Thoughts and concerns on the new Springboard update and CDS

gameovr

Hello operators and Springboard staff. We have certainly seen a lot of issues and concerns arise over the last few days with this latest release so rather than reply on multiple threads I thought I would create a central one and add in my 2 cents on everything.

Bugs! Every major springboard update has come with its share of bugs. As an arcade that has been on Springboard for nearly 2 years, I have come to expect/anticipate there being a few hiccups. A longer in-depth beta test run could help here since most of those bugs were squashed pretty fast once we all got our hands on it. The other side we have to remember is pretty much any platform that releases a major software update runs into bugs. Even Microsoft and Nvidia, huge tech companies that have been around for ages still manage to break everything with major updates so to a certain degree that's part of life in a tech industry. Timing the update for midweek was a good plan to allow a few days to fix things before the busy weekend hits, although unfortunate for those in the middle of spring break- I feel for you. Springboard- perhaps with the next major rollout you could propose several options for dates/times and get feedback from us as to what would collectively work best.

CDS: I like the fact that it is much easier to install and manage games so that part is an improvement. Losing the ability to customize launch arguments, images etc is a big step backwards and in some cases a deal breaker. The part I am most concerned with however is no longer having the safety net of steam if springboard stops working or has a major failure. Generally, we would just close springboard down and manually launch it through steam but with CDS that option is gone so if Springboard stops working we lose the majority of our game library which is asking for an incredible leap of faith from Springboard. I would like to see the option to manually launch a game installed though CDS without having springboard open as a failsafe.

Content: Content is our lifeblood. Without games we have very expensive paperweights. In order to compete with other arcades we need to have better content, and get it faster. There are close to 150 content requests sitting open on the springboard features page. Almost none of these have any note or update from Springboard as to the status of them. Springboard- if you have contacted a developer please let us know the response, put a note on the content request page so we know that you spoke with them and they weren't interested, or the content didn't meet your guidelines or whatever the case may be. Keeping us in the dark doesn't help our industry move forward. Some of the games we have requested are available on other content platforms so we know they are receptive to commercial licensing, so it makes me wonder why we don't have access to them.

Keep talking and nobody explodes: 52 arcades have requested this game, and it is on steam site licensing as well as other 3rd party platforms. The original request was almost a year ago and no update from Springboard? Fruit Ninja, Arkham Asylum, Serious Sam the Last Hope, Angry Birds, Duck Season, Accounting, Climby, Slightly Heroes... All of these have been highly requested and all of these are available of licensing but not through springboard and none of them have updates or notes from Springboard and with the exception of Angry Birds, none of them are even under review. I think securing great content should be more of a priority, and keeping us in the loop as to where we are at with content would be much appreciated.

Other License options/ regional rates: This has been promised for a while now and keeps getting pushed back. Game licensing is one of our biggest costs, so seeing options to reduce that is a high priority item to me and I would like to know a little more than "coming in future updates" considering we are well outside the original timeline. I know things get pushed back, things don't go as planned, but again- keep us in the loop.

Finally, I would like to remind Springboard:

We are your customers. We are the lifeblood of your entire platform. We Arcades provide feedback on games, and we pay for that privilege. Our sheer numbers and wealth of information make you attractive to developers.

Our success is your success. Imposing updates that hamstring us or leave us scrambling for workarounds is hurting your customer base. Taking away options for us to do this hurts us more. Not securing the content we need to be competitive is costing us business, and ultimately will be the downfall for many of us. This is a growing business Industry, but it's a fact that many arcades fail today, and many more will along the way. We need to be the ones leading the way, not the ones scrambling to catch up. I certainly don't want to speak for other arcades, but there are Steph and my perspective on things. Springboard does a lot of things well and it's the reason, personally, we sought you out. There is a lot of advantages to being a part of it, but we are stand-alone arcades. Not franchises, for a reason. I don't want us to get to the point where the disadvantages outweigh the advantages.

VR-ARRIVAL

Well summarised Eric. As a new arcade, and one that is seriously struggling to be viable, I agree with everything said here. We need to be able to customise and provide the best content as that will draw customers back. Conversely, one negative comments spread through social media about a less than desirable experience will hurt an individual arcade immensely! A lot of it does come down to communication from and with SpringboardVR as well. For example, if SpringboardVR would have indicated in advance that we would not have been able to put in launch arguments or customise games in the latest update, I am confident that there would have been a lot of discussion from arcade owners that may have made that more of a feature that needed to be included in the rollout. There just wasn't that level of information sent out or discussed in the open huddles. For such a major content provider change, maybe having 2 open huddles in succession would have been useful - one to provide detail, let us mull over it for a week and then clarify points in the 2nd open huddle, may have been useful before rolling everything out. I am still in the dark about these timelines and what is to be included when. I understand the pressures that SprinboardVR are under trying to cater to a vast and diversified group of arcade owners as well as trying to deal with another group of diversified software developer that may or may not see the advantages of engaging with SpringboardVR. I also understand that SpringboardVR has its roots in the VR Arcade sector but would suggest (with all due respect) that they may not understand what it is like at the coal face now (which is just a nature of the evolving business and industry). My 2c worth anyway...

