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Essays 07 May 2022, 20:49

author: Darius Matusiak

7 Worst Practices of Publishers and Developers

Modern games are big projects with big budgets. And whenever money is involved, it's not hard to find various pathological practices, aimed to maximize profit at the lowest possible cost. Here are seven common problems that the industry suffers from.

Table of Contents

Who cares about the PC?

The releases of multi-platform productions repeatedly reveal that devs and publishers favor consoles at the expense of PC. The latter are often released in much poorer technical condition, with many more bugs, in extreme cases running on an older engine or lacking some critical new features or mechanics. This is a common practice of EA Sports, particularly flagrant in case of the wildly popular FIFA series.

There are also other publishers that are resorting to practices that seem unfair – let's just remember the spectacular failure that Batman: Arkham Knight was on PC. We could mention here the hot release of this year's hit, Elden Ring. The fantastic game initially received average reviews on Steam due to poor technical condition. There were complaints about random crashes, a faulty implementation of the anti-cheat system, performance drops even on stronger rigs and other technical shortcomings.

On the one hand, it's understandable that there's undoubtedly greater difficulty of adapting a game to a countless number of different hardware configurations, but when deciding to release a game on PC, the developers must take this challenge into account. However, it's completely unacceptable to release subpar products, for example created on an older engine than the console counterpart, while demanding the full price.

NBA doesn't like PC either

FIFA is not the only series from EA Sports to shun the PC. 2K Sports also keeps the latest tech exclusively for consoles. Basketball fans somehow got over the fact that last year's NBA 2K22 was released on PC with solutions straight from XOne and PS4. Next-gen bells and whistles were reserved for the PS5 and XSX. A similar situation took place a year earlier. The creators resort to different justifications for their controversial decisions, if they do bother at all. For example, EA Sports wants to maintain low hardware requirements.

Darius Matusiak

Darius Matusiak

Graduate of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Journalism. He started writing about games in 2013 on his blog on gameplay.pl, from where he quickly moved to the Reviews and Editorials department of Gamepressure. Sometimes he also writes about movies and technology. A gamer since the heyday of Amiga. Always a fan of races, realistic simulators and military shooters, as well as games with an engaging plot or exceptional artistic style. In his free time, he teaches how to fly in modern combat fighter simulators on his own page called Szkola Latania. A huge fan of arranging his workstation in the "minimal desk setup" style, hardware novelties and cats.

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