Rotten Tomatoes tends to be wonky, primarily because it’s really a judgment call on many reviews whether it’s actually in the fresh or rotten side of the scale, due to the fact of most game reviews being rather rambling, fan-written (and sometimes anti-fan written) affairs.
Consoles are easier (usually) because there’s only one kind of hardware, one operating system, and only one program running at once. On PCs, you have a million different combinations of video cards, motherboards, drivers, other programs people have loaded, etc. Makes one wonder how and why developers even stomach writing for the PC anymore.
Having been a beta tester, I have to agree with Cerri. There’s so much pressure on the development team from the publisher and producer to get stuff out the door that many bugs slip through knowingly. The game I tested was a flight simulator that was essentially a half-finished product when it went gold. And since it wasn’t Microsoft’s, they didn’t have a limitless budget to include everything they needed to compete. I think the company has since dried up, but I haven’t followed the industry in several years.
Another thing to consider is that for a high profile game slipping your ship date can mean hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses. Stores have to print their ads in advance. If a store prints that they will have Xtreme Paintbrawl IV for $19.99 on September 31st, and you can’t deliver it, the publisher has to reimburse the store for its loss. Yes, even if you are Microsoft. So there’s no such thing as slipping a date by a week or two. If it’s that close, it goes out the door. Only if a product is completely unacceptable does it get held back.
It is a no win situation for the software companies. It seems like the only two options that they have are to release the game on time with bugs, and have people bitch, or try to fix the bugs and push back the release date, at which point people will bitch.
Or POSSIBLY not publish unrealistic release dates. Most of the companies have been in the business long enough to KNOW that Murphy’s Law always takes effect, and that planning on EVERYTHING going right the first time is a guaranteed recipe for disaster. I’d rather wait longer for a game that I don’t have to patch, and patch, and patch, and which STILL has broken quests and unbalanced play.
If the game is a beta version, fine, RELEASE it as beta, and price it accordingly. I would like FINISHED versions of my games.
This is why I’m primarily a console gamer, and why I shudder when I read that more consoles are getting internet capability. I predict that console games are more likely to be released when they’re not quite finished, and the companies plan to release patches afterwards.
This apparantly happened with “Indiana Jones and the Emperor’s Tomb.” It was rushed for Xbox and really buggy, the PC version got more developement time and a patch and wound up being the better game.
Put me in for not publishing ludicrous dates too. What killed Star Wars Galaxies was that they originally published the launch date as within six months of the announce date, when they hadn’t even begun beta. Then they caught all kinds of flack from investors and gamers for just pushing it back to a very rushed date. If they’d said it was going to take another two years, and it came out in a year and a half, they would have looked like geniuses. Overpromise and underdeliver seems to be the motto of the industry.
