Profit or Quality?

 

You would think that given the number of glitches appearing in most video games these days, that the people responsible for making them would endevour to put out a quality product from the get go. Sadly that isn’t the case. Take the immensely popular Mass Effect trilogy as an example.

By the time the first of the games appeared in 2007, written for Xbox, both Bioware and Electronic Arts realised at the eleventh hour that the Sony platform was the dominant system, owing to Xbox being so unreliable. Subsequently the game was made roughly compatible with Sony’s PS3 system. But like most games originally conceived with just one game platform in mind, instead of doing a total rewrite of the software to make it work with the PS3, Bioware and EA decided to maximize profit in favour of quality.

Fortunately when Mass Effect 2 appeared in 2010, at least the game had become more player friendly from the point of view of ease of control over your character. But like the first game, ME2 had some serious glitches, which were taken care of by a downloadable patch.

Then in 2012 ME3 the third and final game of the franchise appeared. It is relatively glitch free thank goodness. I have installed all of the add-ons for both ME2 and ME3, making both games that bit longer and enjoyable. Had Bioware bothered to totally re-write the first Mass Effect game, making it user friendly, I would also have that on my hard-drive.

Now all we ask for is that the games platform of your choice is made reliable. I had endless trouble with my PS3’s Blueray disc-drive, due to it being a dust trap, thereby rendering it inoperable. That was until I cottoned on to doing away with game discs altogether in favour of direct download to my PS3’s hard-drive. Now the only problem I have is when it decides to lock up for no good reason. When that happens on restarting the platform, the first thing I see is a request for a report from Sony to find out why it locked up. So far I’ve yet to see any improvement in its software, which makes me wonder why they want to know what happened in the first place if they are not going to send a patch to fix the problem?

What everyone in the video game industry has to do is to get out of the habit of profit over quality. It’s a no-brainer, that if you sell a quality product, you will soon gather a faithful following willing to spend money…