Testing, testing....

Computer game companies can occasionally bemuse the hell out of me. They want to sell as many games as possible and they all talk of “establishing respect for our brand” in order to “make our company name synonymous with quality” (taken from real company reports) – and yet they cut corners in stupid ways which create products which simply cannot fail to irritate any right-minded consumers. I have to be very careful when discussing subjects such as this because (i) this is not a review column and I do not want to harp on about a narrow range of products and (ii) last time I tried talking about bugs or glitches in games a major games publisher threatened to sure me, arguing that an error which randomly disabled the “game save” option was in fact “an essential feature” – only for them to remove the “feature” in a “bug fix” pad released one month later. Hmmm....

I simply do not understand why companies will hold focus groups at considerable expense to discover what consumers want in a game (hint: things which work!) and then are reluctant to employ professional bug testers to check the quality of the finished product. I am not saying this is always the case: some companies are much better than others (EA after a dodgy start are now leading the way in this field) and the bug testers will occasionally miss things but there are so many examples of games rushed out without adequate testing. The main reason is summed up by the maxim “time is money”; release dates for games are crucial and once the shipping day is announced companies are hugely loath to change them: hence games which are bugged (Diablo 2) or pretty much fatally flawed (Daikatana) are released to meet a preannounced date (this was hugely ironic in the case of Daikatana when the game had already slipped for more than a year and then Ion Storm claimed that the huge flaws in the game were necessary because of a tight time scale). Sure, some games are too screwed for a little playtesting to fix but many are not and in my experience companies are doing themselves more harm than good in that there is nothing which the consumer hates more than having to download or buy on disk patches to make a game work. Similarly the shipping date argument has holes in it, in that I contacted two major games retailers who, on the condition of anonymity, accepted that within a one month period it didn’t matter to them when a product was released (the month is due to advertising limits) and one said “I would prefer it if they did take their time because it would save us the hassle of dealing with returns”. So consumers would prefer it, as would manufacturers: so how come more games companies have not gotten the message?

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