4. There is a hidden industry of underground support teams
Believe it or not, many of your favorite video games are not only developed by the advertising studio, but they are collaborated with smaller support teams, and often prefer the teams that remain anonymous.
As mentioned in a great article on Polygon, for decades there has been a hidden industry of “under-the-name” video game development, in which small, unknown studios give uncredited support to well-known AAA studios.
This often happens because the main studio does not want the public to know that aspects of development have been outsourced, for fear of damaging its reputation.
While this may limit a tentpole studio’s ability to promote its work on a big AAA game, it can benefit in other ways, such as working on two competing projects at the same time without having to harm any relationships.
Anyway, for many users, they do not understand that many major games are secretly developed by teams they have never heard of and some of these teams prefer to stay that way.
3. Anti-piracy software often harms game performance
For as long as video games have existed, publishers have naturally sought ways to reduce piracy, and in recent years this has usually involved includes digital rights management (DRM) software that appears in computer games to prevent tampering.
Although most games are eventually hacked by hacking groups, popular anti-piracy software Denuvo has been criticized recently, due to its negative impact on game performance.
It has been observed that many games, including Sonic Mania Plus, Tekken 7, Rime, and recently Doom Eternal, suffer from lag and longer loading times due to the presence of this software compared to the versions pirated.
While Denuvo helps reduce the loss of revenue in the first days or weeks of a game’s launch, the unwanted side effect is penalizing players who bought the game, because the software takes up the CPU to manage both the game and Denuvo, affecting Game performance. .
2. Work on performance capture may continue until shortly before release
AAA games can take more than three years to develop depending on the nature of the project, which is why most gamers could be forgiven for assuming that elements such as story, voice recording, and performance capture recorded and set in the early stages of development. .
This should allow the team to focus on improving gameplay and graphics, and possibly adding new systems that won’t affect the characters or the story too much. But in reality, this is not always true.
Naughty Dog is an interesting example, as performance capture work on The Last of Us Part II ended more than a year before the game’s release. But for Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, they were still filming new footage just three months before its release.
Given the complexity of even capturing basic performance, this is surprising, and shows that the final level of “optimization” could introduce significant changes even in the months of finally before release.
1. Cybercriminals use online games to launder money
While the debate about the inclusion of predatory financial transactions in video games, especially those aimed at younger players, continues to grow, an additional concern has emerged recently, as popular games such as Fortnite, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and World of Warcraft. being used by cybercriminals and scammers to launder money.
This is usually accomplished by purchasing in-game currency or items using stolen credit cards, and then selling those currencies to unsuspecting players at discounted prices, allow them to launder ill-gotten gains.
Amidst criticism that major game publishers were not doing enough to protect players, Valve finally decided to stop in-game currency trading in CS after their own investigations revealed that “the vast -some” of the trades on the site come from fake sources.
Although Valve represents an exception in the gaming industry, blatant fraud still continues in a major way in other video game economies, in plain sight.
