You've got to be kidding me...

[Monty Burns]

what company are you with?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

I work for www.ni.com. Our code is expected to run for months without a single crash.

[irate_customer]

This is what the readme on MY game said:

 

------------

Known Issues

------------

 

--------------------

Intermittent Crashes

--------------------

The game may freeze or crash to a blank screen if you play

in one level for extended periods of time. This was typically

seen when playing the game between thirty and forty minutes

without transitioning to a new level or movie.

 

We chose to cash-in on the popularity of KOTOR by rushing

a half-done product to market rather than address the many

tech issues we found during beta testing. Hope you don't mind...

 

We might get  'round to a patch in a few months, you see, our

head programmer is out sick right now. He tripped over a HUGE

pile of loose cash we made from the sale of this defective game

and broke his arm. You know how it is...

 

Anyways, I have to catch a flight to Hawaii...

 

YOINK!

 

[Master Dahvernas]

Just get used to it.

 

Meaning, as someone already said, this IS the state of the PC games industry and it is only going to get worse with the huge monopolies going on right now with EA and UBISoft gobbling up every title, franchise and genre in sight.

 

This is the only industry (that I am aware of) where you CAN release a faulty, buggy, unfinished product without any (legal or financial) consequences to your company other than bad word-of-mouth from players and reviewers and reduced sales because of that bad press... But even that isn't enough. Especially, if you are someone like EA and even LA.

 

I don't want to get into a whole side debate about other issues pertaining to this... But this industry, from my humble outsider (gamer; no programmer) opinion, needs more strict guidelines in order to release a product. The "let the devs/publishers police themselves" isn't working. Period.

 

Also, I mentioned this on another thread, the reason games are allowed to be released this way is not just because of the "excuse" that there are infinite number of system configs and they can't test every one for incompatibilities... But also because if something like 70% of the time the game runs on test hardware... That is a legal standard to which a consumer cannot sue them because the it will be on the consumer to prove that it does not run on either 70% of the hardware (in the market) or 70% of the time. The loop hole is that a company can have just five computers and if it runs on say four of them... Then it legally fits this standard.

 

Don't quote me on this, but I learned the "70% rule" from reading various other complaints with regards to non-functioning PC games and the like. I am not a laywer or programmer so just take what I said with a grain of salt and like general knowledge.

[justabloke]

I can't help but wonder if someone has done a cost/benefit analysis:

 

Release game with bugs vs fully beta test.

 

If you release the game with bugs or you release it knowing that you haven

[Master Dahvernas]

I can

[Darth Ni]

well at least u guys can patch it, xboxers are stuck with the same old game.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

Yes... patch... lets hope it fixes something other than the manual next time. That would definetly be a step in the right direction .

 

In LucasArts' marketing room :

 

Umm... This game supports ATi cards... It doesn't cause the system to reboot or anything after installing the game... Therefore, I conclude that we should release this game. It supports ATi cards... I take it everyone is in agreeance...

 

Yep... right ok, end of session.