. They put out a bunch of mediocre crap, and every once in a while they have a hit, but that too is eventually marred by too many know-nothing-no-it-alls getting into the mix. Like the guy who headed the most expesive BF 1942 mod in history ~ err, I mean Star Wars: Battlefront game, axing all of their successful lines in favor of his and his buddies stuff.

[EnderAndrew]

Publishers decide on the budget and ammount of time spent on beta-testing and bug squashing.

 

On these forums people were foaming at the mouth wanting the game released sooner.

 

Be careful what you ask for.

 

They wanted the world, and they wanted it yesterday. People, stop bitching. We got a game 3 months before the initial release date. In this industry, that's pretty impressive unless you forget how many games ship WAY late.

 

An XBox games needs to be beta-tested for one set of hardware.

 

A PC title sells fewer copies, and needs to be beta-tested with all kinds of drivers, hardware and software conflicts.

[iamthelorax]

Having read the forums for hours, I discovered that Obsidian's deadline for sending the game to LA stayed the same even as LA moved up the XBox release date by at least 2 months. This implies to me that LA decided to rush the game out for Christmas (whats wrong with Mid-December though?). But hopefully the PC release date is based off the same QA commitment as the original XBox date, not the actual one. And hopefully LA rushed it because they decided the XBox community was too stupid to care that reviews said the game is buggy, but that they won't misunderestimate PC'ers as well (though reviewers' experience with K2 bugs seems to pale in comparison to that of peeps on the XBox forums, and I don't necessarily agree that the XBox community is stupid or more X-Mas materialistic than PC'ers). I would prefer that to the PC version really needing 2 months of work just on compatibility issues in addition to finding and fixing the quest and engine bugs from the XBox, compressed into 2 months total. Or perhaps the XBoxers' problems are mostly not software problems. That would also be nice.