Ship it when it's finished
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 is the latest game to ship half-assed on the Macintosh. Specifically, the game lacks multiplayer and force-feedback capabilities. Aspyr Media is promising that a patch with these capabilities will ship within two weeks. If there's one dead horse I've been continuously beating for the past while in my talks with Mac game developers, it's "ship it when it's done."
This annoying trend surfaced about a year and a half ago when MacPlay shipped out a few titles that hadn't been completely finished. Feral Interactive did the same thing with their Mac release of Black and White. So this isn't an isolated or unique incident, by any stretch.
Now, I can understand why it happens -- publishers are on deadlines to get titles on store shelves before they start getting dinged by retailers and penalized by their publishing partners. But I think it's unfair to expect the consumer to be aware enough of what's going on to buy the game and then have to download a patch -- presuming it's even released fairly quickly -- to get the title to work properly.
Comments
I was just working on an editorial about the same thing, actually.
Posted by: Corey | February 11, 2003 03:06 PM
BTW, a correction: The trend began with GraphSim and Baldur's Gate.
Posted by: Corey | February 11, 2003 03:06 PM
But will Aspyr have the same class as MacPlay to put a flyer in the box drawing attention to this fact?
Posted by: Dan Dickinson | February 11, 2003 03:13 PM
You mean the class to tell people AFTER they bought it that it's incomplete? :)
Posted by: Corey | February 11, 2003 11:28 PM
I think the real lack in mac gaming is not enough crappy synthetic benchmarks. Where is our 3DMark 2003 so everyone can bitch and moan about how it has no bearing on reality and the pixel shader revisions aren't proper for true next generation support and driver manufacturers only optimize for the benchmark, etc etc... I die a little inside every day when I realize the mac gaming community doesn't have nearly enough backstabbing and contention. How are we to keep up with our comrades from anandtech, sharkyextreme, hardocp, and more?
Posted by: nobody | February 12, 2003 12:18 AM
Shut up, Rura.
Posted by: Dan Dickinson | February 12, 2003 12:22 AM
You've penetrated my disguise. I guess I'm not Dana Carvey after all.
turtle turtle?
Posted by: Rura | February 12, 2003 12:33 AM