Fixing Games Is Fine By Me: The Definitive Review
Remedial Revision Redemptions: Videogame Rehabilitation As Standard Practice
It was interesting to read the Financial Times state the case for something that seems to be increasingly the norm; namely that high-profile videogames launching as total shit-shows can have redemptive arcs. For the FT, the contemporary crux is Sony’s rapid shut-down of Concord with maybe some promise to bring it back, but the article’s standard-bearer is No Mans’ Sky. Naturally, Cyberpunk 2077 gets mentioned as does, more interestingly, Final Fantasy XIV. Personally, I’ll be beating the box for Ghost Recon: Breakpoint with annoying tippy-tappy fingertips as proof that the resurrective endeavour is absolutely worthwhile. If you’ll allow me, I’d like to coin a corpo-lingual set of initials to describe these games, so let’s call them Remedial Revision Redemptions, or RRR. More germane to the current meta was the reaction to Bethesda’s ‘deep dive’ promo for Shattered Space. Go onto the Starfield subreddit and commenters are actively hoping for some of that RRR medicine. The promise of Shattered Space being locked to a single planet with ‘lots of stuff’ has somehow promoted the prospect that it’ll be a kind of mini-Skyrim in the classic Bethesda Elder Scrolls mode, part of a renovation program that will silence the critics and elevate the title beyond its Bethesda siblings. This is less a wild dream and more a genuine hope given the kind of repair jobs lavished on the aforementioned successes. This highlights how the consumer base, or at least the enthusiast consumer base, not only accepts post-release fixing as a standard practice but actively hopes for it to happen.
Personally, I’ve always preferred to be able to play the game I’ve bought, no matter how glitched or buggy, rather than wait for a 30GB+ Day-One patch to download. One thing putting me off going anywhere near Test Drive Unlimited: Solar Crown is the prospect that it faces a good few months of patching1. This is because I’ve benefitted plenty from coming to the likes of Cyberpunk and Breakpoint well after their launches and multiple rounds of said remedial patching. As Tom Faber points out in the FT piece, videogames enjoy a kind of malleable dynamism that other media does not. Sure, books are printed with edited editions and music gets re-released with new mastering, or even movies would get new prints on better-quality stock, but the modern videogame is built with the knowledge of patching in mind. It’s almost as if knowing a game can be patched means that it will be patched. What’s maddening is that rigid capitalist structures demand things like advance-planned release dates, which in turn lead to suboptimal releases, which are then ‘fixed post-release’ into RRR games because the market absolutely allows it to happen. I think in part, this is due to the other pillars of the consumerist engine, where marketing and PR need some kind of timetable around which to construct their plans. Though it seems that initial campaigns are still kicked off far too early2. In the corporate publisher world, meeting an artificial, arbitrary date is far more important than releasing a game that doesn’t have horrific bugs or balancing issues or laughably shit monetisation. The game has a date and it must meet it. Well, it can always be delayed. And probably delayed again. But delaying a third time is a PR disaster. The game must be shit, because they don’t want to release it, and they’re struggling to fix it, right? And of course, release dates are tied in to company financial performances in terms of year quarters. Q3/4 must be big, or the entire company is fucked. THERE ABSOLUTELY MUST BE TENTPOLES FOR Q1/2. Few companies have the luxury of Rockstar being able to take nearly fifteen years to make a sequel, although few can claim $8bn revenues off a single product in return. However it underlines that clash of the old and new; the new medium suffering under the weight of the old media structures and practices that ‘always worked in the past’3. Rockstar absolutely exemplifies this. The Grand Theft Auto 6 teaser was, given the announced and revised release date4, far too early (for a game that’s arguably a half a decade too late). We’ve been left with nearly a whole fucking year with zero meaningful information. It seems a complete mess, really, for what is perhaps the most anticipated videogame of all time. Yet in almost outright defiance of the userbase that gave the company $8bn, Rockstar persisted with a policy of absolute silence punctuated by a blip of a trailer that incidentally showed no gameplay and gave no gameplay details. There’s a kind of corporate arrogance in that extreme gatekeeping, especially when the hugely-budgeted game, coasting on brand value alone, will likely generate a profit on the day of release. This illustrates the weird voids that are created when companies stick to rigid PR and marketing philosophies tied to corporate-dictat release dates. Did that void explain why Rockstar was hacked and had dev builds released? Could that have all been avoided if Rockstar had been a bit more transparent about the upcoming game and its scheduling, and fed its hungry audience?
