I'm creating a petition. (Link Will Go Here)

[Mikenike]

As the title says, I will be creating a petition that I plan to send to Sony and Microsoft to make the console game updates testing less restrictive and more attainable. I understand that this will not be taken very seriously, especially because most games have little to no problems with it, (mostly AA and AAA games). I hope to gain at least 5k signatures in this petition. I am doing this as a response to all the threads that I have read about complaining about how horrible the game is..... Its only bad because of your favorite console devs. I will edit the link into the title and into this.

I hope I am not breaking the forum rules here. I re-read the rules, and I don't believe that I have, but if I am, call me out, report it.  

Edited February 22, 2021 by Mikenike

[JIMMY_the_DOG]

I'm a pc player myself, but my friend plays on console and he's not up-to-date on the forums so he's always confused when I say the new features of the latest pc update. Will sign.

[Mikenike]

1 minute ago, JIMMY_the_DOG said:

but my friend plays on console and he's not up-to-date on the forums so he's always confused when I say the new features of the latest pc update. Will sign.

I'm not tired of that, I'm tired of the companies forcing these tests on the game, because it makes the porting company take time away from fixing bugs and such, and this would help with the lack thereof of updates, and the 6 months it takes to get one.

Less testing, means more time to fix bugs, and a faster update patch time.

[JIMMY_the_DOG]

6 minutes ago, Mikenike said:

I'm not tired of that, I'm tired of the companies forcing these tests on the game, because it makes the porting company take time away from fixing bugs and such, and this would help with the lack thereof of updates, and the 6 months it takes to get one.

Oh, I see what you're getting at. Yes, but if they dont do any tests then you'll have a truckload of bugs, but maybe they dont gotta take so long.....

[Mikenike]

1 hour ago, JIMMY_the_DOG said:

Yes, but if they dont do any tests then you'll have a truckload of bugs, but maybe they dont gotta take so long.....

Yeah, I would like them to cut down the time.

[Bej Kerman]

1 hour ago, Mikenike said:

As the title says, I will be creating a petition that I plan to send to Sony and Microsoft to make the console game updates testing less restrictive and more attainable. I understand that this will not be taken very seriously, especially because most games have little to no problems with it, (mostly AA and AAA games). I hope to gain at least 5k signatures in this petition. I am doing this as a response to all the threads that I have read about complaining about how horrible the game is..... Its only bad because of your favorite console devs. I will edit the link into the title and into this.

I hope I am not breaking the forum rules here. I re-read the rules, and I don't believe that I have, but if I am, call me out, report it.  

Will get 50 signatures and ultimately go nowhere.

[Snark]

1 hour ago, Mikenike said:

As the title says, I will be creating a petition that I plan to send to Sony and Microsoft to make the console game updates testing less restrictive and more attainable. I understand that this will not be taken very seriously, especially because most games have little to no problems with it, (mostly AA and AAA games). I hope to gain at least 5k signatures in this petition. I am doing this as a response to all the threads that I have read about complaining about how horrible the game is..... Its only bad because of your favorite console devs.

As with any case where you're trying to persuade someone to do something... if you want to get traction, it's important to understand why they're doing things the way they are (i.e. their reasons for not doing what you want).  Because they care about their reasons, not yours-- so if you don't address those reasons, you won't get anywhere.

I'm hardly an expert on console development or the various business logic that goes into all of this, so take this with a grain of salt.  However, my (possibly imperfect) understanding is that the reason console manufacturers tend to have a fairly rigid, cumbersome certification process is that they are protecting the brand of their console.  They know that if there are a bunch of titles on their consoles that don't work, then the market (i.e. their console-buying customers) will tend to blame the platform, not all the individual game developers.  "Ew, don't buy Console A, their games are all broken.  Buy Console B instead!"  I think that's what they're primarily worried about.  They put that rigorous certification in place to prevent brand-destroying lemons from slipping through.  "How fast do things get updated with new features" is not really something they care about as much, since that's not what drives their revenue stream.

Yes, it imposes some inconvenience.  And yes, that inconvenience gets especially exacerbated for little indie games like KSP that tend to update frequently.  But remember, they primarily care about where their dollars are-- and my impression is that the overwhelming majority of the market for console games is comprised of a fairly small number of really hugely popular titles.  If you're a console manufacturer, and the dozen most-popular games on your console account for 90%+ of the dollars from game sales, then that's what you're protecting.  So if your certification process does a good job of working with those games' release model, then you're likely going to be less concerned that it causes problems for some teeny tiny niche product like KSP that's much less than 1% of game sales for your platform.

Again, like I said, I'm no expert here and I could be wrong about aspects of what I've just said-- would love to hear input from someone more knowledgeable in this area.  And I also don't mean to belittle at all the frustration that KSP console players regularly experience-- it's vexing in the extreme and yeah, that really sucks, and I totally understand why people would want to see that improved.  And hey, it's worth a try.    I wouldn't want to discourage anyone.

So, please don't take this as "it's hopeless, give up"-- rather, it's more "to maximize your chance of success, figure out what the battlefield looks like before charging into battle."  A petition that takes the form "Here's how what I'm proposing will make things better for you" will be more likely to succeed than one that just says "I don't like how things are."

[VoidSquid]

2 hours ago, Mikenike said:

to make the console game updates testing less restrictive and more attainable

Sounds contra productive to me, we already have more than enough issues currently with the way things are handled now. Will not sign.

Edited February 22, 2021 by VoidSquid

[paul_c]

Its an interesting thought - whether you can influence a commercial company to alter its methodology in a fairly detailed aspect of their core work - by petition.

I am sure companies do listen to feedback and have "customer satisfaction" fairly high up the agenda, but for things like this they would need persuading quite a lot; or quite a lot of customers to raise concerns - to change tack.

Good luck though.

[The Aziz]

What Snark said was right. The whole certification process is not to... wait, right, you don't seem to know why that procedure exists in the first place. So here it goes: it's there to protect the console, and also the game itself from possible exploits. Consoles are closed systems, and they don't care if your ship wobbles, they don't want to see that someone clicks a specific button combination and accidentally gets access to internal files of the console because devs left a hole in the code. Which is also important in games with multiplayer. Remember Fall Guys, that wipeout-kind game? They manage to drop updates at the same time on PC and consoles, but there's one difference: you won't find cheaters in PS4 edition. Because these tests assure than nobody can modify game files. And they have to check that with every update, because, surprise, there's new code in the game. So no, there's no way they could do these tests "less restrictive".

Now, the fact that console editions are few versions behind.. There's probably a reason to that (other than it's being made by another studio) but if you look at it, the updates are as frequent as those on PC, every few months.

[Gargamel]

Along with everything said above, they started doing this because of brand control.  You get a wonky game on your system, and it corrupts every other save file you have, people won't blame the bad game, they'll blame the console.  Console makers don't want a reputation of "Yeah they have a lot of good games, but there's a huge number of broken games too".   This trend is nothing new, and it's not going to stop, regardless of how many signatures you get.

https://www.dkoldies.com/blog/did-you-own-illegal-nes-games/

And as this not about KSP specifically, but consoles, it has been moved to the Lounge. 

Edited February 22, 2021 by Gargamel
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