Valve: Xbox Live 'such a train wreck' Posted by XanTium | September 9 21:23 EST | News Category: Xbox360

From computerandvideogames.com: [QUOTE] Valve boss Gabe Newell has called his company's assumptions over Xbox Live "such a train wreck". When asked if its mistake on Xbox Live was to assume Microsoft would let Valve update its games more often, Newell said: "We thought that there would be something that would emerge, because we figured it was a sort of untenable... Oh yeah, we understand that these are the rules now, but it's such a train wreck that something will have to change." Microsoft has a notoriously closed approach to its online service compared to PSN, with developers allowed as little as one free title update (though there are exceptions) and limitations on the amount of free game content they can release. [/QUOTE] Full Story: computerandvideogames.com

Wasn't this the guy that was trashing the PS3 a couple years ago?


Anyway I love my Steam so if the guy wants to be a little contradictory far be it for me to say anything...

the very same person indeed ... http://www.joystiq.com/2007/10/11/gabe-new...verybodys-time/

woa...woa...woa... hold on one second... Microsoft only allows ONE free title update for games that may end up needing more than one go to be fully patched for online play without little to no glitches, on a service that we pay for? I think I just found out why devs put dlc on the actual game Disc and have launch day DLC.

Certainly makes sense. I think this also explains why a lot of games don't get bugfixes for minor things, too.

So he talks shit about PS3 to get Sony to budge on something he wants and now he's talking shit about Xbox to no doubt get Microsoft to budge on something he wants. He's full of it.

Wow..1 free title update per game?? You would think that m$ would WANT publishers to desire to make games on their platform and provide a good experience. Guess not.

This seriously makes me reconsider renewing my Live subscription that's about to expire..

Most games I play and love (Saints Row 2, etc.) need a minimum of 2 or 3 title updates before they're really stable. I understand Microsoft's policy, but I think it's a poor business move.

Newell is a ball of lard, but puts out a great product. I love Steam.

He was saying MS's policy of limiting free DLC is a train wreck, not Live as a whole. And he was right.

Why doesn't MS have a taste of its own medicine and allow only one free download for Windows? Remember that dog of an OS called Vista that, on launch day, took about 5 minutes to empty a 1K text file from the recycle bin?

Yeah, thought so.

That`s the problemwith lazy game developers. those games that you play and love should be stable from the get go.

Commenting on valve with that attitude is just plain stupid - Valve primarily makes competitive games that constantly needs balancing and new content - Just look at Team Fortress 2. Rarely/Never has a single game have had such a flow of free content since the release date. You would want to pay x$ for each "free" map - just because you're sitting on an Xbox?

Microsoft needs to get it together and realise that free content/patches is a boon, not a sin.

God forbid someone's opinion changes on something over the course of several years.

That just isn't realistic.

Not too sure how many lines of code go into a game, probably in the millions or if not close to. Being a programmer myself, I have heard the phrase "for every 10 lines of code, there is 1 bug" countless times throughout my career - the larger a project, the more likely there will be bugs that may not be identified for a long time, hence Windows is so often plagued with problems - over 50 million lines of code have gone into the latest Operating Systems, hackers pull it apart and Microsoft have to fix them. Constantly.

I'm not sure if Microsoft's policy applies to game patches, probably just DLC. The amount of times I've logged in to certain games and had to apply updates is certainly more than 3 or 4 times! I know those aren't all dashboard updates either.

TF2 has had 160 + patches
Triple the maps it has started with.
more than double the weapons it started with.

This equals the most fun and equal game ever

And we're paying for this with our wonderful subscriptions to live.

Coming from a development background myself im sick of companies like M$ charging a fortune just to release a patch. It normally takes just 5 to 10 mins to put in place a patch on servers yet they can charge thousands for doing it. It really isn't rocket science to release patches onto a server.