The Grand Theft Auto 6 hack bears the signs of a change in the consumer-corporate relationship. Consider the idea that it came about because Rockstar was being too tight-lipped, too wedded to its kinda 90s idea of total information control in the context of an over-long and drawn-out PR campaign. This seems so oddly obsessive and paranoid given the luxury Grand Theft Auto enjoys as an IP that’s as sure a shot as any for making vast quantities of money5. But there was a community, a fucking huge community, that wanted information that Rockstar simply wasn’t prepared to give. While it’s entirely Rockstar’s choice as to which information it releases to the public, it might be helpful to understand what it says about the power dynamic between all-powerful publishers and passive consumers. Consider the hack as the community fighting back, asserting its power and simply taking that information because it could. Now, it’s almost certain that if you were a cash investor in a company like Rockstar, you would be privy to some kind of product timeline and possible post-release content roadmaps and thus, likely have access to more information about its games than the people who actually buy the fucking product and supply the fucking wealth. Naturally this seems somewhat unfair, but consumers often acquiesce to that passive position because, perhaps, we simply don’t understand the options that could be available. It’s interesting, and perhaps a tragedy, that the AAA publishers haven’t paid more attention to the benefits of transparency and the free flow of product information that’s almost fundamental to successful crowdsourced indie titles. Here, the consumers that fund those titles are rightly treated with the same luxuries as stakeholding investors and when run properly, those campaigns show how much healthier and balanced the producer/consumer relationship can be. This brings us back, somewhat tangentially, to the RRRs. What’s interesting about them is that it seems that the twin forks of consumer outcry and indifference are what powers the degree of commitment to take a AAA failure to RRR success. Perhaps there’s sunk costs to recover on the publisher’s part, but any true RRR program must pay attention to the community discourse in order to work. In this sense, the post-release process is oddly similar to the pre-release processes of things like optional and stretch goals in crowdfunded productions. It’s primarily a dialogue between producer and consumer, the likes of which simply do not exist to anywhere near the same extent in other media.
I’m sure there are plenty of people who’d love to see certain movies, or series of movies, getting the kind of RRR treatment that Cyberpunk 2077 enjoyed. But the thing that really stands out about a game that’s undergone a true RRR process is that what emerges is distinctly special as a result. Despite the performative front of the AAA marketing machine in full bombast any carefully, expertly constructed image melts into nothingness once a game faces its reckoning and is found severely wanting. This humbling process, the knocking-down of an over-promoted and over-promised product, is humanising in an abstract way. Some artifice, some undue, false enhancement of the game’s image of quality or feature set is destroyed and the naked reality cannot be ignored or covered-up. In a real rock-bottom sense, the RRR process means the rebuilding is done under the glare of both media and community attention. It’s far removed from the secretive, pre-release NDA-clad development that’s standard industry practice. But the results can be spectacular. No Man’s Sky is now simply wonderful, with most of its wildest pre-release promises now fully in place. It’s a testament to endurance of Murray and the developers, but it shows how great the process can be, the strides that can be taken. Likewise Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the greatest games of its generation, with its RRR rehab being one of bringing the game to a correct level of finesse as well as adding the Phantom Liberty content.
