9 out of 10 new games don't work at launch.

It is not just hardware, but problems in other places as well. For an example, look up "bush hid the facts".

The difference is the sheer amount of variants of hardware that PC games have to deal with.

Let's take Elemental as an example.  We've been making games for going on two decades. When I say Elemental was stable when we released it, I mean it. We tested on a lot of configurations and it worked fine. And yet, look what happened.

So what causes this? Bugs? Not usually. It's typically caused by how different hardware handles different scenarios.

Let me give you a really simple example: Video cards and how much on board memory they have.

Let's ignore drivers, compatibility, etc. Let's assume all is fine there.

Some video cards have just 128MB on them. Others, these days, have 4GB of memory on them.

What happens when a video card runs out of memory? It dumps its stuff to main memory. But WHEN it thinks its out of memory depends on a myriad of decision choices including what OS it's running on, what version of the driver it's running on, the APIs being used to access that memory and so on.  

As a result, I could run game X on two machines that are identical in every way including the video card with the exception that one video card has say 512MB of video memory and the other has 1024MB of video memory. They're both the same video card except for that difference. Same OS. Same everything.  But one will crash randomly on a given game and the other won't.

That's where things stand now in the PC game market. And that's just one of hundreds of examples.

The real solution is to design games with very strict machine Specs and not deviate from those specs. Sure you alienate every P4 and shitty old laptop user, along with every person on a dial up modem connection on the planet (MP) and don't fret, little Billy will be overly verbose and pissed off, on the anonymous Internet Game Forum, that his ancient PC can't run the NEW games but wtf right?

Well, it comes down to sales. If you create an already niche game, then isolate alot of potential clients, laptops, old PC's etc, then your sales base diminishes to a point where production costs cannot be recouped. If one cannot recoup said production costs, then what is the point?

There is none. So game companies are forced to include way to many differing possible hardware setups and the result, especially on any new Engine, is what we see more and more of these days.

I do not condone nor support poor releases but at my age, I have seen the Industry evolve, and evolve it has. Not always in the right direction but it still warms my heart to see some try and be fresh and creative. And when they do so I will send my support their way. Call it what you will, fanboyism, stupidity whatever, but I do not want to see the PC industry die off. So instead of sitting around and bitching, how about stepping up and lending a hand.

Obviously many here have the skills because they know way better than the developers how to run a gaming company, produce Bug free games and have Infinite monetary budgets.

P.S. And don't forget. The modern gamers demands way f'ing more stuff (like everything) be in all the games they buy today than was the case when games came on three 3.5" floppy disks.

I think you are misinterpreting what I said or perhaps I was not clear enough.  I agree with you completely and I have purchased several games and other programs that work great right out of the box.  I simply said that I am willing to accept some hardware compatibility issues.  Mostly because I am not a computer expert by any stretch of the imagination, and I have no idea how a company could possible test every computer configuration out there.  However, if a company is willing to work and get these patched then they earn my repeat business.

As far profits, etc.  There are plenty of companies that make games and seem to care less that the game does not work.  I have run into them myself and they got my money the first time but will not get any more.  In my opinion it seems that Stardock is not one of those companies.  The game is much more stable from what I have read.  Since I never experienced any of the compatibility issues like the win 64/ATI problem, I didn't experience some of the frustration it caused.  I did eventually run into the OOM crash.

Playability, the game has improved and I am looking forward to 1.1.  Are there problems, absolutely, I have made it no secret that the city spamming is driving me crazy and has actually made the game not fun for me.  I seem to start a lot of games but stop because the city spamming just ruins the game for me.  I have a game saved that I could send a screen shot of (if I actually new how), where me as the Kraxis vs the other Empires.  I have three level 3 cities in a triangle.  In the center of the triangle was Arcane Temple.  Since there was only about 4 or 5 squares not in my area of influence, I just left it alone and just figured I would grow into it at level 4.  Sure enough, I made an Alliance with the Yithril and he plopped a city right in the middle just to get the temple.  I broke the Alliance, went to war, and killed him because of it.  As I said, hopefully 1.1 will address this.

Well, I honestly dont know what you guys have been gaming on all these years however PC games have never been bug free on release. It had nothing to do with Windows, they were buggy as hell back in the DOS days... anyone remember Origin and their voodoo memory manager with Ultima VII? Bethesda was one of the worst companies ever; the initial release of Daggerfall should have bankrupt them to be honest. Or how about the old RPG Darklands from MicroProse? Or maybe Twilight 2000? Traveller? Patriot (now that was a winner), Harpoon? The list is pretty well endless.

