Sony and Microsoft's Failed Releases Since E3 2014

SlappingOysters writes: Ahead of E3 2015, which begins next week, Grab It has undertaken an analysis of the games announced at the big E3 press conferences for Sony and Microsoft last year, and reveals — amongst other data — that 60% of Microsoft's announced titles remain unreleased a year later, and 50% of Sony's announced titles remain unreleased. The article then debates whether this is good enough for both companies as they fight for market share.

Comments

Great!

[ExekielS]

Great, maybe it means they are trying to ensure the games are quality and actually finished when released instead of the half assed unfinished shit that has been being released the past several years.

Re:Great!

[Xest]

Yes, the same is true of Nintendo also. In fact, you can stretch it all the way to companies like Valve on the PC too.

The fact is that 1st party console titles, and titles from top developers like Valve are of consistently higher quality than those from other publishers.

The fact they take their time and even cancel stuff that is sub-par should not be seen as a bad thing. This is probably one of the weakest attempts at console bashing to date on Slashdot, games like TF2 on the PC underwent countless cancellations, revisions, and restarts before they finally saw the light of day as decent and successful titles.

Worse, the article is even complaining that some titles that haven't come out yet aren't out yet, even though it was never once suggested they'd be out yet. Take Crackdown for example in the Microsoft article- Crackdown was never ever meant to be anything other than a 2016 release, so why is it a problem that it's not out yet?

This article seems to be complaining that some sections of the industry are actually taking their time and doing things properly, when those sections of the industry - MGS, Sony 1st party titles, Nintendo 1st party titles, Valve's own titles, Blizzards own titles and so forth where development takes a long time but the titles are consistently good are exactly what the industry needs more of, not less of.

These articles are exactly why we get broken games - because some 'tards think it's more important to have a completely forgettable broken game that fails to deliver now, instead of a great game that we'll remember fondly for years after it's released in two or three more years time.

Re:Great!

[Xest]

But the problem is it's not the corporations lying here, it's the people who wrote the article. As I pointed out, there was never any suggestion that most of those games would be out yet.

What lie have they told here exactly?

One by one, the games they're complaining about:

Dance Central Spotlight - Released
Ori and the Blind Forest - Released
Phantom Dust - Delayed because subcontracted developers failed to meet contract
Crackdown - Always a 2016 release, still on track
Scalebound - No release date ever given
Forza Horizon 2 - Released
Sunset Overdrive - Released
Project Spark - Released
Halo 5: Guardians - To be released on time in September
Fable Legends - No release date ever given

Entwined - Released
Bloodborne - Released
LittleBigPlanet 3 - Released
Abzu - No release date ever given
Let It Die - Delayed
Uncharted 4: A Thiefâ(TM)s End - Delayed
The Order: 1886 - Released
No Manâ(TM)s Sky - No release date ever given

There are actually only 3 broken promises in there, out of 18 titles. I don't think that's terribly bad and is far better than the industry norm.

I'd rather the journalists just stop lying for page hits above all else quite frankly. I think that's a far far bigger problem in the industry than absolutely anything else.

exclusive

[chill]

The summary forgot the word "exclusive" as in "exclusive to PlayStation" or "exclusive to Xbox".

multi-platform titles fared much better, but can't be used as a reason to buy one console over another.

So how are open source projects any better?

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, so software development schedules sometimes slip for big companies. But how is that news?

More importantly, how is open source software any better?

Here I am, using Firefox. It's an open source web browser. For years we've been promised that it will support using multiple processes, like Chrome has for so long, sometime "soon". But as the years go by, the hope for this critical functionality fades. While we can use a half-arsed attempt at this functionality with the nightly Firefox releases, it's not very stable. Meanwhile, the Firefox devs have trashed Firefox's UI, and infected it with stupid shit like a half-arsed communication system and ads.

Firefox isn't the only open source project that fails to deliver. GNOME 3 is another excellent example. They didn't just trash their UI, but the entire GNOME user experience was shot to hell years ago. We're still waiting for something usable to come out of the GNOME faction, yet we see absolutely nothing of value being produced.

At least Microsoft and Sony achieve 40% to 50% of what they say they're going to do. That's a lot better than the 0% that we see from so many open source projects. Heck, if we could how Firefox and GNOME have gotten so much worse over time, their accomplishment rate is more in the vicinity of -70%! That's right, by trying to accomplish things they've actually set themselves further back than they were when they started!

Good (insert "Good" cat meme image here)

[ArcadeMan]

Announcing upcoming games? Great!

Announcing upcoming games with a godamn release date from the marketing department that will all but insure that the developers won't have time to code and test everything properly? Extremely bad!

Do one thing and do it well

[xarragon]

"Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent,"

My favorite Jobs quote (though I would never buy an Apple product myself). Some projects should perhaps die. In the software realm a lot of projects live unnaturally long lives; stagnating into maintenance with cosmetic rather than functional innovation.

It feels like a lot of projects, FOSS or commercial, has forgotten how to build better mousetraps and now focuses solely on mousetraps with rounded corners or some cloud tie-in service.

In the case of Mozilla I have no idea what they are doing now. It gained traction because the existing monoculture was stagnating. Remember the days when people got excited about tabbed browsing? Innovation by window management in an application. Then came the adblockers. They were all innovations that benefitted both developers and users alike. Better mousetraps.

The last round of "innovation" has only helped to line the pockets of the foundation itself, integrating advertisement and third-party proprietary stuff into the browser.

"Choose your enemies well, for it is them you will most come to resemble."

I guess Firefox chose Chrome and Google.

3 of the 5 titles for MS & 'rusted on'?

[shoor]

I actually read the first 3 or 4 paragraphs of the Microsoft link. That 60% is 60% of 5 exclusive games, which doesn't sound all that statistically significant.

There was a line "Whether you're a rusted on fan or still on the fence looking to make a purchase decision" (italics mine). Is 'rusted on' a new expression or was that a typo for 'trusted on' (which doesn't even sound as good as 'rusted on' to me)?