Are code bounties something being considered?

[Pyritin]

Given the number of developers that play this game I was curious if Intercept was considering offering code bounties to help correct issues? There aren't too many aspects of the game that don't have glaring issues and given the slow turn around you all have committed to (and shown thus far) it makes it seem like we will be in this state for a very long time. I was wondering if you all have considered code bounties to offset this. Many issues in this game at the moment are junior dev level issues (like localization not working correctly) that just take time, but are pretty simple to do. Outsourcing those tasks to a bounty system would allow Intercept to focus on bigger issues and core functionality, greatly improve how quickly issues can be resolved, and frankly cost less than full-time staff.

[Sᴄɪɴᴛɪʟʟᴀᴛᴏʀ]

It would be a bit embarrassing for a game published by a company with a market cap higher than the GDP of Malta to need to resort to using bounties to help fix the game they just released for €50 a couple of days ago...

[Pyritin]

Outsourcing development work isn't a new thing for a company of any size. In fact the larger they are the more often it occurs typically. At this point I doubt the community cares about how they get the results, only that they see them. Having to a wait a month to see only some of the pretty egregious issues with this release solved is a pretty hard pill to swallow. I'd argue it's probably larger than finding out they had to outsource some work to get the results the community expects.

[majNUN]

14 minutes ago, Sᴄɪɴᴛɪʟʟᴀᴛá´ÂÊ€ said:

It would be a bit embarrassing for a game published by a company with a market cap higher than the GDP of Malta to need to resort to using bounties to help fix the game they just released for €50 a couple of days ago...

I've heard of AAA companies outsourcing this kind of stuff to India. Why not offer code bounties?

[HebaruSan]

I dearly hope not, that would be even worse for code quality, and probably waste a lot of developer time reviewing "solutions" that don't work.

[Periple]

They’d need to provide access to the source code. Not going to happen.

[Pyritin]

16 hours ago, Periple said:

They’d need to provide access to the source code. Not going to happen.

All they'd have to do is spin up developer VMs and make the people remote into them. You act like remote development work for corporations is some new concept never done before. That being said the game is written in C# using Unity. Anyone who wants the source code has it already and have since the day the product released.

[Periple]

It’s not a matter of technical won’t. It’s legal, IP, and cost won’t. For one thing they most likely use Plastic VCS and that’s paid per seat. They’d need to buy licenses for everybody submitting code, even if they were using their own Unity licenses. 

But that’s all moot. Studios just don’t release their source. The fact that Unity stuff is easy to decompile is neither here nor there, while it’s technically possible it’s not allowed. Even if they wanted to it’d be legally too risky. 

Never even mind that keeping your source coherent isn’t trivial even with a fairly disciplined team, with internet randos submitting patches it’d be complete mayhem.

(Where I work is fully remote, I know how it’s done.)

[zeekzeek22]

Reminder that Intercept Games has a huge AAA budget in the same way a local craft brewery that got bought by Anheuser Busch has Budweiser's R&D budget. IG is a small-shop "indie-scale" developer, owned by a publisher of only-indie-scale games, which is owned by Take Two. No company, not to mention project under Take Two's umbrella has access to GTAV's budget, or is even a AAA title. KSP2 is not AAA. Their small team gets some corporate support from PD, who gets some corporate support from TT. I work on a project that is subcontracted by a subdivision of NASA. Nobody sees our occasional struggles and goes "how are you messing that up when you have all the knowledge of NASA at your fingertips"...we don't.

[Profugo Barbatus]

On 2/28/2023 at 3:16 PM, Periple said:

Never even mind that keeping your source coherent isn’t trivial even with a fairly disciplined team, with internet randos submitting patches it’d be complete mayhem.

Came in here to say as much - Code bounties/external contributors aren't just some "spend money get code" situation. There's a significant administration overhead on the devs plate to facilitate any sort of come and go development model, where you have to review everything coming through by SME's from the relevant teams and possibly an architect. I run into this problem every time a company wants my help to set up Citizen development, thinking they can cut the core team and just have the business units take it all on. Rando's coming in to fix and add to the code means you have to corral them all, enforce standards, and review that they're not accidentally doing anything destructive to stuff in other branches - I might see this weird floating stub and useless verification operation as a weird resource hog and waste, and trim it while rewriting something to handle a bug. Only later for the devs to go to merge and find that I've rewritten and deleted a key point for the new stuff they were building in a different branch and now we've got collisions and bug fixes that need to be undone and remade.

Considering the small headcount, and the fact that only a portion of that headcount is actually programmers instead of artists or designers, they'd almost certainly spend months setting up the groundwork for this only to end up fixing bugs slower as the devs spend more time herding cats and rejecting bad fixes. It would be cheaper and easier long term to hire on 2-3 contractors for 6-12 months as extra muscle for a dedicated fix team that can actually be trained up and trusted to be set loose. After all, we know all the other major features like colonies are half complete, those teams will still need to finish them, and odds are they're not super familiar or useful in the core stuff thats broken right now - The guy making colony resource management probably has minimal understanding of the physics problems underlying SAS going monkey mode.