Always this uniformed argument that is so irritating.
We have increased the amount of money and people spent working on patches for every single project. I've personally spent 90% of my time during 8 months after hoi3 went gold working on patches for hoi3.
Back when we had a team of 6 instead of a mainteam of 8 and an expansion-team of 3 there was two very different things regarding the post-process development.
(A) Before Hoi2 we only budgetted for ONE patch, done during the first month. Nothing else was ever planned for or done. Since then we've changed it to allow for 3 major patches if needed.
(B) All extra patches beyond budgeted patches have come from developers (mostly me) working weekends for their love of the game. This is happening much less nowadays, as enough death-threats & name-calling kind of make you not that keen on spending your spare-time adding features to a game.
I am very pleased to see information like this posted. It gives me an insight into the gaming industry that I lacked before.
To comment a little on the information:
A) Having been a project manager I understand that you need to budget and have an internal expectation for what will be needed to support your product. Without that you can't hire or price your product effectivly. On the other hand, given that it is possible to publish a product that, for various reasons (some good, maybe some bad), is in need of much support I would hope the company would be willing to re-evaluate the situation and at a minimum provide as many patches as necessary so that the product
works as advetised (I am not explicitly saying that HOI3 does not work as advertised, some may think so some not). I would think the reputation of the company would require it.
B) I applaud any employee that volunteers their time to work on support for the game. I regret that this is necessary (see A above).
c) I also encourage the ownership of PI to consider the situation from the consumer's point. As of patch 1.4 consumers have a product that is 90% working (your experience may vary, just using that as an example). The company is explicitly saying that there will be no more patches for the product. I hope PI can appreciate that a consumer may not feel this is sufficient, possibly to the point that purchase of further PI products is in doubt. Ah, but wait says PI! If you give us some more money to purchase this expansion all will be better! I also hope PI can appreciate how this will anger some comsumers. Not having a fully working product, the company wants more money to provide them with a fully working product. Possibly not the way to build a good reputation as a company.
Imagine if you purchaased a car, and a lot of the functions didn't work. You take it back to the dealer and they fix some of them, but after 3 repairs they say, "Nope, not fixing this any more. You want it to work better, buy another car from us!" I'm pretty sure people would stop buying cars there.
Why do I take my time to post this? Because I love PI games, I want the company to prosper so that it can make more of these great games. But I do need to be able to
play these great games, not just enjoy them as a work of art. So PI, perhaps you need to take another look at your development process, both pre and post release. Because even though some people are intemperant with their posts, or even downright mean and nasty, as consumers we
do have a reasonable expectation that what we buy will work, and that if it does not that it will be fixed until it does, not just fixed until PI is tired of fixing it.
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