Originally published at: Payday 3 studio head issues formal apology for game's rocky launch | Boing Boing
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This is such a common issue with online games, especially for smaller devs. You underestimate the initial interest, or there’s some bug that wasn’t obvious under smaller server loads, and the whole thing collapses. Having worked in online games, I’m frankly amazed when launches happen without everything immediately falling over. Gamers get so absurdly bent out of shape about it, but it’s just one of those things. You don’t have to play a game on day one - and reasonable, one should be waiting for reviews before buying it, unless one is committed to supporting the developers, regardless of game quality. (In which case, getting worked up over things having technical issues isn’t very supportive…)
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I absolutely don’t want to imply support for the frothing insanity pops out of ‘gamers’ incredibly disproportionately, because it’s not defensible and you’d frankly be a bad person for wanting to try; but I would say that anyone selling “Payday 3: Pre-order edition” is setting up a pretty strong expectation that Payday 3 will be playable on day one(or, in this case, 3 days ahead of day one because that was one of the features exclusive to pre-order).
The tendency to fly directly to internet death threats or choosing the most female public face of the studio to harass, rather than just returning the defective product, is reprehensible; but the part where you treat a mandatory-online game with servers that aren’t working as a game that isn’t working seems pretty reasonable; unless it’s specifically being represented as some sort of beta or early access thing.
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In this case, the period of exclusivity for pre-orders does give customers more of a leg to stand on - the devs should have set aside a larger time window so that they could deal with unforeseen issues and still have those three days. The problem being that non-pre-order players would have flipped out. “I have to wait five whole days before I can play it!”
That this was just for pre-orders makes the issue more understandable too, though. They might have seen it as a server test with a smaller group of players, and then far more people tried to play it than they expected. Though more likely they just thought their set-up was pretty bulletproof after having already done this twice, were feeling overconfident and got a very rude surprise.
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maybe this. because otherwise you’d think they’d have done a sizable beta first. then you can measure your usage and estimate what you need from pre orders.
unless the game isn’t very good or you need a cash infusion to actually finish it. then releasing it with issues that make it unplayable could well be to your advantage 
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