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Gabe Newell on why game delays are okay: 'Late is just for a little while. Suck is forever.'
(www.pcgamer.com)
this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2023
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But he said that in the context of releasing Half Life 1, back when there was no way to patch a game after release. This isn't the case anymore and it's been proven many times that games can come back from sucking.
Very few games actually come back from that though.
And patches even existed before the advent of internet, they just were also rare.
A game can, but the reputation of it can't. The reality of it is - it's unacceptable and always have been. Producers have just pushed for releasing buggy crap and the "fix it later" mentality.
I'd generally agree, but one huge exception that comes to mind is No Man's Sky. It feels like its updates get far more attention than most games' just because they did manage to turn it around. Even though it was generally considered "redeemed" years ago, it still gets credit and publicity for its redemption every time there's an update, to the point where I think it does far better today than it would be doing if it had released in the state it was supposed to.
It's not a strategy I'd recommend other companies try to emulate, though. I think Hello Games got very lucky with people letting them redeem No Man's Sky, along with it taking them a lot of extra time and work. It was a phenomenon, not something that can be worked into a strategy.
You only get to make a first impression once, after all.
But that's the thing though right? No man's sky will always be known for sucking at first. Sure it got better, but it did suck. It will forever have that taint of sucking attached to it.
It's better to be remembered as being good from the start.
I think NMS is an exception. If it released today, I think most people would end up feeling that it's just kind of "fine" and it'd die down somewhat quickly. It's managed to get a lot of goodwill because of how they turned it around and I think it gets a lot more publicity and positive attention because of that.
Can't it? Cyberpunk's DLC came out not long ago and it was consistently in the top sellers and praised by everyone. Maybe people on Reddit will still hold a grudge but the vast majority of people don't care; If it's good then it's good.
The spirit of your point is right, but: game patches existed back then. The first patch for Half Life was 1.0.0.8 released in 1999 (release version was 1.0.0.5). I cannot find the patch notes or exact release date as my search results are flooded with "25th anniversary patch" results.
What was true is that players patching their games was not a matter of course for many years. It was a pain in the ass. The game didn't update itself. You didn't have a launcher to update your game for you. No. Instead, you had to go to the game's website and download the patch executable yourself. But it wasn't just a simple "Game 1.1 update.exe" patch. That'd be too easy. It was a patch from 1.0.9 to 1.1, and if you were on 1.0.5.3 you had to get the patch for 1.0.5.3 to 1.0.6.2, then a patch from that to 1.0.8 then a patch from that to 1.0.9. Then you had to run all of those in sequence. This is a huge, huge part of why people eventually started to fall in love with Steam back in the day. Patches were easy and "just worked" — it was amazing compared to what came before.
The end result being that patches existed but the game that people remember (and played) was by and large defined by what it was on release. Also console games weren't patched, although newer printings of a game would see updates. Ocarina of Time's 1.0 release was exclusive to Japan; the North American release was 1.1 for the first batch of sales. After the initial batch was sold out the release was replaced by 1.2. That was common back then. As far as I know there was no way for consumers to get theirs updated, or to even find out about the updates. But they did exist.
Steam literally started as a way to easily patch and find servers for your valve games. They didn't start selling other games on there until a few years later.
There were also revisions of even game cartridges for consoles.
I remember having a first revision of the first Legend of Zelda for the Game Boy. A bug meant that hitting a particular button combination (Select or Start+Select, can't recall) precisely when crossing a screen boundry would let you cross two screens rather than one.
That was patched in a later revision of the cartridge.