Come on guys, back then we had to wait forever to get a patch; if you were rich you may have had access to Genie with a 9600 (or 2400) modem and if not you needed to wait till someone loaded it onto you local bbs.

So to say that PC games are buggy today your just looking back with rose colored glasses; if anything, the bugs are far less "game breaking" now than they were "back then".

I blame sales and marketing departments.

By the way, I find it offending that you treat every game as a product. Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, a roguelike game I'm highly involved with, consistently delivers high quality releases, for free. There's no "final release". There's constant improvement. More interesting items, skills, monsters, player-designed dungeon elements put here and there among totally random corridors.

http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/

What exactly is the definition of 'work' in this thread?  Of the 96 games that I own on the PC, I can count, on two fingers, the number of those that outright didn't work out of the box and both of those issues were fixed inside of two weeks.  I suppose, if we count the server issues with WoW, then three fingers would do the trick.

"Working" would be defined as: Having no need for the "thing" that sits between the chair and the keyboard, to have any idea at all about the device they are using, despite the fact, that having even a basic understanding, would, obviously be a great help when things don't seem to "work"

I've never had a game not work, and, I too have a hundred or so PC games.  And I think we can all agree I am an idiot, so if there was some problem, I would not be able to fix it.  I've had games crash fairly often, like this one, I've had them be poorly made, unbalanced, or unfun, but they all played. 

I'm very much hoping Windows 8 is 64 bit only to at least stop some of the compatibility testing that has to be done.  And that once that's out people stop supporting XP.

There are a lot of improved APIs in Vista/7 that I'm not convinced some companies even use (like D3D9Ex) just because they're not in XP

i can't speak for anyone else but i will throw in my two cents.

i think it would be naive, given the reality, to suggest *working* means having every advertised feature present and fully functional. i don't think i've seen that, ever. something is always broken, or at the very least, some feature dropped or redesigned to be other than what was originally stated.

at the very least, i consider a game *working* when i can play it, begining to end, and do so without having to rely on luck, or some cheat guide walkthrough, to avoid reaching a dead end pitfall.

two worlds is a prime example of this, do quest 'A' while you were in the middle of quest 'B', and either you had to restart, or somhow find a way over the gate, cheat basically, so you could steal that last needed piece for the end game quest. it was a mess.

civ 4, obviously, until a kind gentleman from russia patched it for us poor saps with too little memory to handle the massive leak, as there was no way to achieve any kind of victory before the game konked out prior to this, and boy did the developers take their sweet time.

myth 2 was one that i never got to finish, being that the level to obtain the codex at the library bugged out something fierce, forcing me to restart the game from scratch and hope things magically worked out better the next time. i lost interest in trying yet again.

i won't even touch myth 3. that was rancid

obviously  WoM is a work in progress, but on first purchase i crashed constantly before slowing to such a ridiculous crawl that progression was impossible. so i call that not working.

far cry was purchased solely to play multplayer, but had some serious synchronization problems. after dying dozens of times without scoring a single hit, we discovered the host always appeared a good 2 feet away from where he was actually standing, making him impossible to shoot.

thats just what popped into my head, while i don't play as many as i used to i'm sure i can recall a bunch more if i had to.

but really, thats just the most forgiving and generous definition of *working* i have, i consider a game working when the features of the game consist of more than a token effort and are fun and enjoyable

an example of this is mount and blade(since i don't want to pick on WoM). it had a quest system which consisted of about a dozen quests, they could only be done once every 45 or more days, and some of which eventually became uncompletable. the king would gather his forces and ride off to battle, but then run away if he personally was outnumbered, despite having a combined army ten times stronger than whatever he was facing, or abandoning a siege that was hours away from completing because a caravan passed by that he would gleefully chase across the entire map letting his kingdom go to heck. they had an economy and trade system that unfortunately was practically destined to go bonkers, and a feif system where it was impossible to maintain any level of wealth as the player.

yeah you could play it without crashing to completion, but so much was ihalf assed and tacked on, i can't call it *working*. if all you wanted to do was fight endlessly it was okay, but anything else was prone to dissapointment. using that definition, i can name quite a few more games.

The problem is two folds:

1. hardware for PC is currently developing too fast, and...

2. ... there are competitions in hardware development/design/manufacturing.

A good computer that's 1 year old is far from being top-of-the line. This is because, in a given year, you could have 2-3 real improvement in a field. If you take several of them together, say Gfx card, memory, processor, you just got a bunch of different system configurations.

