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The free version of DriveClub for PlayStation Plus members may never be released, Sony has admitted.
That’s still being looked at,” Sony Computer Entertainment Europe president and CEO Jim Ryan told Metro when asked about the release. When pressed on whether he could guarantee” that it will be released, Ryan replied: I can’t say anything at this stage.”
DriveClub launched on PS4 last October but was beset with technical problems from the off. So serious were the issues that the planned release of a free version for PSN subscribers was put on ice and eventually postponed until further notice”.
In November Sony said that it remained committed to releasing the free version of the game.
In the context of Driveclub, which as you say did not work correctly at launch, I gotta tell you that everybody [at Sony London] and in the development community was absolutely distraught that that was the case,” Ryan added of the game’s post-launch struggles.
I don’t think anybody should labour under the opinion that there was any feeling of insouciance or anybody being relaxed about that being the case. People were working 24/7, and that’s an expression that’s lightly used but people were working 24/7 trying to fix this. Now, should the game have worked at launch? Of course. Should people pay 50 for something and expect it to work? Of course.
And QAing this stuff… a lot of it is load placed on servers, simply due to concurrency. It’s hard. Again, that’s not to excuse publishing something that’s not fit for purpose. In any form of entertainment, in any business… whether it’s a washing machine, whether it’s a book, whether it’s television, whether it’s a video game you shouldn’t put something out until it’s ready.
One would hope, and certainly we’ve learnt an awful lot from the Driveclub experience, that those mistakes, once made, should not be repeated.”