I have a weird sense that the rise of the RRR and crowdfunding are part of an unguided and unconscious evolution of the videogame within the corrupted biome of late-stage capitalism. I’ve written before about the sheer decadence of £100m+ development budgets, and how unsustainable the logically-projected upward curve seems to be. I recently saw a TikTok comment on some Space Marine 2 footage claiming that in ten years’ time, there’ll be three AAA releases a year and everything else will be indie and crowdsourced. That seems almost utopian in a way, especially if the credo of the RRR, a sense of forgiveness and collaboration, increasingly becomes normalised. When I love a game, and truly love it in a stupendously irrational sense - cough Starfield cough - I want to invest in it. I want to give the developers my money and my precious time. But in return, I want to know the future plans, you fuckers. With the ongoing build up to Shattered Space, the trad formalism of the campaign is oversaturating me with trivia about the DLC (that I would much rather discover for myself) at the expense of outlining, or even hinting at, what’s next. And this is what I really care about - what is the fucking plan? How many Shattered Spaces are you (at least) hoping to produce? What is Bethesda’s actual intent for the game? What degree will community feedback contribute to the outcomes? These are likely anathema to a rigid corporation, but they are also the kind of information around which followings can build, around which communities can grow and user investments be made. Within the Starfield carapace, I would be 100% happy to contribute to crowdsourcing future content - if you can respect me enough to tell me what you want to actually do. I don’t mean everyone giving £10 to resolve the position of the ECS Constant, but I think a hybrid model of traditional retail with crowdsourced post-release fixing and content would make for a far more fitter animal than the seemingly inflexible, inscrutable roadmap model and passive consumerism we have now. Obviously it demands a kind of transparency pre-release (and post) that the current corporate and platform-holder status quo absolutely cannot accept, and more’s the pity. Yet I’d be so much more trusting of a publisher that would admit it’s considering a RRR process before a game is even released. To make it a feature, because that kind of process delivers results the community tends to like. A kind of qualified trust me bro and a moment of honesty at the same time6. Of course, that would be nonsensical in a traditional business sense, but how long can tradition hold against a market that evolves and adapts at an increasing pace? When the pressures really mount, as they very much seem to be in the AAA space right now, the kitchen will be getting very hot indeed. And if one thing can be predicted with any certainty, it’s that Darwinian maxim about what survives under those selective pressures.
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The PR announcement of a patch with “over 300 fixes” did not fill me with enthusiasm to take up the game, funnily enough.
I long for a platform holder to announce some incredible-looking AAA and then telling us it’s on the storefront right fucking now. The win would be very much epic, as they would say in 2007.
One can’t rule out some spectral influence from the old days of healthy physical retail outlets and their demands for when product can go onto shelves, which aside media duplication windows, was the prime factor for determining a release date. As we inevitably transition to wholly digital platform, will the old process fade into some much more modern approach? I fucking hope so.
I have a theory that the female protag was going to be the ‘big reveal’ for Grand Theft Auto 6 and having the hack/leak reveal that before any formal PR campaign had even started was a seismic shock, hence punching another year onto the dev cycle to presumably add a new ‘big reveal’. Then having the teaser leak early on YouTube was perhaps the funniest thing to happen in videogame marketing this decade. There’s always been certain pomposity to Rockstar’s obsession with secrecy and here, it bit them on the ass twice.
And therein lies the rub, perhaps. Grand Theft Auto 6 is an absolute whale of a product and if Grand Theft Auto 5 was anything to go by, its marketing budget will be extreme. The irony of course is that it really doesn’t need it. They could do a ‘Beyoncé dropping Lemonade’ with zero publicity, and still hit profit on day one. You have to then question why something that destined for certain success needs a wildly expensive marketing and PR campaign in the first place (which was a question I asked thirteen years ago).
What this could do, of course, is change the nature of what would be present at release and what it means to buy for day one. It could be the rebirth of episodic-style models, or partial rolling content releases that are much better fits for digital platforms than dropping a huge glob of content that was rushed to meet the date and then fixing it afterwards. At the very least it would represent change, which is something it seems may become necessary at the top end of the market.