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Game Phone Home!
Author: Cliff HarrisPublished: 13th July 2008
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Comments 26 to 35 of 35
Uh... are we testing bugtesting/Quality Assessment, or are we talking balance tweaking?
I thought the whole point of what was being said in the article was that it wasn't so much going to be bugtesting the game, as balance testing the game - whether a certain weapon dominates, or a power is used (or not, whichever) and whether costs, tactics, AI routines etc have to be tweaked? Seeing how gamers play the game, and adjusting the game accordingly.
If we head into the 'bugtesting' realm... then a similar routine to Microsoft is sensible - "Oh, your game crashed or there were texture glitches - do you want to send blah-blah an error report? Y/N?"
What game genre isnt represented in Steams catalogue?
To be honest, there are so many flaws with what you say that it's hard to tackle them head on. Everything you say is plausible in an ideal world, but realisitically is completely impractical for a indie game dev. If you really think it's that easy then I'd love to see you put your money where you mouth is. There is a huge difference between people who play an open beta and people who properly test a game.
http://www.calendarlive.com/music/cl-wk-tester24nov24,0,169991.story
They won't give out free copies of their games so why should they get free labour from game testers?
I did some game testing for THQ in Frontlines: Fuel of War, in the open beta test.
Despite them having a competition to name servers and them using several of the names I entered (they were original names not entered by anyone else) I never got the copy of Frontlines that was the prize for them using any of the names, never even heard from them about it and when I tried pulling them up on it on their forums (after e-mailing them several times) the thread I started was deleted quickly, they had also moved the competition thread to a part of the forums where I could not access so I could not get the proof that I had entered the names.
I put this expectation of game testers to work for free in the same boat as big companies that expect the government to pay for them to upgrade facilities, expand operations or start new operations when the company can easily afford it from their profits, how dare a company that makes for example $X hundred million in profits expect the government to cough up $X million to help them make more money when they could easily use some of that $X hundred million profit, I know they usually have shareholders to look after but part of running a business is re-investing some of the profits to expand and improve the business, it is just greed to expect handouts.
The argument that the government will get a return from increased tax or the benefit to the community makes it ok is ridiculous, the company can afford it and should pay for it themselves, the money they expect from the government should be going to what governments were set up for in the first place, funding healthcare, education and infrastructure from our tax dollars.
If they can't keep the business going on their own then they have no place being in business, if they can't accept a little less profit now in order to increase profit in the future then boo smegging hoo :'(
As for data collection it must be completely optional and transparent otherwise they can smeg off!
As for the desire to collect data...umm...it's been going on for at least a decade. Microsoft has been collecting data in both automated fashion (logging & transmitting data to servers) and in-person testing like you describe (it's actually called user-research, not testing).
References:
* automated logging: see Halo 2 & 3's webpage--massive amount of stats about gameplay, available to individual players.
* user-research: finding people to test games is actually quite easy, and you don't have to set up a LAN tournament (in fact, I advise against that). See the Wired article about the user-research Microsoft did for Halo 3 (600 unique users played, for a total of 3000 hours--and that doesn't include the beta). http://www.wired.com/gaming/virtualworlds/magazine/15-09/ff_halo
The reason that I'm only citing Halo stuff is because they talk about it publicly. But in the past few years, Valve, Infinity Ward, and Bungie have all given presentations where they cite how critical playtesting/user-research is to polishing a game.
And, as for the costs and practicality of doing user-research as an indie game developer, the costs are quite reasonable. (Automated data logging systems are very time & resource intensive right now, and probably beyond the reach of indie developers.)
To learn more in general, just put in 'games user research' into Google. Eventually, you'll even come across my consulting company by the 2nd page. :)
You say you want to collect this information from your customers, well have you even bothered to try asking them. Have you tried to distribute a system information application with your games that has the option to "phone home" after asking if it may, or even better let it create a plain text file that could be sent back so people know what's being sent, now what's wrong with that? If you have tried that and people aren't letting it phone home maybe that's the message you should be getting, it's none of your business unless the customer decides to make it yours. Trying to justify this feces by saying you just want to know their computer setup is horse manure.
As for DRM, the only thing it manages to accomplish is pissing off legitimate customers. I know people who have had to turn to piracy just to use something they've already purchased, Bioshock for example since it happens to be the picture used, You think it stops piracy? You think it even delays it? If you want to fight piracy lower the damn prices, the cost of games is totally ridiculous.
I will never purchase anything that has to phone home to work, let alone something that can be deactivated from afar. Do you think that's stopped anyone from using any such product?
"software that traps us could also be used to free us."
Oh wow, really.
Don't worry, it's clear you would prefer game developers to ignore what YOU want and like. That's fine with me. Nice rant about DRM too, not vaguely the topic of the column, but hey, don't let that get in your way right?