Publishers have learnt nothing from broken game fiasco, warn bug testers

Major games this Christmas could launch with crippling bugs, just like in 2014.

That’s the warning from leading games testing firms, who insist too many publishers have not learnt their lessons from Q4 last year, which saw a number of titles arriving with game-breaking issues, such as Halo: The Master Chief Collection, DriveClub and Assassin’s Creed Unity.

The run up to this Christmas will be no different to the last one,” Pole to Win localisation director Chris Rowley warned.

Console games are expensive to develop, so missing a street date is not an acceptable situation to a publisher. Day One patches have become the norm over the last few years to try and address this, but the reality is that it often takes several patches where a title is significantly behind schedule.”

Universally Speaking QA manager James Cubitt says that there has been some improvement from game creators, but it’s still not enough.

It is getting better, but far from solved,” he told MCV. People need to stop seeing delays as a bad thing, both companies and the user base. The number of companies that just squeeze QA testing into the remaining period, without sufficient time to then fix the issues and re-test, is hurting their own titles in the long run.”