The second problem is where things gets very, very complicated. Go to any hardware site and search up a graphics card. You'll notice that for one specific card there are several brands, with differing specs (different memory amounts/types) and then there's also OCs. Then look at reviews. Some are great, some are inefficient, some just never works, etc... and this is just one single card. Imagine what it's like with dozen of these parts trying to work together.

PS: standardizing PCs doesn't work because one of the primary draw of a PC is the ability to pick and choose parts when building your own to fit its role or your budget. Even if you don't actually "build" the system yourself. Out-of-the-box style PC are often considered the worse PCs you can own.

Aha! You fell for my trap!

I will relish this moment..................., the relishing is now completed.

And now for the counter-argument:

The PC is just one big box of trade-offs. When you're building one, the trade-off is money or performance, when you're designing one, it's specialisation or diversity of function, when you're operating one, it's compatibility or particular needs.

Standardising PCs would slow down marketed series improvements. Meaning, like consoles, if you bought a new PC, you could expect it to run everything it's designed to for at least 3 years without needing to upgrade. That would also cool the hellfire that is currently consuming software developers. It would also mean a decrease in R&D costs to hardware competitors, which would improve their bottom line, not to mention manufacturing processes would not have to be modified as frequently.

On top of that, with slower increments, manufacturers could spend more time on hardware and chipset QA, meaning much better system stability.

I do agree with what you've said about out-of-the-box PCs, having sold many of them myself. It is an unfortunate fact, but not a necessary one. Standardisation can be done a LOT better.

So in the end, it comes down to just one trade-off instead of many. That is, the option to mix-and-match from a list with a buttload of options, or a pre-prepared system that just works better (i.e. more reliably) with everything.

We're not talking about having a game work out of the box which does not equate to bug free. I don't know where you got the idea that anyone said PC games are or should be bug free. Minor bugs, most PC gamers can deal with. Heck even larger bugs PC gamers can deal with depending on what kind of bug it is.

You guys are kinda missing the reality. The industry is somewhat standardized, its called everyone is microsofts bit**. yeah new improvements roll out pretty quick, but if they don't work with microsoft & directx, noone will see those improvements, because noone is going to write their own api to utilize them, especially not to take advantage of an improvement of one specific piece of equipment that may or may not be present

Nvidia, ATI, when they come up with some new idea, they are pretty much compelled by circumstance to work with microsoft to get it out there, To standardize it. what they fight for, as far as the software community is concerned, is to get to set the standard. And most of this happens under the hood, its not something you as a game programmer really care about, because it doesn't substantially change what you do to use the card. you still set textures and shader options, and feed vertices through the pipeline to display the pretty triangles on screen. even if you get some new feature, utilizing it is done through directx new function calls and settings which don't affect existing code

and yeah, this graphics card is an nvidia 8200 by "so and so" and this is an 8200 by "whomever" and they run a little differently, but you know what, they both run on the same stock nvidia drivers, they were both built from the schematic handed to them by nvidia, your performance issues, guy one used a cheaper memory resulting in a slower speed of the card, or moved the memory around causing some minute delays in communication, or one of them is actually a cheaper 8200 'crp' model which means they were given the exact same nvidia chip, but its been hardwired to shut off some of the more advanced features, hence a reduced price, and slightly poorer performance.

but you the programmer, don't care. you ask directX, can this handle shader 2.0, can this handle multiple backbuffers, can it handle 80 kagiliion by 80 kagillion resolution, and it in turns asks the card, and it says yes or no. is it an 8200 or an 8200 crp, you don't care, you just wait for the reply that says yes i can do it, or no i can't. you are going to work with directX & windows, so they have to make sure they work with directx & windows,

its called object oriented design. how the card works doesn't matter, only that it exposes a common interface for achieving the desired actions, and that, however it achieves the desired action, it does achieve it. new improvements don't matter, either they happen under the hood, where the programmer doesn't see them, or they have to be specificly invoked, as in who cares if shader 9.0 is out there, shader 2.0 is still 2.0.

seriously, you all speak as if you must sacrifice your first born to the combatibility gods to get a game working, like there is a programmer hunched over in a room writing 8000 special case circumstances to account for all the hardware setups. manufactures strive to be compliant, if they aren't, they fix it with new drivers unless they are some fly by night. and when there is a major incompatability, its usually widely known on the developer networks as well as how to get around it. meaning if every engine doesn't have the same exact problems, you are probably doing something wrong, or atleast not everything you should.
 

I havnt done any programming with it, but I thought that was directx was for.

