Still waiting for Driveclub to roll up on Playstation Plus? You may have to keep waiting.
When speaking in an interview with Metro, Jim Ryan, head of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, said the free version of the racing game Driveclub for PS Plus users was “still being looked at.” When asked if he could guarantee that it will ever happen, Ryan said “I can’t say anything at this stage.”
Ryan also discussed the numerous “broken games” released on consoles this past fall, including the Sony exclusive multiplayer online racer Driveclub, which was plagued by connectivity issues upon release.
I gotta tell you that everybody in this building [Sony’s Europe HQ in London] and in the development community was absolutely distraught that that was the case”, Ryan said. ” I don’t think anybody should labour under the opinion that there was any feeling of insouciance or anybody being relaxed about that being the case. People were working 24/7, and that’s an expression that’s lightly used but people were working 24/7 trying to fix this.”
“Now, should the game have worked at launch? Of course,” Ryan said. “Should people pay £50 for something and expect it to work? Of course.
Ryan went further into discussing the difficulty of developing games on the new consoles, emphasizing the challenge of new hardware and the increased use of online gameplay.
“I think one thing that the industry appears to have misjudged in the generational transition – where there’s a lot spoken about moving to a more straightforward PC architecture that should make it easy for developers to come to terms with next gen and all of that – is I think the massively enhanced online ambitions a lot of developers and publishers have identified as one of the opportunists of next gen, appear to have been way more technically challenging than anyone realised” Ryan said.
“And QAing this stuff… a lot of it is load placed on servers, simply due to concurrency. It’s hard. Again, that’s not to excuse publishing something that’s not fit for purpose. In any form of entertainment, in any business… whether it’s a washing machine, whether it’s a book, whether it’s television, whether it’s a video game you shouldn’t put something out until it’s ready.”
Driveclub was announced to be receiving additional content in its latest patch.