Quote from: HrfulTurkie on June 16, 2016, 03:05:36 PM

They are; it takes some time to produce and ship the games, just like a car doesn't magically appear on the lot when it's finished being built.

It takes a month to do that, at most. You see all the time the "X game has gone gold" announcements a month before the game releases.

Developers should use the time before release to work on the game they're going to ship -- not stuff that'll come out later, for more money.

It's like QA, bug fixing, and other polish work doesn't exist or something. Games are content complete months before launch, but that doesn't mean they're ready to go out on the presses and be sold to consumers.

Quote from: LC on June 16, 2016, 09:30:29 PM

It's like QA, bug fixing, and other polish work doesn't exist or something. Games are content complete months before launch, but that doesn't mean they're ready to go out on the presses and be sold to consumers.

Then the game isn't "complete". Complete means finished, ready for store shelves.

Which is why I said it's content complete. Everything that's going to be in the game is in it at that point and work from there on out is polish work. People who are not involved in this part of development (like the art team) are put to work on post release content because it's better to put your people to work than it is to have them sit around and do nothing for a couple months.

Quote from: LC on June 16, 2016, 11:04:33 PM

People who are not involved in this part of development (like the art team) are put to work on post release content because it's better to put your people to work than it is to have them sit around and do nothing for a couple months.

Oh, then yeah. I agree with that. I was referring more to people who are a bit more directly tied into the actual game itself, rather than its conception, working on post-release content prior to release. That's something I don't think should be acceptable.

The thing is though is that you don't need 100% of the people who start working on that polish stage to stay on it throughout the development cycle. The "polish team" as we'll call it gets smaller over time as less people are needed for the work they're doing as things get closer to release and those people who are no longer needed for the polishing are put to work building the things the art team has been cooking up in the mean time.

Quote from: LC on June 16, 2016, 11:14:33 PM

The thing is though is that you don't need 100% of the people who start working on that polish stage to stay on it throughout the development cycle. The "polish team" as we'll call it gets smaller over time as less people are needed for the work they're doing as things get closer to release and those people who are no longer needed for the polishing are put to work building the things the art team has been cooking up in the mean time.

So then what do we do about the current situation we find ourselves in regarding DLC and pre-order BS and all of this crap?

As much as I'd like to say that the best solution is to not buy bogus DLC and not pre-order people who go to forums and discuss stuff like this are in the minority. The vast majority of people who play games these days will buy bogus DLC and buy into pre-order incentives and I'm guilty of doing this occasionally as well. There's not much you can do about it, that's just the way the industry is and will be for the foreseeable future.

I mean a way to combat this might be to raise the price of games to cover for the massively increased cost of developing them, but at the end of the day these are businesses looking to make a profit (our entertainment is just a byproduct of it) so it would probably only be a matter of time until they tried to slip in bogus DLC and pre-order incentives as a form of potential bonus revenue as well.

In short, I have no idea.