14 DAY TRIAL // The next wave of home consoles, including the Xbox 720 or the PlayStation 4 (PlayStation Orbis) need to provide better and more open terms when it comes to releasing updates for games, at least according to a few developers and publishers.
In order to release an update or patch for games on current consoles, including the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3, developers and publishers need to make it and then submit it for approval with Microsoft or Sony.
Depending on the company, this could take a few weeks, during which players of the actual games are stuck with glitches and bugs.
According to quite a few developers, this needs to change with the next generation of devices, because they want the same freedom they get on platforms like the PC, Facebook, or mobile ones.
"It's sometimes expensive, there's an awful lot of bureaucracy, even when you want to do quite small things," Ubisoft Massive‘s David Polfeldt told Gamasutra about the update policies on current consoles.
His voice is backed up by Christian Svensson, the senior vice president at Capcom, who also wants updating to become a more hassle-free experience.
"I'm hoping for a much more fluid means of providing updates to consumers, being able to have a much more rapid turnaround in between when content is submitted and when content goes live to consumers, to provide a higher level of service to them," he said.
These demands can be solved by implementing a few systems behind the scenes, through which developers can fix their games on the fly, without needing to go through approval, according to the Capcom executive.
"I'm hoping that the networking and the processes in the future are built with that in mind,” Svensson added. “I'd like to see more server-based backends that are more under publisher-developer control, rather than being forced through systems that are bit more pre-defined by the first-party. That would enable experiences online that are not currently available in today's console marketplace."
Right now, however, nothing concrete is known about the next generation of home consoles, as neither Sony nor Microsoft are willing to admit they’re working on new devices.