An open letter to the game industry

Halo 4 has been out for almost a month now, and the problems I've found with the game have not gone away. There a multitude of bugs, imbalances, and missing features that I just can't overlook. The game looks and feels amazing, but it falls just short of true greatness because of some very basic missing elements. Worse still, these missing elements are symptomatic of a greater trend within the gaming industry, something that has gotten worse over the last several years.

In their defense, 343i has been doing a good job of removing bugs from competitive multiplayer. Halo 4 gets an update every Monday, and since the launch many of the game breaking bugs (like hiding in the wall on Complex) have been fixed. Other bugs, however, are harder to deal with, as they are problems with the game's code, for example, the shrinking covenant glitch.

As adorable as that glitch is, it's also kind of game breaking, especially at higher difficulties. It doesn't affect their damage or health, only their tiny tiny hitbox. Now, I do have sympathy here, I'm a programmer too, bugs happen, it sucks, but why is this allowed to be launched? Which leads me to my main point:

Developers; stop using your fans as unpaid beta testers. Seriously. Stop it. This applies more to console games than to PC games, but it's relevant across all platforms. Ever since the start of this past console generation, the first generation to feature true online systems, way too many developers and publishers have been releasing buggy, broken, or flat out incomplete games, because they know they can just patch out the problems later, and if it's a series with a lot of weight behind it (like Halo) people will buy it up anyway.

It's really a worrying trend because it preys upon the stereotype that gamers are gullible, maybe because they are a younger demographic, or maybe because they have a stigma of being "immature". You would never see anything else like this in any other industry. You'll never go to a movie theater and find a film that is missing the last scene, or have audio that cuts out halfway through. They don't air TV episodes where part of the set falls down. Games like Bully for the Xbox 360, Orange Box for the PS3, and many many PS2 and Wii shovelware games come to mind, but those are just the extreme cases. Why should there ever be hardware problems or framerate stutter on a console? It's not like the developers don't know what they are developing for. Not only are every console's internal specs well known by now, but many developers are on their third or fourth game this generation.

Publishers are even more to blame for this phenomenon. Articles are posted all over the internet every day about how launches need to be moved up, and other horrors, all so games can be released by some arbitrary deadline. Then these same publishers are astounded when games that were created with loving care over years like Journey, Portal 2, and Bayonetta get rousing critical and commercial success, while consumers look at things like Madden and see "just another year of Madden".

The biggest factor, I think, is whether or not you consider games to be art. Games being art is a debate that has gone on for a long time. Movies are considered to be art, as is music, so why not video games? Nay-sayers will point to the fact that interactivity kills any artistic message a game could have, or any number of other factors, but it really comes down to one thing:

Anything can be art, if you want it to be.

Not everything everyone creates is art, if it were, almost all food would be art, the rivets used to hold steel beams together, anything man-made would be. But if you love something you create, and you put your true feelings into creating that thing, it is art, doesn't matter what it is. That's the difference, and unless you are on the development team for a game, it's not possible to know truly whether or not they love their projects, but when you look at the final products, it's pretty easy to tell.