Computer software, and by extension, video games, are getting more complicated every day. It used to be that a game might be a few hundred thousand or maybe a million lines of code. Now, some of the third-party libraries we use in our games are approaching that size, if not already larger! Keeping that in mind, it’s quite impressive that modern games still run for the majority of users. But here’s a simple fact: Sooner or later, someone is going to be unable to play your game. What you do then determines whether or not they will remain your customer.

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A few years back I was doing design work on an MMORPG. Really satisfying work – come up with characters & stories, try to construct gameplay around them, and then watch the rest of the team turn it into a living, breathing part of your game world that your players are going to interact with for months afterward.

So, at one point we decided to run a weekend promotion to promote our upcoming title. We temporarily enabled access to the content from our next game, and allowed people who didn’t own the game to create characters and play for the duration of the weekend. Great idea – get people in there at no cost, try and convince them your game is fun and worth playing. Works good for existing customers, too, because now they get excited about what’s coming down the pipe because you’ve let them play it for a couple days.

I was pretty excited about it, since it was the first promotion of its kind that we’d run since I had started working there – which meant I could finally show some of my friends what I was working on, and try and convince them it was worth playing. Most of them hadn’t even looked at the game since they had to pay for it first – and who can blame them, really?

Friday rolls around and I head home late and get some rest. The rest of the team does the same.

On Saturday morning, I send a message to a couple of my friends explaining how to download our client and try out the game. They’re both pretty enthusiastic about it and get started. A few minutes later, one of them says:

‘Why can’t I use any skills?’

What? What do you mean you can’t use any skills? Are there buttons on the bar at the bottom of the screen?

‘Yeah, but they have little lock icons over them. Nothing happens when I press them.’

Well, uh, s–t. That’s not supposed to happen. I emailed one of my coworkers to ask – uh, did anyone try creating a brand new account for the promotion to see if it worked? – and the answer is depressing: Nope. Luckily, it wasn’t a total loss – our existing customers were still able to participate in the event, because they already had working accounts. But for new, potential customers – the game didn’t work. They downloaded and installed our game, and it was mostly useless to them.

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Tags: business, Code, design, Games, reliability