CDS - year later - SpringboardVR Community

CDS - year later

gameovr

For those of us that have been with Springboard for a while you may remember that it was almost a year ago that Springboard started offering games using their CDS system instead of Steam. Back when it first launched many of us had… constructive criticism for aspects of their system. I thought it would provide some perspective to revisit some of our concerns from a year ago and how they have been addressed;
1) We cannot control when Springboard installs or updates games - happens automatically when it detects the system is idle. 1 year later there is no change to this.
2) If Springboard isn’t working we can’t launch CDS games. This has been partially fixed by allowing the stations to go into offline mode, but Springboard does need to be running to allow the game to launch so if it completely breaks we are still left without those titles.
3) Lack of change logs/updates. Since developers control the update process they can at any time upload a new version of their game to CDS and it will automatically install on our stations when they are idle. We receive no notice or update when this happens and it is not posted anywhere for us to see, so we often have no idea games have been updated, or what has been changed with a game. This has seen no improvement over the last year.
4) lack of launch arguements (arcade mode etc) for CDS games. Some games allow for custom launch arguements like skyfront, elven assassin etc. Many CDS games are now an “arcade version” that makes many of those launch arguements no longer necessary.
5) CDS games can’t use steam friends for invite which leaves multiplayer to rely on quickmatch, and in some cases multiplayer does not work at all. This has seen no improvement over the past year- still a huge step backward for multiplayer games.
6)CDS did not allow for custom images or videos replying on what the dev provided. This has been fixed to allow us to use our own images when needed.
7) CDS titles often lag far behind the Steam version of a game or are missing key features that make it worse than the home consumer version. We have yet to see a plan to improve this.

I see new arcades on the Springboard community bringing up these issues all the time, and it reminds me that we brought all these same issues up a year ago. Considering that Springboard has had nearly a year now to work out these issues it’s disappointing to see so many of them have not only not been resolved, but have not seen any progress made. We were assured that CDS was necessary for planning exciting improvements down the road like being able to launch customers straight into a multiplayer game together- that was on the roadmap a year ago. I was hoping that over time these issues that we brought forward would be adressed, and we would start moving forward with their other planned features, but that simply does not seem to be the case. Now, with a few notable exceptions it seems Springboard just chooses to ignore our complaints and that is deeply disappointing. I used to take a lot of pride that by using Springboard I was on the leading edge of the industry and had a huge advantage over the competition- but that lead is narrowing all the time, and we are going to fall behind in many regards if things don’t change. /end rant/

Jayson_Paglow

Hey Eric,

Thanks for taking the time to write this out!

While we are always trying to improve some things we still need to work on and others are outside of our control. We agree with number 1 and 3 and this is something we’ll be discussing moving forward.

Number 2 is actually a common misconception that we need to do a better job of communicating. You can actually launch CDS titles directly from the PC after they’ve been downloaded through our CDS. While this is not ideal it does allow for arcade business to continue to function in the event of downtime/network errors.

Launch arguments and CDS titles lagging behind their Steam versions for update/features are something we fight hard for but at the end of the day we can only be so persuasive and persistent. While it’s definitely a difficult process, we’ll continue to work hard to get content developers to optimize for arcades

Number 5 is tricky. Multiplayer is definitely one of the most difficult and painful experiences with running a VR Arcade. While it should be on the content creators to make more fluent multiplayer experiences and use things like Steam friends to streamline the process we understand they’re not likely to adapt as a whole. We will be discussing internally how to potentially solve this and while we can’t give any guarantees I appreciate you bringing this up.

As always Eric, we’re thankful for your straight forward approach and bringing our attention to pain-points that you and many operators feel. Within the next month we’re hoping to release an updated roadmap based on what we can realistically achieve in 2020. We’ll take this into account as we make our final decisions.

Thanks again!

gameovr

Thanks for the reply Jayson. Unless something has changed recently with manually launching cds games in my experience, it will start up springboard in the background along with the game. In the rare instances where Springboard has gone off the rails (can’t add time to station or something along those lines) the game will launch but customer will still have the “times up” message displayed and will be unable to play. If this has changed then that is definately an improvement and I did not realise that.

When it comes to multiplayer I thought the idea was to streamline games (at least CDS ones) so the multiplayer could be handled through the Springboard launcher. That would require all multiplayer games on CDS to use 1 uniform system off the same servers and backbone but it would be the single greatest feature of all time for springboard. Rather than leaving that to the devs I think this is something Springboard should build out and allow devs to integrate into their game. Ideally you would have the players connected into multiplayer BEFORE launching the game, and then they would just launch into it together. Think of the way Rec-Room has a lobby area where you connect with your friends (other stations) then hop into a game from there. I know @thevrclub has set up a custom rec room with doors leading to each of the experiences and that is sort of what I envision. Have the players in a multiplayer lobby the second they put the headset on, and for the games that are supported they could jump right in from there, and the other games single player or through steam would just be on a list to launch and we would have to manually join them out like now. I think many devs would be totally onboard with this as it would give their games a lot more playtime and thus more revenue (arcade staff are more likely to recommend a game that is faster and easier to get people going on)