PC V2.0 Storms Brewing Dev Diary

Joel's primary posting place was originally Facebook. He would drop links here on the forum to his facebook development journal. Eventually, he abandoned Facebook and started posting primarily on this forum. That changed again eventually to posting on X and then again on Reddit which is where he currently likes to post.

All of his posts end up here to be discussed. As for official TFP announcements and updates they have chosen X as the primary outlet but again that gets disseminated to here as well. If you go to their official website all of their official announcements are there going back 10 years and of course when an update is released there is usually a steam announcement as well.
 
A method you could do is say nothing until a release is a few weeks from being really done, then announce you will release it 3 months from now, which should mostly guarantee success, if there were such a thing. I think some companies do that, but it is really hard to be that patient with all the pressure to build hype and get products out the door.

Another method is to have marketing executives who insist on making the date and expect programmers to pull all-nighters in the weeks leading up to that date, force the team to push out the update before it is ready, and then have community management people out there spinning damage control...
 
Another method is to have marketing executives who insist on making the date and expect programmers to pull all-nighters in the weeks leading up to that date, force the team to push out the update before it is ready, and then have community management people out there spinning damage control...
Yep, I did leave out the AAA technique of "can you play it?", cut features, ship it now and fix the bugs after.
 
Yep, I did leave out the AAA technique of "can you play it?", cut features, ship it now and fix the bugs after.
That describes EA perfectly. They've messed up so many games. It's unfortunate considering there have been a lot of games released through them that could have been so much better if the dev studios didn't use EA. To be clear, that' the company "EA" and not short for Early Access.

I definitely prefer things being released late but with everything in a good place rather than early with everything clearly not finished. Honestly, I thought 2.0 was rushed out and would have been better left for at least another few weeks considering how many problems there were with it that needed fixed right away. But overall, I think TFP does a good job of waiting to do releases until things are in a good place.
 
Another method is to have marketing executives who insist on making the date and expect programmers to pull all-nighters in the weeks leading up to that date, force the team to push out the update before it is ready, and then have community management people out there spinning damage control...
You missed my new favorite.

Release an update patch at 2AM, radio silence for at least 48 hours, then you get a lone dev posting on Steam Forum to head to their Discord for the Notes days after they break your save because you're playing Russian Roulette when you load up the update.

Or even better, the always informative "General fixes and improvements to gameplay" that 2K includes in EVERY patch note.
 
Back
Top