Quote:
Originally Posted by Coldcall
The comparison does not work. A car cannot be modded in the same way as a software application.
Also cars are necessarily built to higher standards re bugginess because if they get a serious bug/error it could kill the driver and passengers. The bugs and DRM insanity of SH5 wont actually kill anyone.
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The comparison is a little far fetched, sure, but you can make it work if you think about the bigger picture. You can even replace car, SHV, software respectively with a placeholder, and will still obtain the same result.
(a) SHV should not need to be modded to function as a product. How many customers are really into modding and spent so much time finding and installing mods? Maybe the GWX people could tell us how many time their final release was downloaded, and how that compared to the ~200.000 sold copies?
(b) Further, SHV should have been an almost bug-free release after the experience with SHIV, that apparently never overcame the initial stigma of a broken product with little innovation aside from graphics. Customers did vote with their wallets in that case, see Ubisoft Corporate official sales report.
(c) Cars are more expensive, and higher price of course leads to less "bug tolerance". If it costs a lot, I want it to be perfect.
This holds true for software, too. I work on huge clusters, occupying 100s-1000s of CPUs daily. The software on such clusters needs to be 100% perfect, but there is still (rare) cases of downtime. The cost of any downtime is sizable, and of course the failure is each time investigated in detail. Any company supplying software for such large-scale applications protects itself by making sure that their products are thoroughly tested, very thoroughly. If any of those companies involved in such a project would act like Ubisoft, not provide best quality software solutions, error-free with excellent support, they'd loose a huge business deal.
But now scaling down the product and its price, you keep the underlying quality criteria. If the product doesn't add any significantly novel feature or functionality to your portfolio, why buy it? If it is low quality (buggy), why buy it? If it requires a couple more patches before it truly leaves beta, why buy it now? If the customer service is bad (OSP DRM?), why not switch to a better supplier with a competing product?
Or would you want to mod your car? Of course you can do so, just requires a few tools and some skill! And ooops, you can replace the broken breaks on your Toyota yourself! Maybe not as efficient as a professional mechanic with the original plans, but still. Similarly, modding a game to fix features is always <= effcient as having the developers fix the code correctly. Scripting always is slower than hardcoding things.