During Masahiro Sakurai's most recent YouTube video, the legendary creator delves into the requirement for online updates and patches in modern video games.
It might seem fairly obvious, as consumers, as to how patches can be beneficial, and Sakurai himself states that he is "very grateful" for them. However, the way in which he breaks it down may still provide an opportunity to further appreciate the additional work that developers put into their games.
Splitting the reasoning into four segments, Sakurai first explains that games are exceedingly more complex now than ever before, meaning that it's almost impossible to foresee and plan exactly how the final product will look. He then points out that developers don't have much time to play games between finishing the final product and releasing it to the market, meaning that bugs or other issues may go unnoticed.
Thirdly, he explains that regardless of how many bug testers are employed during development, no amount of testing will compare to the feedback delivered by consumers playing the game after release, meaning that smaller issues that might have slipped through the cracks can be stamped out. And finally, to perhaps convince those who are against updates, he frames them as a free bonus for players, highlighting the additional development time from developers who would otherwise be better suited to brand-new products.
There's simply no avoiding updates and patches these days, but we're certainly in agreement that they can be mostly beneficial to players. But what do you think? Leave a comment down below and let us know.
[source youtube.com]
Comments 39
I'm all for patches when necessary. Back in the day, if a game was bugged, all one could do was wait for a re-release with the bugs patched more or less.
However, doesn't excuse how patch happy games have become. Releasing games in a very poor state, leaving frustrated buyers having to wait for weeks to months for games to be in a half polished state.
Kirby and the Forgotten Land is still 1.0.0, very polished game and doesn’t need updates.
I am against updates, a lot of times. Post-game content becomes paid DLC, fun glitches get removed. (Imagine if Super Mario 64’s Backwards Long Jump glitch was patched!). I’m okay if they fix an annoying glitch, like Scarlet/Violet.
Games should just get more testing done and not be rushed. Pokemon Scarlet/Violet were clearly rushed games that were left unfinished and still are today.
We're only human and no one's perfect.
Whether it's for fixing bugs or optimization, I always look forward to updates. It usually means that there's an overall improvement to the game....or stability of the hardware.
Fine with patches in big games. They do their best, but with bigger and more complex games it's just not possible to anticipate and test every scenario prior to release.
What I don't like (and thankfully, what we don't see with Nintendo) is using patches as a crutch for rushing out a half-a***d effort. Cyberpunk and the GTA Trilogy are two of the most recent and infamous examples, but there are many others.
The possibility of patching games already out in the market is a godsend for modern gaming. It's just as with anything else, you can count on greedy jerks to misuse it and release broken games to patch up later
As complex as games are now, especially games with net play, patches happen. However releasing a game with play breaking bugs requiring a patch on release day....inexcusable.
The downside of needing patches is game preservation of physical media. If Game A is busted on cartridge or disc and requires a patch to make work, that physical media is doomed to be that way forever. Eventually, unless a community archives the patches, that broken game will never be able to be played.
@WaffleRaptor01 I was just thinking that. Donkey Kong Country had at least three different carts ship to address various bugs and glitches.
@PikminMarioKirby I mean, it's a case by case thing right? Pokemon Scarlet and Violet was absolutely atrocious in terms of how unfinished they allowed it to be released
Sakurai, meet Miyamoto.
Miyamoto, meet Sakurai.
Companies are lazy to pay game testers and it’s cheaper to sell unfinished products and get testing be done for free by players!!!!! This is not acceptable! Either charge half the price and claim it’s unfinished so that game collectors won’t waste money on unfinished physical games which is completely ruining the physical gaming!!!!!! Or start releasing finished products as it should be!!!!!! Don’t accept this practice people!!! Don’t buy unfinished games!!!
The math people simply don't understand.
Let's say I'm a game developer. I get 200 testers and let them test my game for ... let's say ... 1 HUNDRED YEARS. Kinda impractical, and it would cost over half a billion dollars just to pay them, but let's just say we do that.
Then the game sells a million copies.
In TWO WEEKS, the general public will likely have encountered more usage cases and have more time spent playing the game then my team did in 100 years.
So ... yeah. You test the best you can, but the idea that you can actually simulate your deployment with testing is just ludicrous. You're always going to miss things. It's pretty amazing games, especially PC games, work as well as they do at lunch.
As for the obvious outliers, the games that have bugs that seem to effect the vast majority of people at launch ... that's a different problem. That's either a publisher demanded the game is shipped in a knowingly unfinished state, or shipped on a virtually untested patch. For example, the game has a number of bugs that were fixed days before the game goes gold in patch 1.2, so rather then ship the working, but flawed, 1.1 and a day one patch, they ship 1.2 without any testing. But it turns out 1.2 broke more then it fixed. Woops!
