Opinion: Corporate gaming blues — When games won’t run, won’t save, and just stop playing

Hundreds of thousands descend on Gamescom each year for one of the gaming calendar’s higlights. – © AFP Ina FASSBENDER

Every gamer knows this one. The desperate attempt to get a game to run that was working fine yesterday. This problem is ongoing and getting worse.

It’s simple. All you need to do is;

Join a monastery and spend hours or days searching for fixes.

Realize that you’ve always wanted to do a big company’s work for it.

Allow a multi-billion-dollar industry to get away with lower standards than a supermarket.

Understand that something as simple as “read/list” is far beyond the skills of developers making millions of dollars.

Have mindless faith in the formulaic, talentless garbage that pretends to be new games.

This all started when I was trying to get Civilization 6 to run. It had been fine the day before. I’d installed a new graphics driver. Opened the game, and it said it couldn’t find the graphics card, not the driver. I lost interest fast enough because the driver was running everything else well. It was the first time I’ve ever uninstalled a Civilization game.

Then I just spent what felt like 4 million years last night trying to get Shogun 2 to run after I downloaded it.  I performed the ancient Ritual Of Unnecessary Searching as usual. Then the game wouldn’t even pretend to start. Hunted it down in the Steam Library, and after any number of obstructive popups, EULAs, and hair-tearing exercises, it finally ran. It still won’t run off my Games menu.

Then there was the John Tiller Games debacle, in which some nice person from Slitherine tried to help, but couldn’t. That went on for 5 days. This series includes the classic Talonsoft East Front/West Front games. I did eventually get it to run, using another graphics driver. They couldn’t have helped, in this case, and they didn’t know about it.

See anything even slightly unfamiliar that you haven’t seen yourself a million times? No, of course not.

These systemic problems are all basically the same thing. You have to question the efficiency or even the existence of testing where so many identical problems arise automatically.

The two-dimensional spreadsheet heads go nuts when asked to do anything. They pay peanuts to develop these so-called games, and then they don’t work. Even big franchises simply ignore the problems.

We have a situation where games like Age of Empires, a very old game from 1999, will play flawlessly, but games from 2022 won’t. We have far bigger RAM capacity, and something still doesn’t play.

Consider the seemingly infinite number of Jewel clones and other “recycled” games from long ago. All of these crocks were developed on much older systems.  

Something that ran on Windows 95 should be easy for Windows 11. Never mind “legacy software”. Never mind patronizing commentary to people who’ve spent billions on their games.

There should be no issues with playing anything at all. You do not and have never needed a new OS. different hardware and the other gouging exercises to play games.

The one and only issue is running the games.

There’s no commitment to anything. Now we have sparkly nothing games. We have people in the sector who will say, “I don’t play games. I’m an adult. Snicker, snicker”.

Well, no, you’re not an adult or anything like one. You’re not even doing your own job. You know nothing about your own market. Gamers range from teens to people in their 70s. You don’t understand that gaming is far bigger than most sports.  

An opinion is supposed to provide a perspective. So, here’s one:

AI can test games to exhaustive levels of performance, if not actual gameplay.

Any procedural issues are not the responsibility of the gamer. If you pay for a game, you have rights. Imagine a class action on any of the brilliant issues above.

Games that all look the same and sound the same are a result of stagnation and lack of talent. More creativity, more scope, new ideas, and less “obsessive tech”, thanks.