Why do games take forever to get updates?

[Wictorian]

I heard that the game Don't Starve was developed in one day but they can barely rework a character in a few months. This is the case for many games as I 've obserded. I really wonder the reason of this, do you have any ideas? Best answer I have come up with is bureocracy.

[Lurick]

It has everything to do with development and validation time. If you have a formula and it arrives at a number and you want to change that formula but still have to arrive at that number you need to be careful in what you do, double check yourself, etc. to make sure you still arrive at x every time. Now imagine doing that on a much larger scale like a game where you have to check interactions and all sorts of other changes, test those changes don't break something else and if they do go back and undo the change or add more code to fix what's broke and test that and make sure that doesn't break things, and so on.

 

You can spend no time on validation and hope your development time is good enough but then people complain about that so you have to rework things. Keep pushing out dozens of patches to customers in a week as pure beta testers and soon you'll have nobody left playing the game.

[manikyath]

"developed in one day" is quite a hollow statement.

 

you can write a program in a single 'session', just go from start to finish in one straight go. it's not all that hard.

the hard part is finding all the odd edge cases finding what causes them, and finding what fixes them.

also, when you fix something, you have to think about potentially breaking something else. so if you apply a change in one function, you essentially have to go up and down the entire chain of functions to confirm that your change didnt cause an issue somewhere else.

 

i've actually "developed" my own game in what was probably a few hours. i then spent the next 4 months testing every single edge case, discovering more bugs than my game had features, and finding a way to fix them.

[Kilrah]

1 hour ago, Wictorian said:

I heard that the game Don't Starve was developed in one day

Might help to look up actual sources:

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Starve

 

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The game began development as part of a 48-hour game jam in 2010. The team liked the idea but shelved it until two years later, when they had the time to flesh it out.

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Full development commenced in 2012

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Release    April 23, 2013

I.e. they got the idea and started rough work at a 2-day event, but then worked a year on it. 

 

Nowadays you can literally make a full basic game in a couple of days with Unreal Engine or such and a bunch of downloadable ready-made assets - but if you decide to replace one of those assets with something you made from scratch you'll spend days just making that one asset...