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Saboteur Launch Plagued By Problems With ATI Cards

Posted by Soulskill on from the more-or-less-finished dept.

An anonymous reader writes "So far, there are over 35 pages of people posting about why EA released Pandemic Studios' final game, Saboteur, to first the EU on December 4th and then, after knowing full well it did not work properly, to the Americas on December 8th. They have been promising to work on a patch that is apparently now in the QA stage of testing. It is not a small bug; rather, if you have an ATI video card and either Windows 7 or Windows Vista, the majority (90%) of users have the game crash after the title screen. Since the marketshare for ATI is nearly equal to that of Nvidia, and the ATI logo is adorning the front page of the Saboteur website, it seems like quite a large mistake to release the game in its current state."

1 of 230 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Saboteur, hey? by eulernet · · Score: 5, Informative

    Unfortunately, the games industry is being pushed by customer demand and sabotaged by shrinking budgets from the corporate side.

    Definitely no.

    I worked for the video game industry, and this has nothing to do with QA or anything...
    The period of the year when the games sell well is Christmas.
    But selling your game at Christmas means that the game MUST be ready by the end of September.
    If you miss September, you can say goodbye to make money with your game (especially if it's crappy).
    There is also a small period at the beginning of January: parents gave money to their children, and the children tend to buy games.

    In general, the company does not care if the game is ready for launch or not, because it does not want to miss the launch date, so the game is sold in the state it is in September.
    Also, the company believes that a patch will be available by December and won't affect most of the customers, since the game is scheduled to be played after the Christmas sales.
    Only the early customers will discover the problem.
    Note also that when a crappy game is published, the company behind the game does not send the game to the magazines, since it does not want to ruin its Christmas sales.

    QA has probably found the problem before September, but the marketing department told that the game must be available whatever the circumstances are.

    So, instead of blaming QA or developers, blame the marketing department instead !