Valve is miles ahead of 'live' just look at Steam which is free to anyone with a PC, game updates are free & so are new map updates for most titles. Get to choose from thousands of servers with low ping a very little lag, shame the same cant be said for the service we pay for with xbox live. M$ is just a cash cow & wont stop providing a sub standard service until they have been forced out of the market.

Its for this reason I play most of my gaming on a PC now.

This is such gawd awful BS. With the original Xbox almost every title update & patch was free or would be after 3-6 months. I'm really cheering that Live gets pantsed by Sony getting their stuff together or Nintendo doing their own online service that is worth well...anything...

This is such gawd awful BS. With the original Xbox almost every title update & patch was free or would be after 3-6 months. I'm really cheering that Live gets pantsed by Sony getting their stuff together or Nintendo doing their own online service that is worth well...anything...

I still can't get over the fact on 360 we pay for dlc that pc gamers get for free (L4D dlc hit me hard).

Now that I learn this is how MS runs XBL games, MS is really doing everything they can to maximize profits at the customers expense.

And they wonder why people are pirating their console (you screw us, we will screw you back).

The homebrew community gives you all the updates and patches you need for free.

I hate ps3, but Sony is showing MS up with their update policy.

testing? or maybe QOS?



are you actually comparing an xbox360 game with an OS?

I think it's good that some (though too few) developers are speaking their mind. It can only do good. At worst Microsoft just ignores his comments and at best they make some changes.

This is the difference between PC gaming and Console gaming. The platform is open and there are tons of people willing to make things for free. Games can be modded by anyone and there is no overlord to say no. With PC gaming can come other headaches so it's a trade off.

It's very realistic. Add up the total number of games released for the XBox, and the PS2, the Gamecube, the N64, Playstation, etc. Several thousand, easily. Now add up the total number of those games that shipped with important bugs. That's what, double figures, maximum? Offhand I can think of three; Thief 3 (XBox), which cannot be played on any skill level other than normal, Perfect Dark (N64 NTSC, fixed in the PAL version, not sure about the JAP version), which crashed if three people played in the warehouse level, and Space Station Silicon Valley (N64 NTSC), which had two serious bugs, firstly it crashed if you had an expansion pak plugged into the NTSC version of the N64 (the PAL version has this fixed, and reportedly there are fixed NTSC versions), and you can't collect one particular item, so you can't complete the game without cheating (this happens in all region versions, AFAIK).

Granted there are no doubt other bugs in other games on various systems, including probably some very famous bugs, but they were very rare given the vast number of games on the market. There are some very complex games on consoles, yet most are bug free (at least to the end user), and this is due to extensive testing and the efforts of skilled testers doing their best to find the bugs so that they can be fixed. On the PC, on the other hand, where patches could be issued at any time, it became common for companies to release games not fully tested, and use the players (who paid good money for the game), as beta testers, and then the company would release a fix/patch for those bugs, which shouldn't have existed in the game anyway, and wouldn't if the game had been properly tested before release. But the possibility of issuing patches to games "out in the wild" (i.e. in the possession of the games players) allows companies to both release games early (good for sales) and to save money and time by not testing the "finished" product nearly as much as they should.

And when it became possible to patch games on consoles (the XBox and PS2 era), then the rot slowly started to set in. It should be almost unknown for a game to need a fix or a patch, but it's gotten to the stage now where we accept it unquestioningly. And that's a bad reflection on the gaming industry.






They will with sufficient testing, especially if the testers include people familiar with the basics of coding in the areas being tested, so that they can help identify the cause(s) of any apparent problems.





? Windows is totally different to what we're discussing here? We are talking about XBox 360 games, which are finished products, are designed to run on one fixed set of hardware, and are not designed to run third party code or to allow for third party programs running simultaneously.

By contrast, Windows is an operating system, designed to run multiple programs at the same time, on an almost infinite combination of hardware add-ons, which allows for all sorts of third party modifications and intrusions.

There's no comparison at all.

