What constitutes a 'totally fucked' game launch?

[Stark]

Recently Demigod came out, and Stardock totally fucked the launch (by their own admission). They totally underestimated the server load and issues with their netcode, and the game is still suffering weeks later.

This made me think. Given how critical the early period is for sales, and how important reviews are (and in this regard Demigod got excoriated by many review sites for the connection issues), how much can you fuck up a launch and still 'suceed'?

Plenty of games come out with show-stopping bugs, unfinished content, day-1 patches for missing featuers, all kinds of crap. Some of them sink without a trace, but some do fine regardless as everyone waits for the support.

What is the determining feature here? If you're launching a strange and somewhat non-standard game and totally fuck it up, is that worse than messing up a predictable, firm-genre game that nerds will play even if it formats their computer?

[Thanas]

Yes, sure.

Medieval 2 was completely messed up and they still managed to sell a lot of copies.

[Stark]

Even within Stardock's range of software, they've got games like Sins that launched with massive absurd balance issues, but this wasn't a 'show stopper' so the game sold well. Demigod was sold as competitive multi, but for several days after launch a lot of people couldn't get in to multi, and I believe it's suffered.

In the Medieval example, were there 'show stoppers'?

[CaptHawkeye]

Their were repeated instances in the game where player infantry would literally stand idle and let enemies kill them. Even if you gave them an attack order.

Enemy AI generals would always rush your battle line head on and die every time as a result. That's just what I can remember off the top of my head. I have faint recollections of other unbelievably stupid moves by the AI that could only be explained by negligence in design.

I know all of this is pretty characteristic of CA though.

[Mr Bean]

Anarchy Online, MMORPG
The following issues happend during the first month of launch
1. The servers went down for three days in a row
2. Over twenty patches were released, some nearly 50 megabytes in size back during the days when it was 56k or ISDN for most of the players
3. They were twice forced to roll back servers because there were well know easy to exploit duping exploits that lead to people hitting they money limit by duplicating semi-expensive loot (Fun fact, the limit back then was 999 million credits, you could buy one of every for everything sold by NPC's for about 400 million credits)
4. Server crashes four times a day, Zone crashes by appointment

Anarchy Online was famous as a game that went from Alpha to Beta then the next week launched. The fact it still has a follow is a minor miracle. The game was complete and utter shit for the first two months of release. Falling through geometry, exploits, unbalanced combat. Broken PVP due to unbalanced combat and exploits.

Oh and best of all? You could lose levels, not as in die and lose enough XP to go down a level, but like you could log in as a level 1 nekked character one day due to database issues the had.

Nothing by Xenu will ever top Anarchy Online's first two months of hell.

[The Yosemite Bear]

cite obligatory Duke Nukem Forever/Daikatana refrence....

Though a while ago, I recall being part of the Hellgate Beta, including the multi-play crashes, and the clipping errors (yes you could attack/be attacked behind walls, you could also get stuck between the walls)

[Commander 598]

I played Medieval 2 right out of the box, unpatched. It wasn't that bad as far as "How the hell can they even release something like this?" is concerned but I might just be comparing it to the likes of GTA4 ("Bogus system requirements? What? It's totally running, I don't what you're all complaining about.") and ETW ("It's totally are intention to not include interesting and entertaining features, as is making Native Americans supermen with terrible morale.").

[General Zod]

Recently Demigod came out, and Stardock totally fucked the launch (by their own admission). They totally underestimated the server load and issues with their netcode, and the game is still suffering weeks later.

This made me think. Given how critical the early period is for sales, and how important reviews are (and in this regard Demigod got excoriated by many review sites for the connection issues), how much can you fuck up a launch and still 'suceed'?

Plenty of games come out with show-stopping bugs, unfinished content, day-1 patches for missing featuers, all kinds of crap. Some of them sink without a trace, but some do fine regardless as everyone waits for the support.

What is the determining feature here? If you're launching a strange and somewhat non-standard game and totally fuck it up, is that worse than messing up a predictable, firm-genre game that nerds will play even if it formats their computer?

I think marketing hype is a big factor here. Remember Spore and their securom snafu?

[Quetzalcoatl]

1up did a feature on this a while back:

http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3166996

I'm surprised none of you mentioned Hellgate London, considering all the hype it got in the UK (and some part of Europe).

[starfury]

I'm surprised none of you mentioned Hellgate London, considering all the hype it got in the UK (and some part of Europe).

Yeah, Hellgate it's launch even got special term coined after them, Flagshipped in reference to both company name and how awful launch not only sunk the game, but the company with it.

[The Yosemite Bear]

actually I DID mention Hellgate London, as I'm one of the Beta testers for it.

[Crazy_Vasey]

Fallout 2. The game was nearly totally unplayable at launch[1] and the patch was savegame-incompatible. I love the games Black Isle and its spawn make but they can't make the bloody things work to save their lives.

[1] The game has a massive, game-breaking bug even post patches. Don't do those hubologist quests whatever you do.

[The_Saint]

The Hellgate London issues were quite reminiscent for me of the AO bugs...

Even after the first two months there were more issues than you could poke a stick at in AO from people being able stack their stats so high that with high strength/agility you would get stuck in ceilings and a particular class that could shrink that would consistenly get so small they would fall through ground geometry. Was falling damage on.. or off... or was it back on.. the weight system that would suddenly abandon the laws of physics and backpacks end up the equivalent of several tonnes and you'd be walking .01 km/h, pets would turn on their owners if they lost line of sight, you could turn any mob into a pet, name it and then release it leading to half the mobs on the planet named after body parts. Oh those silly old days...

[Psychic_Sandwich]

What is the determining feature here? If you're launching a strange and somewhat non-standard game and totally fuck it up, is that worse than messing up a predictable, firm-genre game that nerds will play even if it formats their computer?

I think a large part of whether a game survives a shit launch or not is brand recognition. To take Empire as an example, it's a not particularly fantastic game which had a fair number of launch issues (Steam not downloading the whole game, Steam letting you play the game before the download finished, Steam going on strike and not bothering to download at all, etc, etc), but it's going to be one of the most successful games of the year. Oblivion is another example, although without the launch day bullfuckery; it's an aggressively mediocre game, but it still won Game of the Year and all that shit, simply because it was made by Bethsoft and was part of the Elder Scrolls series, so it had to be good, damnit. If you're a semi-well known company with a dedicated fanbase of any sort of size, you could distribute dog turds inside DVD cases and still contrive to have that be a success. Companies in that position which screw up a launch can be certain that there will be hordes of people who will buy the game anyway, at least long enough for them to fix the issues.

If, on the other hand, you're a small, fairly unknown company and don't have a bunch of slobbering fans propping you up, if you fuck up a launch, it's entirely possible that you could be sunk before you can fix things or that you simply don't get enough players in the first place because nobody's going to buy a game from an unknown developer that they've heard has problems.

If, say, Bioware, had been the ones making Hellgate: London, the game would have been a success, because every CRPG fan in the world would have bought it on the strength of the name alone. For that matter, you could argue that the entire reason NWN and NWN2 were successful is because of Bioware name recognition; the first was basically a tech demo of the construction kit, and the second was riddled with bugs and problems at launch, but they got a pass on that because, y'know, Bioware!

[Stark]

I remember particularly Auron's Fury, a game whose mechanics were so obviously stupid and broken that they changed them RIGHT BEFORE LAUNCH, so not only was the manual worthless but their site was totally out of date too. They also managed to fuck up the UE3.0 engine so bad it ran like shit while LOOKING like shit, and they had the common netcode issues. They were so leveraged on the game that the second it wasn't a massive success they WENT BANKRUPT.