Hey Mcksalg, thanks for hitting us up and thank you for writing this up. To begin, I just want to outline the major differences for developing Armello (and games in general) for console compared to through Steam. So on Steam, the owness is on us to provide and maintain the builds. Patching or updating this can happen as regularly as we like and we have total control.
For console however, they have an extensive list of regulations that we must adhere to in order to exist on their platform. As such, they have a through submission process. Jeff Kaplan from the Overwatch team explains this in a really great way in one of their
latest developer updates.
- The constant crashes and matchmaking errors
When it comes to bug fixing, Steam users are able to send through in-game bugs that include log files with more information about what technically occurred, but this is not the case for PS4. We receive reports of softlocks and crashes on PS4 every now and then, but have nothing other than what's said by the reporter to track down the bug in question. This stretches out the investigation time but we're doing our best to squash every last error. This is why detailed reports help a bunch.
Also, we have extensive Quality Assurance in house, along with Sony's submission process as mentioned above. We definitely aren't experiencing that a significant portion of games are crashing, which further complicates the issue.
- The lack of full game content
As we're a small team working on a lot of content, we utilize infrastructure provided by the relevant platforms. For example the PS4 friends system and the Steam Inventory system. We merely tap into their processes to bring these epic features to life. The dice system is one that we have a solution for, and it's about prioritizing our time accordingly to bring it to life. I can't spill the beans about how this will manifest on console as it's totally subject to change at this point.
I feel like DLC is something we've definitely done right for consoles! We've managed some fairly smooth simultaneous releases of the hero pack and the board skins pack! Future DLC will be coming to console but prices haven't been announced for any platform at this stage. Hold tight for news about that.
I also jumped on and took a look at the discussions happening in the PS4 communities but unfortunately there wasn't much information that was actionable on our end. In terms of submitting a bug, the best move is to let us know what happened leading up to the break. Say, if someone disconnected while you were trying to play a card or something like that.
We really do care about you folks. In fact, we're hiring a console guru to assist us in more builds out in less time. Hopefully we have news about this in the coming weeks!
Thanks for your patience.
<3 Darcy