So now that I was done fixing the biggest bugs and catching Pinball Arcade up to where it should’ve been on PS4, I was going to start trying to release tables on a monthly basis like all the other platforms. That’s easier said than done with PS4 though.
While platforms like Steam and Google are pretty much completely hands off with your product and let you publish right when you want to, Sony is definitely not that. They used to always require 3 day testing on your patch regardless of the content, but they eventually stripped that requirement. If your patch met certain requirements, you could publish that patch pretty much right away. Sounds great right? It is actually. But still, there was another side to publishing a patch: getting the DLC ready.
The DLC always had to be tested. And because the patch usually contained DLC—the new table—that meant the patch had to wait for the DLC to be tested. Not only that though, but the store needed time to hook everything up our their side. This is all in addition to the stuff that we also had to do to get the DLC ready. So all said and done, all of this stuff took around a week. A week on a monthly publishing schedule is incredibly rough. That’s about 25% of the time just waiting for Sony to handle their stuff. And there’s a huge problem with that for me.
The tables are usually only done around the last few days of the month. The tables are being bug fixed and QA’d during this last week. So for me to submit my patch, so that Sony could test the DLC a week before the last week was unrealistic. So doing the one table pack a month thing was super unobtainable on PS4. But I still tried. Ultimately though, I would be lucky to just get the table out one week after the table came out on other platforms. Unfortunately, from what I recall though even this wasn’t that easy. I’m not sure specifically what tied up the release of the patch, but there was always something. Still, I did end up getting the tables out within better time, but not as well as I would’ve liked.
Not only did I start to focus on getting the monthly table out, I started to also fix a lot of various bugs and add some pretty cool features that were missing. Stuff the fans wanted, and some stuff that I thought was cool.
Honestly, thinking about it, I feel like there could be some ways to get past all of the BS submission stuff for PS4. I could think of a couple ways, but they’re definitely not apparent. It’d definitely be something I’d want to discuss with Sony before I even tried it because they are weird things.