There's a strong argument that the server architecture needed to be better at launch, but then the game sold more than an order of magnitude better than it was expected to, so no one would have noticed that it scaled badly had the player count been in line with their design and testing.

Well, the fact is that there are also a LOT of dumb customers willing to buy crap. God knows why.

Just look at the trending / best selling lists on Steam. There’s shit on there that I wouldn’t play if you paid me. Yet somehow there’s enough of a customer base for that that they sell it.

Honestly, Steam should look into setting a minimum quality level for things sold on the platform.

And even then it’s sometimes impossible because how much can you keep in your head at once. Everybody specializes on these large projects. I may have 30000 ft view of how things operate but getting down into specifics can be hard. I have some intimate knowledge of the learning management system we develop for, which is way less complex than most games, and there are always little gotchas when you make code or architecture changes.

The developers aren't in charge of what's in the game, the PMs and accountants are

Well, the fact is that there are also a LOT of dumb customers willing to buy crap.

As much as everyone love Oblivion...it all started from there with the $9 horse armour DLC.

God knows why.

Yet somehow there’s enough of a customer base for that that they sell it.

Kids. Fucking kids. Thankfully I am never that stupid to buy individual DLCs even when I was a child, which is compounded by familial circumstances and education, but kids will be kids. Either they stole their parent's credit card to pay for useless virtual items, or they were spoiled and never taught with financial literacy.

So then why don't they have regular bulletins in their games showing 'Look, look! These features will be coming by xx/xx/xxxx!' ?

Things set the timeline back? 'Oh no! Looks like we won't be releasing this on that date, it will actually be this date!'

Seems like a non issue for anyone with a 6th graders capacity for interacting with other humans. These are IT folks, with the added layer of gamers to boot — though. Anticipating motivations and responding to others input isn't exactly a strong suit.

Edit: oh, beyond that — I have very little sympathy for a developer of a content drip. You're out for the money, don't whine when people inevitably get sick of waiting for a little more of something they've already gotten maximum enjoyment out of.

supposed to be basic launch features

isn't this very subjective and dependent on the game and scale of success?

Ah yeah that's a tricky one. I guess as developers we'd all like to be ambitious and plan for millions of users but that sort of hardware and architecture takes time and money that might not be realistically in the budget/scope.

I've also not really got insight as to who would have a say on that kind of hardware, whether that's PMs or devs. Probably higher-ups, right?

Well for one they're a consumer who paid for a functional game. Nobody expects drivers to break out power tools and mod their car right off the lot.

It's even more embarrassing when modders do fix it. Some random guy with no source code access manages to fix an issue in 3 weeks that a whole team couldn't fix in 3 years.

When a dev with game dev experience says something should be easy to fix, it's under the assumption of a reasonable code base. Most games are built off of common engines and you can sometimes infer how things are likely organized if you track how bugs are introduced, how objects interact, how things are loaded, etc...

When something is a 1 day bugfix under ideal conditions, saying it will take 6+ months is admitting one of:

• The codebase is fucked
• All resources are going to new features
• Something external is slowing it down (palworld lawsuit, company sale, C-suite politics, etc...)
• Your current dev team is sub par

Not that any of those is completely undefendable or pure malpractice, but saying it "can't" be done or blaming complexity is often a cop out.

Yea, in things like MOBA games you have to compensate for so many edge cases that the amount of interactions between abilities is as you say, scary.

Every 60 seconds in Africa, a minute passes.

Try telling your users (who are gamers) that the feature they want is being pushed back. See how well they'll react.

For Palworld, a new island takes 6 months, per the article. Probably talking about Sakurajima and the big southern one. That makes sense, since it's not just putting stuff there and calling it a day on the first finished thing, some level design has to happen so the place makes sense and doesn't feel super boring to explore.

Ignoring the part about the super credits and fomo stuff, the money confuses me. Is regional pricing so different that you're paying an additional $10 AUD compared to US and EU pricing? Additionally, $25 AUD as a full day's income? Even a low hour, part time job earns way more than that. I feel like your situation might not be financially compatible with buying things like that, I'd cheat or pirate if it's that important to you. $10 USD is not much for DLC, and while I strongly dislike purchasable gameplay mechanics in games, it's supporting the continued development and it isn't egregious. $10 is a burger, or a coffee, and I'm saying this as someone well below the poverty line.

if it takes you 6 months to add a new fundamental game mechanic then thats understandable

if it takes you 6 months to remove an unnecessary popup then youre incompetent.
(looking at you, Hunt Showdown)

6 months doesn't sound unrealistic for re-doing a menu system. Designing, reworking art, re-programming workflows and then testing everything can take several months. Even just the logistics of releasing it after it's done, that alone can take a month.

Yes, it is possible to setup everything in a very generic way that is data-driven, but that also is a lot of work that has to be prioritized with the scope of the project and the team members available.

I think for something like this, you'd rent cloud servers as you'd expect the number of concurrent users to change over time and ideally would be able to spin up more capacity when you need it without having to have those machines available all the time. You still need some kind of system that decides when to order more capacity with enough warning that it's actually available (you can tell AWS you want a VM immediately, but it still takes a couple of minutes to transfer your data onto it and boot it up, which is longer than people want to sit in a loading screen) and decides which servers to assign to which users.

You did it twice, so I'll be the grammar police:

Especially = particularly

Specially = for a specific purpose

a big part of the complexity in programming (especially game programming) comes from balancing flexibility with speed (both implementation and performance). At some point, decisions are made weighing out risks, priorities and plans that will solidify a part of the code base in favor of speed (or some other factor) at the cost of flexibility.

this happens all the time

A lot of the reasons a solo dev or modder seems like they can progress so fast changing things is they aren't facing a lot of the same factors and they aren't needing to go through any rigorous testing.

At some point in the process, there's too much risk and and overhead involved to make any change. This is totally normal from triple A down to game jams.

And, you can't ignore that some of these things come down to game design. A change like you're suggesting, just adding a light, can negatively affect the balance of things even if it seems like it wouldn't.