I’ve released a game on PC game pass (and Steam), and I can tell you that it’s painful for the devs too, before the players ever run into these issues.
One thing that was especially frustrating is that there is no way to automate the process of uploading a build. You have to drag and drop giant files (which you first had to get hold of from the build server in a usual setup). And click buttons and stuff. And wait a lot between steps.
When we mentioned the desire to automate this, so we could automatically deploy eg nightly builds, MS sounded like that was an interesting idea they hadn’t heard of before. WTF.
And stuff like that missing will automatically mean that the quality of the build on that platform is worse. No nightly build, but only build on demand requiring human work time and frustration means no frequent testing by QA on the platform, until they absolutely have to.
It's doubly absurd considering Microsoft owns one of the biggest build and deployment automation pipelines as part of their Azure offerings. Most of it is aimed at Azure, but so much of the Xbox backend is just Azure under the hood anyway. Azure Pipelines should have had integrations for this on day one.
And yet people somehow keep telling themselves that Microsoft has the best developer tools of all platforms (coincidentally mostly people who have never worked with other platforms).
When we mentioned the desire to automate this, so we could automatically deploy eg nightly builds, MS sounded like that was an interesting idea they hadn’t heard of before. WTF.
When you receive a request for a feature that you know would be good, but for whatever reason you can't implement it (perhaps there are other things you need to pay more attention to, or perhaps there's an idiot manager establishing dumb priorities), giving the response you received is one of the least anger-inducing ones. It's likely they've been repeatedly asked to make the process less painful, but whoever is in charge of managing devs doesn't care.
That's embarrassing. How long have CI/CD pipelines been a thing?
I’ve released a game on PC game pass (and Steam), and I can tell you that it’s painful for the devs too, before the players ever run into these issues.
One thing that was especially frustrating is that there is no way to automate the process of uploading a build. You have to drag and drop giant files (which you first had to get hold of from the build server in a usual setup). And click buttons and stuff. And wait a lot between steps.
When we mentioned the desire to automate this, so we could automatically deploy eg nightly builds, MS sounded like that was an interesting idea they hadn’t heard of before. WTF.
And stuff like that missing will automatically mean that the quality of the build on that platform is worse. No nightly build, but only build on demand requiring human work time and frustration means no frequent testing by QA on the platform, until they absolutely have to.
It's doubly absurd considering Microsoft owns one of the biggest build and deployment automation pipelines as part of their Azure offerings. Most of it is aimed at Azure, but so much of the Xbox backend is just Azure under the hood anyway. Azure Pipelines should have had integrations for this on day one.
And yet people somehow keep telling themselves that Microsoft has the best developer tools of all platforms (coincidentally mostly people who have never worked with other platforms).
When you receive a request for a feature that you know would be good, but for whatever reason you can't implement it (perhaps there are other things you need to pay more attention to, or perhaps there's an idiot manager establishing dumb priorities), giving the response you received is one of the least anger-inducing ones. It's likely they've been repeatedly asked to make the process less painful, but whoever is in charge of managing devs doesn't care.
That's embarrassing. How long have CI/CD pipelines been a thing?