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[wierd]

as the customer who's time is being wasted, YES, I AM. Regardless of any actual reality, my perception of it is what drives MY behavior, and as a seller, seeking to obtain my tiny slice of time, you need to recognize and appreciate that.

When you fail to, and somebody else does, you lose that small drop of market.  That happens enough times, you go out of business.


But let me spell it out for you simply:

I start out wanting to play X, but when I start it, I am greeted with yet another update.  Due to issues beyond my control (because the US just fucking LOVES local franchise monopolies on ISP in regions, meaning you have MAYBE a single other choice in one, and so cannot vote with your wallet on the matter), you have shit internet, and this will take  FIVE FUCKING HOURS to complete, because instead of using a modular data format, your company decided that a monolithic data blob was the way to go. Bully for fucking you.

Guess what, instead of wating 5 hours to play, out of their limited time they have available before they have to sleep, they are gonna watch a movie instead.

OH-- there went your attention slice. POOF.

[MrWiggles]

The article doesn't support that conclusion. So do you get over burden with having such vast knowledge on how all these games work flow, management and data structure or do can you actively pick and choose which software you are aware of?

[Dorsidwarf]

as the customer who's time is being wasted, YES, I AM. Regardless of any actual reality, my perception of it is what drives MY behavior, and as a seller, seeking to obtain my tiny slice of time, you need to recognize and appreciate that.

When you fail to, and somebody else does, you lose that small drop of market.  That happens enough times, you go out of business.


But let me spell it out for you simply:

I start out wanting to play X, but when I start it, I am greeted with yet another update.  Due to issues beyond my control (because the US just fucking LOVES local franchise monopolies on ISP in regions, meaning you have MAYBE a single other choice in one, and so cannot vote with your wallet on the matter), you have shit internet, and this will take  FIVE FUCKING HOURS to complete, because instead of using a modular data format, your company decided that a monolithic data blob was the way to go. Bully for fucking you.

Guess what, instead of wating 5 hours to play, out of their limited time they have available before they have to sleep, they are gonna watch a movie instead.

OH-- there went your attention slice. POOF.

What are you even talking about? Just use offline mode and you dont get updates or have to deal with any sort of internet-related bullshit. Unless your complaint is that steam is shit because you can't play multiplayer games without those games being updated?

(Also if you dont want to go offline and notice you have a game which frequently has large updates but you dont often play, you can tell that game to only update when you tell it to )

[wierd]

Look,  A monolithic data blob is used for a certain number of reasons:

1) Compression is maximized through max potential consolidation of entropy.  (You have a smaller install footprint)
2) Data is loaded in a consistent order from the blob. (where smaller modules can possibly be loaded out of order if a user renames one, for instance.)
3) It is easier to keep version control over a single file than many small ones.

BUT-

It has a significant problem:

When you update it, you cannot easily "in place" patch it, because it is a compressed archive. Depending on the archival tech used, this could completely hose the archive if you try.  This leads to "whoop! Time to download 4gb of data because we added a single new holiday unit!"  Which is bullshit.

Many developers consider the benefits to vastly outweigh the detraction.  that is, until peak attention starts really roosting.  Suddenly, not having your players wait 5 hours before they can play has significant benefits.


Your counter argument "that article does not support that", is very facile.  The article indeed does not go through a laborious breakdown of how much of what market demographics get impacted by what common market practices, which would include "abusive updates."

However, that does not make your implied statement correct either (eg, the implied "Therefor not important, or not applicable!")

See also, the almost droning refrain from the internet of "We are NOT your QA department!"

https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/5gjxcp/what_exactly_is_the_problem_with_day_one_patches/

Just read it a bit.  You will find the "Wait to play" thing is not just me being a bitch.  it's a real complaint from your market, and will have real aggregate impacts.

[wierd]

as the customer who's time is being wasted, YES, I AM. Regardless of any actual reality, my perception of it is what drives MY behavior, and as a seller, seeking to obtain my tiny slice of time, you need to recognize and appreciate that.

When you fail to, and somebody else does, you lose that small drop of market.  That happens enough times, you go out of business.


But let me spell it out for you simply:

I start out wanting to play X, but when I start it, I am greeted with yet another update.  Due to issues beyond my control (because the US just fucking LOVES local franchise monopolies on ISP in regions, meaning you have MAYBE a single other choice in one, and so cannot vote with your wallet on the matter), you have shit internet, and this will take  FIVE FUCKING HOURS to complete, because instead of using a modular data format, your company decided that a monolithic data blob was the way to go. Bully for fucking you.

Guess what, instead of wating 5 hours to play, out of their limited time they have available before they have to sleep, they are gonna watch a movie instead.

OH-- there went your attention slice. POOF.

What are you even talking about? Just use offline mode and you dont get updates or have to deal with any sort of internet-related bullshit. Unless your complaint is that steam is shit because you can't play multiplayer games without those games being updated?

(Also if you dont want to go offline and notice you have a game which frequently has large updates but you dont often play, you can tell that game to only update when you tell it to )

More

"I dont make use of the multiplayer aspects of this multiplayer capable game; I prefer solo play. I really do not give even a single shit about your new holiday encounter thing you added. The fact that you require always on verification, and couple that with your version control methods, mean I cannot play unless I am online, and when you push yet another thing I really dont care about, and never will, I have to spend hours downloading it before I can play. I don't like that."

Services like Steam just facilitate that. They are kinda the middle man that gets stuck with the blame, even though they are not really the problem child. It's vendors like EA, Ubi, and pals that demand the "always on + version control == our wet dream experience" that are the villains.)

[ggamer]

the only way this makes business sense is if you see it as activision-blizzard (and every other publisher that pulls bonkers shit like this) attempting to keep prolific devs from budding off into their own companies (like bungie). It'd also explain why they're pushing profit projections into the dang stratosphere off of little to no analysis or factual backing to the projections.

[Reelya]

How does laying off large amounts of staff at the same time prevent them budding off to form their own companies? I'd say it would foster the exact opposite.

Big game publishers are also not at all scared of upstart game studios. All the start-ups get to take the risks, most will fail, a few will survive, and then Activision & Co can snap up those new properties for a good price. The losses are therefore spread out to the investors in the independent game studios, not Activision. It's the same reason that TV networks continue to use external production studios instead of doing everything in-house. If it's all in-house you have to absorb the costs of all the failures, instead of only profiting off the successes.

Actually, this move makes perfect sense for a games company the size of Activision. Activision are too large by far. Downsizing makes sense. Once you get to the scale of a company like this, many managers ad admin staff spend a significant amount of time just coordinating management-tasks between themselves rather than managing projects. Removing one middle-manager removes the need to coordinate communication with that person from possibly dozens of other people to keep them informed about everything that could involve them. Sure, the value of their work is lost, but so is the cost of all make-work needed to maintain their role as a functioning component of the system.

Not every franchise is created equal. Some are wildly more profitable per hour invested than others are. So, you close down things that are only marginally profitable, and switch all your AAA-grade developers to working on the really profitable stuff. Additionally, since there's a finite cap on the amount of attention/time consumers have, if you get as big as Activision, some of your titles end up competing with other titles you own. Reducing the number of titles therefore makes it easier for your other titles to be profitable. Sure, some of that freed-up attention will go to rival studio's games, but you do reduce the pressure on your remaining titles too.

[MrRoboto75]

Turns out, Epic's store spies on your steam activity