News Eidos Montreal delays Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

Every time I see a story like this, I think 'great decision'. Hopefully the AAAs are finally learning that we'd rather wait than have a buggy game. It killed BF4 for me.

 

I'm still upset about Battlefield 4. Another 6 months wouldn't have hurt them at all.

 

I think what they're learning is that now Steam refunds are there and easily accessible releasing half finished crap no longer guarantees a profit.

'Eh it'll ship half a million on Steam, who cares if it works we keep the money either way,' I can only imagine the waves of panic that particular change brought in publishers round the world.

 

That 6 months was on a time-critical schedule though, driven by the EA slavedrivers. If they'd just held the release to iron out the bugs, it would've probably been another year at least before release.

 

I'm more worried about the amount of publishers who just decide not to develop for the PC at all as we're pretty forgiving of bugs for the most part.

 

I don't think that's going to be a big problem. Outside of first party developers the PC market is too big to simply ignore, plus the way Steam takes it's money from sales presents less of a financial risk than the console makers and their demands for lumps of money before you can release or update anything.

 

Good call. We've seen enough backlash from turkey AAA titles.

BF4 pretty much disbanded the Battlefield community. The few people I do know that still play Battlefield went back to BF3. Plus we have the whole Batman debacle still fresh in our minds.

DE:HR should be in everyones Steam library now, as every sale it on for peanuts, which has no correlation to the quality of the game. I'll patiently wait for release and review.

 

Even employing modern engineering principles, software projects are a still a notoriously difficult thing to plan and predict.

I wonder how many free hours of labour EA and their ilk get by pushing tight deadlines on software development teams. Salaried employees doing a few hours extra here and there, or maybe constantly, trying to meet their targets. It all adds up over the few years of development of a big game. Of course tight deadlines usually means ultra rushed code, that is poorly written and hard to support and that wasn't tested properly.

 

I'm sure you've heard about Rockstar's notorious overtime pulling to get a game out the door on time.
Personally, I would hate to work under those conditions, but they seem to get the job done.

 

No I wasn't aware, but reading about it, it doesn't surprise me. Those guys worked longer days than contracted, with no extra pay and a loss of personal time so that a few at the top of the company or shareholders could make billions. Where is the sense in that?

I'm willing to cut an employer some slack with extra hours if what I'm doing is helping me learn a skill which I can monetise or boost my profile with later on down the line. But if I'm just doing what I do, pay me or its gtfo.

No way I would work in the games industry.