Skyrimmed

I have only heard about this Skyrim game second hand. My buddy says he sees the commercials on TV all the time. Another friend paid an extra $7 in priority shipping to get the game right away. The real surprise was when I heard people complaining about the game's performance.

Skyrim was written orignally for a console such as the Xbox 360. It was then ported the PC. Apparently some dude did a mod on the PC release to make it upwards of 40% faster. This mod took about a day to create. Customers think this shows either incompetance or negligence from software manufacturer Bethesda Games.

My game-crazy friend is a big fan of Bethesda. If anybody should know who is good, it would be him. I trust his opinion. Sure some hacker might have come out with a speedup. But did he break anything with the hack? And you got to realize that the PC market is just an afterthought. If you want the best performance from the manufacturer, get the console version. I have given up on high performance PC games a long time ago. You should too.

Pie in the Sky

The game software business seems like an easy one. You code up a great game and get rich right? Well nothing it ever that easy. I gained a lot of insight by reading the history of Pie in the Sky Software. Check out their history starting with Comcob.

You need to time your advertising correctly. Otherwise you might sell a lot of copies before the thing is done. Then you might be forced to ship before the product is ready. That in turn will create a lot of unhappy customers.

How do you handle these unhappy customers? Well you can provide technical support. That is very labor intensive. And you still might have customer who are mad. You might also have to ship out a free upgrade, fixing bugs that have no right to be in a release. Did I mention that physical shipping of software is an expensive activity?