T w e n t y S i d e d

My column this week details the mind-boggling string of outrageous failures perpetrated by Bethesda surrounding the Power Armor edition of Fallout 76. Specifically, it talks about how this $200 edition of the game promised a canvas bag but delivered something worth far less.

Like I say in the article, a company as big as Bethesda has no excuse whatsoever for making this kind of mistake. Only an idiot would cut this particular corner. If you’ve got a customer willing to pay you $200 for a videogame with some extra trinkets, then you need to make sure that customer is happy. Not because you’re a nice person or you care about the customer, but because this customer is a cash cow and treating them well will allow you to extract more wealth from them in the future. I’m not faulting Bethesda for being rapacious and exploitative, I’m faulting them for attempting to be rapacious and exploitative and being completely shit at it.

It’s easy to look at Fallout 76 and see that Bethesda is arriving two years late to the fad of Day Z clones. Fine. They attempted to jump on a trend and they miscalculated. Predicting the future is hard and I don’t fault them for messing up. But the canvas bag controversy? Market segmentation is Business 101. This is the easy stuff. The obvious stuff. If you can’t get this right then what are you doing trying to run a company?

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Experienced Points: Taking Out Bethesda’s Trash Bag”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

My column this week has a title that, on further reflection, could have been better chosen. The title asks “Has Rendering Technology Stagnated?”, but really that question was answered last week. This week the question I’m actually answering is, “Does it Matter?”

I mean, I guess the title kinda works if you think of stagnation in terms of “Not producing significantly better images”. Even so, “Has Visual Fidelity Stagnated?” would have been less ambiguous.

Such are the perils of working with a deadline. I’ve been dividing my time between publishing my book and other important workAssuming that playing Prey: Mooncrash counts as work. and I didn’t get working on last week’s column when I should have. When I finally started writing I realized I was juggling two different ideas:

1. Gaming hardware hasn’t really advanced very much in the last decade. However…
2. …it doesn’t matter, because it’s hard to make real gains in visual fidelity and gameplay is far more important at this point.

So I thought I could split the one column into two. That worked out in the sense that it gave me more breathing room this week, but I really should have finished writing both of them before publishing the first.

If this was just a blog post then it wouldn’t be a problem. I could push the articles off for a week and put up some goofy filler post in the interim. That’s fine when you’re publishing stuff to your own site, but it’s not really acceptable when you’re being paid to do a job. The folks at the Escapist are lovely people and very easy to work with, but this isn’t their hobby. They’re trying to run a business, and the last thing anyone needs is an unreliable contributor.

To be clear, nobody really complained about the column. This isn’t a situation where I turned in work that disappointed someone. Rather this is a case where I realize I could have made a much better pair of articles if I’d had another week.

The solution here is for me to knuckle down and build up some lead time. This is the same advice I keep giving to publishers: Don’t try to finish everything in crunch mode. Take your time. Put in half the hours over twice as many days and you’ll get a better product for the same work.

Anyway.

Now that I just spent 300 words telling you it’s not very good, please do be sure to read the column.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.