The other thing to consider is "going gold", the archaic terms that used to mean the day you printed the gold master CD but now refers to the point at which finalize the code that's going to be on physical media, is generally 3 months before the game is released. So, in all honestly, if you do NOT have a day one patch for your game ... what the heck was your team doing for that 3 months?
"games are exceedingly more complex now than ever before"
You can only use that excuse so many times. This has been parroted for almost two decades, now. Meanwhile, tooling improves, and developers get more skilled.
It's one thing when your game is a giant open-world game with tons of things to do where testing every possible scenario is not feasible. But even small-scale, linear games developed today still get patches.
It's a mentality thing. If you can release something now and worry about patching later, it's very tempting to do so. Especially if you really want to make the holiday season instead of delaying your game.
Of course, just because a game can be patched, doesn't mean it will be.
Then we've got cases like Bloodstained where the end product released in a terrible state. The developer promises to fix things. For a while, they do, and things start to improve. Then they add more content and performance deteriorates again, which then isn't fixed. Today, the game still isn't in the state it should have been released in.
@HeadPirate "So, in all honestly, if you do NOT have a day one patch for your game ... what the heck was your team doing for that 3 months?"
The same thing they would have been doing before patches were a thing: working on a different game.
There is a distinct difference between a patch for an honest mistake and new features and patches for games that were rushed out the door.
And that's exactly why I'm so grateful games can be patched nowadays and no, some companies abusing it is absolutely not a good counterargument to not have it at all - it's just those specific companies that should do better!
@BenoitRen
That's never really been the case.
Even going back to the NES days, you'll find games often listed a build version somewhere on the cartridge, box, or title screen, and that it changes depending on the cart you are playing.
The first production run of 20,000 cartridges might be on version 1.0, while the next production run is on 1.1, which fixed the bugs that were present on the 1.0 release. Thankfully, very few people in the gaming industry have the hubris to think that they released a prefect product. Even small teams like R&D4 would keep people on older titles, monitoring feedback and making changes, anywhere from 6 months to a year after release.
Patching games after release has literally never not been the norm. The only difference now is that it's more visible. That fact that you didn't NOTICE that you bought a 1.3 release of a cartridge game, which had been patched 3 time since release, didn't mean it didn't happen. I would actually say it's much better now, because if you had the 1.0 version of a NES cartridge and encountered a game breaking bug, your only opinion was to locate a buy a 1.1 or later version of the the game. Now you can just DL a patch.
Hardly anyone is against patches.
Most are against using them as an excuse to rush games to market.
@HeadPirate Cartridge revisions existed, but were far from the norm.
Saying that you can just download a patch to fix a game-breaking bug lacks nuance.
@BenoitRen
I'm not really sure what you're trying to argue here. There are 677 licensed releases for the NES and over 500 have post release revisions. in fact, generally the only reason a game wouldn't get a post release revision is that it never got a second production run to produce new cartridges in the first place, so had no way to distribute the new code.
Hard to call that anything but the norm.
I worked in the industry in the era, and I understand for most people the inner workings were extremely opaque. I'm just trying to provide you with new information to help you inform your opinion, I'm not in any way saying the opinion you formed without that information is invalid or "silly" based on the information on hand when you formed it. This is how we learn and change our understanding. But if you're just going to continue to dismiss that information offhand please let me know so I stop wasting our time.
And yeah, there are obviously situations where you can't get a patch, and not everything gets fixed.
Do you have a solution? Because as I pointed out, even given 100 years and $500,000,000, the amount of time Nintendo could spend testing a game like BOTW would be lower the the playtime the general public had to find bugs in about ... 6 hours. It's not as simple as "test more" or "test longer". You simply can't know before hand how 10 million people are going to break your game.
Do you have a way to fix that? I (and literally everyone else in the gaming industry!) would love to hear it.
I do like patches, but with Sakurai, specifically, I'm a -little- wary. I loved smash bros melee. I'm not here to fight about which smash bros is best, but for me, wavedashing was king.
Given that it was sort of an unintended consequence of the mechanics, and that it had never returned to smash bros, I can't help but think it would've gotten patched out of melee, given the chance.
In other games, occasionally things/exploits like that appear, and then get patches out once everyone starts being aware of them.
Maybe sometimes, that's not for the best.
