The REAL reason why GTA IV was released broken
Category: Industry, Posted: 04/30/2008 at 04:01PM CDT by Frank Ling, Editorial Director
When I first heard of the GTA IV problems with freezes and crashes, my first thought was that the testing department screwed up royally by allowing such a big fat bug pass through. But after I thought about this for a while, I suddenly realized that it probably wasn't the case at all.
If anything, the testers probably found the error and production decided to go ahead and release the game anyway. Why? Because GTA was scheduled for release on April 29 and Hell or high water, it was going to be released on that day.
Imagine the embarrassment of Rockstar if they had to issue a press release saying, "Due to unforeseen circumstances, GTA IV will be delayed until further notice..." Can you see the chaos that would have started?
Millions of fans that pre-ordered the game would have been left with their asses hanging in the breeze. People who took off from work to pick up and play the game would have had their vacation time burned up for no reason at all.
Let's think this over. The testing department at Rockstar would have had to be totally brain dead to allow such a bug to go undetected. Also, games just don't get tested in-house.
The game had to also pass the quality control boards of Sony and Microsoft as well. Sony has a TRC (Technical Requirements Checklist) that is a thing of beauty and horror to behold because passing all these things on a first pass is a rarity.
So how could Microsoft, Sony and Rockstar miss these glaring errors? My theory is that a "deal" was made to push the game through. I can almost hear Rockstar saying to Sony and Microsoft:
"Sure, we know it's broken, but cut us some slack here...we can always release a patch later. And besides, think of all the MONEY you'll lose if we don't release it on time..."
Of course, it just could be that the testers totally missed the installation bug, Sony's top testing review board could have missed this error and Microsoft's Quality Control guys missed this big bug as well.
If we're supposed to believe that, then the convergence of the planets may have had something to do with this too.
I hate patches that attempt to fix glaring issues after I buy the game.
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I don't even understand what's "broken," my game's been working swimmingly well. Aside from some multiplayer hiccups in setting up a game, and a lock in a Hangman's NOOSE game, it's run nothing but flawlessly.
I think this 'Patching conspiracy" is going way too far. Maybe the bug did go unnoticed? Maybe they only tried it on specific systems, have you seen dev systems? There like 5 or 6 systems stacked on top of each other. A long time ago if this were to happen, gamers would blame it on bad programing, and just give it another go next time. Now too many are qucik to the jump on "THEY JUST WANTED TO RELEASE IT!!!" You want to know something? They would have made more money had they waited, more preorders, more people buying systems, and definitely more interest. I honestly feel it was a bug.
No way. They would have lost major points with all the people who would have had to wait for their precious game. Can you imagine all the pissed off people who would have taken vacation time or school time off to pick up their game only to find that it was unavailable? Who would trust a pre-order from them again? They would have lost major bucks with a lack of confidence from gamers around world with a stunt like that, not to mention all the bad publicity. Between the two evils, they probably choose to go with shipping the broken game.
In the industry today, there are so many hoops and obstacles to go through in order to get a game through QA from the developers and Microsoft and Sony that a bug like this is virtually impossible to let through.
In the game industry, there are always "shippable bugs" but major bugs like this are an immediate flag to fail the game and have the developers fix the issues before they can get the stamp of approval. No, it wasn't just a bug that slipped by. Sony has each and every PS3 console since release to try out the games to see if they work. The QA guys at Sony are the "Top Guns" of their kind. They can sniff out bugs with their eyes closed.
Microsoft missed this bug too? Not likely at all. You'd have to say that RockStar, Sony and Microsoft missed this big bug. Not likely if not impossible.
Forget about all of the people that where waiting in line, if the game didn't release take2 stocks would fall and EA would be able to swoop in and buy them for a song.