To Ship or Not to Ship

By Joshua Bentley
October 16, 1998

The gaming industry is full of circumstances where games either have
slipped past their due dates or have been altogether because of not setting
a realistic enough release date. As fans of the gaming industry, this
bums us out to the nth degree. We have money burning a whole in our pocket
and we’ll be darned to heck if we’ll ever support a company that doesn’t
ship on time. Does that sound very intelligent? Sounds more like a call
to Tech Support if you ask me! What I hope to do in this article is explore
the whole issue of ship dates–meeting them, setting realistic ones, not
meeting them, moving them, etc.

First of all, let’s define what a ship date is. A ship date is the specific
day/month/year the marketing team sets as the day their boxed, replicated
games will ship to the stores. It is not the day you will see it
on the store shelves. With any ship date you see, there will realistically
be about two weeks before you see the product on the shelves. There are
exceptions, of course, but it’s a good rule to live by–much like “don’t
eat anything still moving.”

Now Available!

“Argh!” How many times will a company use that headline to
hook people into visiting their web site or making an early purchase?
They’ll keep using it until it doesn’t work any more. Let’s play make-believe
for a minute or two. Pretend you’re a marketing guru, a real “run
with the ball” kind of person. You want people to get excited about
your product so you start an early marketing campaign with cool slogans,
awesome pictures, graphic magazine ads, etc. People are jazzed and ready
to buy the game the second they read the ad. As soon as the on-line ordering
site is ready and Customer Service is all set to take orders what are
you going to do? You’re going to plaster Now Available all over
your site so people will order it. Okay, another definition–“Now
Available” is the time period in which you can order the product,
not the time it will actually be shipped to your house.

Is it confusing? Absolutely. Can you make sense of it? Definitely. The
easiest way to prevent from being a frustrated consumer is to research.
Go to the product’s web site and see if it says “Available in Spring
2042.” If there are any notices that state the expected ship date,
the game probably hasn’t shipped yet. Either that or the web master hasn’t
updated the site for a while. The other thing to do to prevent unnecessary
stress is to call the 1-800 customer service number that most gaming companies
have and simply ask “Has this product shipped yet?”

Realistic Ship Dates

Now with some of the confusion aside, we can get to the meat of the story.
Why do products slip? Why are products canceled? Why do web sites insist
on using vague ship dates like Fall ’98? I’m going to answer all of those
questions. In setting a realistic ship date, many, many people are involved
in the process. The marketing team has to talk to the producer who has
to stay in constant contact with the programmers and they all have to
talk to Quality Assurance. Given all the available data, this team of
completely different people can then say “April 2001 is a good date,
yes we can meet that.” The issue they face is setting a realistic
ship date. Realistic being the operative word here. Would it be realistic
to start designing a game this month and set spring 1999 as a ship date?
No way! They’d never meet the date. On the other end of the spectrum,
you have people who set dates too far in the future (like 2042). That’s
where that team I mentioned earlier comes into play. They all talk, have
some coffee and doughnuts or go out for Thai food and put it all out on
the table.

In most cases, an achievable, realistic date is agreed upon. Sometimes
a date is set regardless of agreement simply because a product needs to
ship. Who can forget the Outpost incident? A game shipped that
was so underdeveloped that they may just now begin to live it down. And
sometimes that happens, a company needs to have a bestseller right
now and consumers are ready for it so it ships … with a few bugs.
Therein lies the mystery of (insert trumpet fanfare here) The Patch Disk.
When a product ships with known problems, you can be assured that a patch
disk (or update as they are sometimes called) isn’t too far behind. In
some cases a patch disk is ready and shipped in the box so the user can
apply it at the same time as they install the game. Games don’t always
ship with known bugs. Sometimes, you get a game that’s been tested on,
let’s say 1,000 machines all with different configurations. The QA team
doesn’t find any problems on 1,000 machines, and they call the product
good. The thing is, you sometimes can’t catch a problem on 1,000 machines,
but when you ship it and it ends up on 100,000 you may find problems.
In this case, a patch disk is also created. The idea behind a patch disk
is much like the concept of patching up your jeans when they get ripped.
The magic of patch disks, however, is that they are supposed to make the
product act as it was designed to instead of just cover up a problem as
in our ripped jeans analogy.

Sometimes you have a company like Blizzard that has a product everyone’s
excited about like Warcraft Adventures. People are hyped about
the product, ready to tear out someone’s throat to get even a demo, the
programming teams are staying up nights and days, they’ve got a whole
room of monkeys working on the manual and then everything stops. Gasp!
Everyone’s whispering, everyone’s gossiping, what’s going on?!
The Warcraft Adventures team didn’t set a realistic ship date.
And because they felt they couldn’t produce the best possible product
in the time frame they had allowed, they decided to cancel the game and
work on something else. Now the big question: “why didn’t they see
it coming?” Until you spend some time with programmers and producers,
you will not truly understand the magnitude of what I’m about to say.
Sometimes you have no idea how deep the ocean really is until you’re in
up to your neck. It’s hard to see and admit that what you’ve set as your
ship date is unrealistic until you start in on the project and realize
exactly how much work it’s going to take. Before I get any legal e-mail
or flame messages from my readers, please understand that I love
Blizzard games and Sierra games (used in a previous example) and
that I bear them no malice whatsoever. A mistake does not make one a failure.

Should We Ship It Anyway?

Some companies decide to ship a product even if it’s incomplete; we’ve
covered that. Some companies decide to completely cancel a product; we’ve
gone over that too. Other companies move the ship date. This is an interesting
concept because, in theory, the company could keep moving the date more
and more forward until the game is done. By that time the Pentiumok 5000
MHz chip has been released and their technology is outdated. I can’t think
of a single company that has done this, in reality. It may seem like
they’ve done that, but that isn’t true. Most companies have something
in place that prevents that from happening. It’s called pulling the plug.
In my four years in the gaming industry, I have seen that done, but it
isn’t nearly as common as moving the ship dates. If a product is in a
series, it is more likely to get pushed than canceled simply because of
the fan base. If it is unique and original with no following yet, it will
most likely get pushed a little, then canceled if things aren’t moving
along swiftly. Sometimes it is for the better and sometimes it is for
the worse. Ultimately you have companies who are trying to put out the
best games in the universe before other people get the same idea. Companies
employ humans and humans make mistakes. Sometimes it means a game gets
pushed so it can be solid when you purchase it.

So the next time you get angry at a company for not shipping on time,
keep this article in mind and ask yourself this question: would I rather
have a game now that’s full of bugs and problems, or would I rather
wait a couple months for a complete, perfect game?

Joshua Bentley was employed by gaming giant Sierra Online for four
years. He has since moved on to bigger and better things (which he is
still searching for).