Divinity: Original Sin 2 launched last week, after a Kickstarter campaign and years in development. And while the game has been received well by all and sundry, the nuts and bolts of the launch – getting the game uploaded and available for purchase – turned out to be a total nightmare.
In a Kickstarter update and video uploaded to coincide with the release date, Larian Studios founder Swen Vincke took people through the company headquarters. And for launch day, everything was … eerily quiet. And some levels were empty completely, which isn’t typical for launch day for a game. Or any launch day, for that matter.
So what was going on? As it turned out, the power had gone out. Not to the offices, but the city where Larian was based (Ghent, Belgium). And if that wasn’t bad enough, the computer Larian used to upload builds to Steam refused to boot.
It’s one of those things that gamers never see. From their perspective, a timer ticks down on Steam or a store, and then the game is available for download or purchase or play. That’s it.
But what actually happens behind the scenes is often more complex. And while the process of uploading a release build to Steam and setting a game live isn’t typically this complicated, it just goes to show that making games is never really that simple.
Leave a Reply