Only downside to online updates is that we sometimes find some amazing glitch or something only to lose it shortly after. Like with Smash Ultimate's Infinite Assist Trophy glitch, lol
@HeadPirate
I find it hard to believe that most of the NES library got a revision. How do you get such a high number? Are you counting NTSC-U and PAL releases of Japanese releases as revisions?
It's also worth pointing out that the NES is just one console. I don't think it's fair to base the entire history of cartridge-based consoles just on that.
It's interesting to note that there was one (disc-based) console where patching was not the norm, and that was the Wii. Nintendo had an explicit "no patches" policy.
You keep bringing up The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, but as I've already pointed out, not every game is a huge open-world affair. Yet even the simplest games get patches (like freaking Monopoly). How do you explain that?
The point is not that they should invest millions into testing to fix every bug imaginable. That's a fool's errand. The point is that the trend is to rush games to market with insufficient QA testing before declaring the product ready for distribution, because they can just patch it later (if at all).
The goal should be to make a honest effort in providing a reasonably stable and as bug-free possible product to store shelves as possible, but right now too many corners are being cut by too many developers.
There used to be a middle ground back in the PS3/X360 era, where releasing patches cost money. It meant that patches were still possible if necessary, but discouraged. Unfortunately, those became free starting with the PS4, which opened the flood gates. Interestingly, at about the same time we saw the release Assassin's Creed: Unity, which was released in a broken state.
At the end of the day, it all comes back to a core problem of the game industry: their goal is to make a profit, not to make a good product.
See Sakurai gets it. Yes patches shouldn’t be an excuse to rush out broken games, but if a game has been play tested for say either 1 or 2 years and they release it and there are a couple bugs then at the very least they genuinely tried to ensure that the bugs aren’t game breaking.
True story, when I was young in the 70's and 80's we bought games and played them almost always from beginning to end with very little issue. Did they have bugs, sure some did, but you almost always could find an easy enough way around them. I miss games where when you buy it, that's what it is.
For better or for worse, I sure miss those days.
@BenoitRen
Seeing you are generally just choosing to not accept any of the information I'm giving you, I'll just make a few points and we'll end on that.
1) Patching cost money right now. Nintendo is by far the most expensive. Steam and Xbox both offer free updates to self published games, but large publishers have to pay for testing and distribution. I don't know about Play Station because I've never been involved with publishing a game on Play Station.
2) I still am waiting to hear your solution. I want to make a good product, and I'm a developer. Do you have some % of my budget that is the magic number to spend on testing? Is there some best practice you think me and the rest of the industry are just collectively ignoring? To you think the majority of developers invest years of their lives in and put their name on games and don't actually care about? Do you think that most development houses are going to pay someone $200,000+ a year even if they show absolute apathy towards the quality of their work?
3) If the goal is to "just make money", how is spending 2 years developing a game, releasing it, and then spending a year updating it any different then spending 3 years developing the game? Both have the exact same development cost. I'm paying the same number of people for the same amount of time. Even if patches were free, I'm not making any more money that way, so why is that preferable? We're not talking about abandonware here, where the developer simply releases a broken product and NEVER fixes it, we are talking about patching active software.
4) If I have a million dollars to make a game, and after spending a million dollars and giving an honest effort the game has bugs due to situations outside my control, like perhaps engine updates or assist changes, where do I get more money to fix the bugs without releasing the game? Are you suggesting the better solution in that case is to fire my whole team and not release the finished, playable, enjoyable, but slightly less then prefect product?
Again, it's really easy to point at something and go "that's bad". But sometimes the bad situation we currently have is the best possible one, and it's a lot harder to come up with a way to actually fix the problem.
Very well reasoned points.
@PikminMarioKirby Super Mario 64 did get three sets of bugfixes. The final one (1.3) did, in fact, fix the backwards long jump glitch, but it was only released in Japan. International editions only ever went as high as 1.2.
Said version also added rumble pack support and fixed some camera issues involving trees so...
OK, there's good and bad. Super convenient to quickly patch little glitches that didn't get noticed nowadays;, also super convenient for a crunchy vampire corp to con gamers out of their money with half-baked garbage.
@HeadPirate
I question one point and suddenly I'm "generally just choosing to not accept any of the information"? Get over yourself. You're a random person on the internet. Anyone can claim anything.
"Patching cost money right now."
According to an inside source patches to fix bugs are free. Developers are only charged when they need to release gigantic patches due to their own mistakes.
What's not free are patches with new content, as those require certification.
"I still am waiting to hear your solution."
