It has now been over a month and a half since the release of Driveclub on PlayStation 4, but the game is still nearly unplayable due to the abundance of server issues and coding problems at launch. Games being broken at release is a troublesome trend as of late, but Sony Computer Entertainment America’s president and CEO Shawn Layden weighed in on the topic and how the problems were about impossible to predict beforehand.
In an interview with IGN, Layden discussed how they continued to test every possibility prior to launch, but explained how it was hard to anticipate what ended up happening.
“In the development cycle, we try to do all things. In the development cycle, we try to test against every possibility. We have a [Quality Assurance] team, we have a QA plan. You do a beta test, you scope against that. But now, in a connected world, you can’t effectively test in your house or in your beta group what it means to have 50,000, 100,000, 200,000 users hit your service. And the guys [at the studio] are struggling with that. It’s throwing up things they had not anticipated.”
“And I get reports from them every day on the progress that they’re making, and it is going forward. It is going slowly, but, you know, they tried to do the best, newest, greatest thing ever to happen in the driving genre and they hit a hiccup. I prefer people to have the ambition to try that, though. It’s no fun being safe all the time.”
Layden does make a point with how it can be very hard to truly test games that have a major focus on online play. Hopefully the developers will find some way to simulate this capacity level better in the future.