I have to wonder, is the problem with directx or the games code?

Fraid you are WRONG here bud. I started back in the 80's as well and never got a bug ridden unplayable game until Ultima IV in which I merely called the developers/publisher at that time Sierra and they talked me through a boot disk over the phone (it really wasn't even a bug but just a setup routine required to boot up the game on my machine). I played hundreds of games of various types and many of them from SSI and SSG and MICROPROSE and not a one did I have any crashes or lockups or bug ridden crap out of the box they all worked great. The AI's were pretty darn good as well. You want a good fantasy wargame go find an old copy of SSI's "War of the Lance" it will stomp you in the dirt. So yeah the Golden Age was in the 80's when developers put QUALITY into their programming, they were PROUD to produce those great games and you didn't have to jump through hoops to get them to work. I eventually learned to write my own boot disk with 6 different bootup settings for various games. That is NOT A BUG it is just something that was required to get the game to operate. Sadly the GOLDEN AGE is gone forever because of greedy publishers and developers alike. Their philosophy: Put out CRAP OUT OF THE BOX the LEMMINGS will buy it.

That is what DirectX is for, but how well it works is questionable. DirectX gives a single interface for accessing the graphics driver. The driver takes care of how to use the hardware. The fact that you theoretically should not have to care does not matter is something the these and other related black boxes does not work. And the truth is there are problems, frequently.

There is a reason why Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic allows you to choose not to use DirectX for the sound/graphics, and that is it gives a back up when things do not work for some people.

Not long ago someone posted that after a driver update the cursor in AoW:SM would not be erased after it was moved, resulting in a screen full of cursors. One of the solutions was to turn off Direct3D (the other was not use fullscreen, which causes Direct3D to act diffrently).

Not exactly a fan boy. If Stardock had released Elemental and then moved on to their next project I would be just as mad as possible at them. But they are not doing that, in fact we know that they are hiring people to direct the progress of a game that they already got all of our money for.

That is not business as usual. This is a company run by people and not by policy and it shows.

Been a PC gamer for 20 years now and out of 100's of games that I have purchased the vast majority of games work just fine.  Saying 9/10 games these days are broken on release is crazy...either that or just really really bad luck (or crappy system?).

thanks for all the replies guys! Glad to see that other people out there are as fed up with publishers, EA, the games industry, EA, shoddy products, etc.

And Stardock, you better deliver cause I just tied myself to your bandwagon!

Ultima IV was fine (geez, I played that on a Commodre 64); Origin didnt start the bug fiasco till Ultima VI with the Voodoo memory manager when half the current PC's couldnt run it. As far as Orgin goes, one of the worst releases of all time was Strike Commander. Not only that but the Commander series games were $70 each and you had to drop another $30 for a "sound pack".

MicroProse had their share of bugs as well.. Darklands was one of the buggiest games ever made and no save games were compatible with the new patches; thats tolerable in a strategy game but gamebreaking in an epic RPG. Microprose also did the Traveler series (awful) and the Twilight games (even worse). Bethesda had Wayne Gretzky Hockey that wouldnt even boot on release and Daggerfall which was a bug-ridden fiasco.

SSI was always pretty decent however they used the same engine for the majority of their games so had years to perfect it.

If all people want is consistant hardware/OS then we should all be running Macs!

To say all developers care only about money would be incorrect. Just yesterday I check the requiments to work as a programmer at one company (to get a few for what companies want for when I get out of college), and one of the requirements was to be passionate about playing and creating games. Many of the big names may be as you say but it is not universally true.

There definitely was a golden age of gaming. I played through it and it was fantastic. Although as others have said, games were a lot simpler back then, so it's to be expected that they were more complete on release. In fact, when I first started gaming, most of them were made by 1 guy in his bedroom. So games today are far more complex, and that is a reason why they are harder to get polished for release, but that doesn't mean it's justifiable to just release them too early and then rely on patches.

The problem is that the game developers know they can get away with it. For every day the game stays in development, it costs them a lot. Most of them have huge teams that they are paying, and some of those staff are hired on contract just to complete that game. There is also the huge debt that most companies shoulder during the development that costs them more and more each day, only starts to dwindle on release. So once the game is on the shelf, the costs plummet. That's why they release it early, and then patch the holes later.

The problem is, most gamers still don't realise this. People still rush out to buy new games, and don't realise that most of the time they are getting an unfinished one. It's a shame, but it won't change. There is that expression, give an inch - take a mile, well the developers are given many inches constantly, so they take their mile with every game released.