Plus, and let's be honest here, Microsoft are the worst offenders of all when it comes to releasing bugged software and expecting the paying public to beta test for free. If any company other than Microsoft released a product as buggy as Windows they'd be laughed out of the industry. Yet thanks to their marketing muscle and the sheep like mentality of the business world Windows is all but synonymous with PCs in most areas of business.

M$ make some great products (I detest them, but I have to admit that), such as the original XBox, the 360 (aside from the unforgivable failure rate), M$ Office (albeit bloat-ware for so long now), etc, but Windows' problems are appalling.





I have to admit I don't like having patches applied to my 360 when I don't know what they do. I don't trust M$, either technically or morally.

I've never played a game that didn't have any bugs at launch. I don't try to find bugs, but I always do. They're not always stop-the-game type bugs, but they are annoying and do often freeze the game or prevent the player from easily continuing to play.

So you've never played any games on the XBox 1, PS2, Gamecube, N64, PSX, etc? If you have, and have found bugs in them, then please name these games and point out the bugs. I'd be interested to know of them.

Just to clarify:

Live officially allows 1 free automatic title update, and no free DLC. They bend these rules a lot. Many games get more than 1 free auto-update (especially if it's a superset of the previous update and released rapidly after the first) to fix critical bugs and through deals with MS publishers can get free DLC, though that is often time-limited or "volume limited" to keep MS' costs down.

Bandwidth isn't free. Microsoft has to host and serve all the updates (and DLC) and that's a non-trivial cost for them. Another way to present this is "Valve is too cheap to pay for updates to their games on XBOX Live." Steam uses Bittorrent and other tricks to reduce their bandwidth costs on the PC. Presumably MS could technically do something similar, but consoles don't really have the idle cycles desktop PCs do.

Also remember that Valve's Steam competes directly with Live. I'm sure they would love the situation they have with PSN, where Sony is pretty much writing off PSN as a failure (ex. No cross-game chat and no parties. EVER.) and allowing Valve to put Steam on the PS3. I believe they're doing the same thing with Square Enix. Since Live isn't a failure, I doubt MS will do this.

Exactly. Something has changed, and like someone else here said, It is either lazy coding, or insufficient testing. I am beginning to think these people code these games and release them without so much as even attempting to play them first. It's bullsh!t. I won't even BEGIN to list COUNTLESS games on past-gen systems that I have completed without any bugs

I remember ONE game for the original NES called Legacy of the Wizard that had a big bug. The game was never completed. That is the only one I remember on the many game systems I have owned. There were a few other games on the Atari Jaguar that were also never completed but I don't consider incompleteness a bug. Chalk that up to simply just being a Jaguar game. It was just junk.

All Star Baseball 2001 for one. The double switch issue. That was a continual bug that never got fixed.

I think something is being missed here: there has been a significant transition within this generation. Obviously devs are working with significantly advanced hardware as compared to previous generations. Every new stage of complexity brings new amounts of problems, and thus new bugs. It's not, "Oh, well. They're just being lazy and not testing code." Could that be a part of it? Definitely, but we're working with too many variables to pin it on one single thing. Does the ability to release patches have something to do with it? I'd say so, but I think pinning it on that is far too quick a judgment for such a vast array of possibilities. There are too many things happening to just blame it on bad coding.

Never forget the golden rule of stats: correlation is not necessarily equal to causation.

Non-trivial cost? The PSN charges publishers 16 cents a gigabyte and they're probably making some amount of profit on that. Title Updates are no more than 4mbs and most are under 1mb. So even the rare 4mb Title Updates cost Microsoft less than a penny in bandwidth. You're telling me that Microsoft can't afford a penny out of their licencing fees for the game?

Surely a cost that our Gold membership goes towards? Otherwise, what the hell does our joint millions go on?

kotor 2... nuff said when it comes to games not completed and bugs.

force unleashed... also.

new business model idea for ms... charge for the new dash. if you don't update then you can't play newer games. why not gouge us even more.