Comic for Friday 7/28 (Early High Res) (Patreon)

My oldest has graduated from tablet and console gaming, to now playing some games on my PC. One of the games he plays is technically in early access, so it's been a lot more exposure to the "sometimes things don't work right" side of gaming.

When he asks me something like this, on the one hand it cuts to the very heart of an important matter we all feel: Yeah, why don't they make sure the game works before releasing it? It makes me realize how very numb and resigned I've become to the idea that games might launch with issues, and then they (hopefully) get fixed afterwards. That's not to say I'm fundamentally okay with it, just that I'm very used to it.

On the other hand, while I don't make video games myself, I've been around them long enough to have developed a cursory understanding of how ridiculously complicated they are, especially these days. Exponentially more complex than they've ever been, with more moving parts and (especially for PCs) more combinations of hardware that make adequate testing a herculean feat. Add in things like budgets, and unrealistic publishers, crunch and servers and DRM and  there are a billion different reasons for a game to have bugs. It's not always as simple as "they didn't care" or "they're bad at their jobs."

I wish he could maintain this youthful gaming innocence, this perspective that games "just work" (because when he was only playing console games that had been out for a long time, they did just work). But that's not the world of video games he's growing up in.