I already gave the solution. Just not in numbers and percentages, because I can't give those.
"If the goal is to "just make money", how is spending 2 years developing a game, releasing it, and then spending a year updating it any different then spending 3 years developing the game?"
If you spend 3 years developing the game instead of 2, you'll obviously have a more complete and finished product, which results in better review scores and more sales.
"If I have a million dollars to make a game, and after spending a million dollars and giving an honest effort the game has bugs due to situations outside my control, like perhaps engine updates or assist changes"
Rollback the engine updates, obviously. This is software, after all. I don't know what you mean by assist changes.
"Are you suggesting the better solution in that case is to fire my whole team and not release the finished, playable, enjoyable, but slightly less then prefect product?"
Don't be ridiculous. Obviously you'd fix the game.
"But sometimes the bad situation we currently have is the best possible one"
Sometimes, yes. But using it as an excuse for what is obviously a trend is dishonest.
Imagine an alternate timeline where patches existed in the NES days and Urban Champion became a legendary series of fighting games. One can only dream. . .
As mentioned, there may be some fixes in re-releases/second runs or simply in a later regional release.
Donkey Kong 64 is one example. You miss a Banana Medal in Hideout Helm and you're out of luck, this was fixed for the European and Japanese versions but there was no reprint in America with that fix.
Banjo-Kazooie also fixed some issues (including the termite tower slope in Mumbo Mountain) in the European and Japanese versions, and there was a ver. 1.1 released in America with such fixes.
Squashing minor bugs, easily missable, found during the printing process ain't a bad thing
Having massive amount of bugs with half the game missing isn't going to be easily forgiven. And having vital content, even if free 1 year later, is still kinda disappointing if it isn't multiplayer stuff since I wanna own my games.
@HeadPirate It's called cartridge, not cartage.
@BenoitRen
Look, I really, really would like to continue this conversation if you were interesting in learning some things, but at this point, it's very difficult.
I don't mean this as an insult. This isn't a challenge. I know basically nothing about billions of fields I've never worked in, and if some dude on the internet stated telling me they were an expert on farming, I could either accept that and continue the conversation assuming they know more about farming them me, or just assume they are lying and waste both our time, seeing I'm not an expect and probably shouldn't even be commenting on farming in the first place.
It's clear you've never worked in game development and have an incomplete understanding of really important things that are primary factors in patches, like 3rd party assist changes and how engine updates are pushed TO CONSOLES and you have to run the version of the engine the console is running even if it breaks your game. You can't roll back the latest Xbox patch because it broke your unreleased game (trust me, I've asked!), or even the fundamentals like publisher / developer relationship. And that's fine.
But we can't really go anywhere unless you're willing to accept that I've worked in the game industry for 35 years and development for 15 years, and I know what I'm talking about.
If you can't do that, again, that's fine! I'm just some dude on the internet! But lets stop wasting each others time.
In fact, if you want some really good insight, try this.
https://youtu.be/KFNxJVTJleE?list=PLKBPwuu3eCYkScmqpD9xE7UZsszweVO0n
The whole series is great, but this is one of the best examples of how development can implode even with everyone doing their best. It's also someone who is verifiably a game developer making the exact points I did about testing.
@BTB20
Thank you. I'll "patch" my comments! I wish I had the time and money to hire you for testing of my posts beforehand.
Certain 3ds cartridges ask for a patch but the console is no longer supported. It looks like Nintendo is actively encouraging hacking, modding and emulation here.
I get where he's coming from but it seems Nintendo ships games in a finished state on cart compared to other platforms whos physical discs won't mean anything once the store is shut down. That being said, some older games have glitches that are hard to seek out but can help with speedrunning like blj in super mario 64. That stuff should be kept.
This practice should mandate that cartridges sold after the patches & updates are out, should be updated themselves to INCLUDE all patches and updates ON the cartridge. I’ve actually seen some do this, but it’s not common.
As I always say, if the future of gaming is digital, then gaming has no future. Reasons like this article scream loud and clear why that is true.
I feel like too many companies use updates as an excuse to release games in an unfinished or lackluster state, and even Nintendo has done this with their Mario Sports titles.
Patches can be abused and exploited by the Devs, in some cases they over patch and can even break the game doing this, constant nurfs, buffs break the characters more than fixing anything which is what patching should be used for but like I said it makes the game and it's characters unplayable to the point of broken which completely contradicts what patching should be used for in the first place
So to sum it up, I am not a fan of patches and don't trust them to fix anything broken when in fact the game can become even more lost and unplayable with more patches they pile on with each release
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