NickFSVR

Hey Guys, going to be an interesting response here as a bit of a blend of doing work for SpringboardVR and being an Operator long before that as well so I'll be mixing my own experiences and thoughts as made by being in both worlds! This post is intended to give my own feedback on it and to help fill in some gaps and perceptions hopefully and like Eric and Andrew are my general thoughts on the topics rather than a direct response.

What you said is true and I'll probably just be saying what you said again. There are always bugs, I'm sure most of us appreciate that with software you simply can't make a perfect program the first time and I understand from both sides that those bugs can be crippling. First thing I should mention is that there is a lot of testing done before releases like this, there were 2 weeks of Beta Testing internally before an entire week of testing with selected Arcades, it was then decided to extend by a couple of weeks to fix the known bugs and upon release all known bugs had been cleared. The problem arises when we distribute to over 500 Arcades with over 2600 Stations, it's impossible to account and test for every scenario.

In the end there were a bunch of bugs but each bug would only be experienced by 5 or 6 operators most of the time and no others which means they're very individual and that means it takes time to go to each of these operators and collect the data to find out why as we can't replicate them on our end as it's because of their individual setup and we can't just take control of these stations as the bugs are found when in use which means often when it's busy and not available for us to jump on which exacerbates the whole situation. For anyone else reading worried that we don't do enough QA I assure you it is being done to the best of our abilities, there is always room to improve though and each time we fail we will do our best to integrate the lessons and learn from them.

I think it's important here to note that a lot of these Bugs are often due to extremely outdated Drivers and Updates, some GPU Drivers are as much as a year out of date, so whilst they might be "Stable", being that far out of date the programs that rely on them (eg the Launcher and all of the content, haha!) becomes unstable as it's not written for year old drivers, same goes for Windows and keeping the content and the launcher itself up to date. It means the Devs often spend a lot of time finding an obscure work around for these few that keep things so far out of date which takes them away from being able to do other things. I personally keep my GPUs no more than a month out which is more than enough time for any bugs with them to be worked out and use that same philosophy for most other updates.

I think Jordan Williams already addressed this fairly well over in https://community.springboardvr.com/t/let-us-customise-game-presets/491, the major issue there is that I think the Content Creators are well aware we'd like to be able to make these changes are but are still unwilling to allow us as they want to control what they've created which I think is fair on a certain level but I'm really hoping for a new middle ground to be struck though eventually and would encourage us to make a bit of noise to let the Content Creators know that we want this ability. I think that whilst we feel we have a better idea of how to market to our local market (And in a lot of cases probably do) the Content Creators are trying to get paid too and worry the exact opposite that we don't and it'll end up with their Content being trashed. I think the perfect example of this is Richies Plank Experience being put on PlaystationVR, it's a BRILLIANT bit of content but it's being absolutely panned in the reviews by PSVR Users, the Devs there would rather it just not be on there but they're also making money off it, the problem becomes that when it goes on there they really are unable to control it and the environment it is used in.

I wouldn't be overly concerned about not being able to launch, infact this should make things MORE robust in the end, you see the DRM isn't dependant on having an Internet Connection at all, it is dependant on Springboard running in the background, which means if you lose connection to the internet or our servers you'll still be in Offline Mode and able to launch titles from the Launcher without hassles, you'll just need to manually let the customers know when time is up really, I tested this today for instance with Superhot VR Arcade, I pulled the LAN cable to simulate losing connection, it displayed the "Attempting to Connect" in the Launcher and I was able to launch Superhot which is a CDS title with no hassles.

Out of interest, I've been trying to imagine some scenarios where you would want to close SpringboardVR and launch a title but can't think of any off the top of my head but am pretty tired after a long week and not thinking clearly, what are we thinking are the likely scenarios here? Is good to think about them for developers to see as well!

Probably not a bad idea for the team to be reporting responses, a simple "Email sent to Developers with request on xx/xx/xx" and then when they respond something generic like "Developers Responded positively and working with them" or "Developers are not interested" type respond could be good, I've put this in as a Feature Request over at https://features.springboardvr.com/feature-requests/p/better-tracking-of-content-request-status as well. I think a lot of Developers view Steam as the easy version and anyone else as being more work so don't really consider the requests, other times I wouldn't be surprised if there are exclusivity deals done with Steam and other providers, take Fruit Ninja for instance, there is a company called Secret Location that does their PPM and they probably have a deal with Fruit Ninja as exclusive agents which is why Springboard aren't able to get it on!

I'm unsure about the timeline on this, I agree and want it out soon as it really does affect us in terms of costs, I'm feeling the pain as well with the Australian Dollar being so crap right now!

In response to your last paragraph I agree but also emphasise that there is always so much going on behind the scenes that we don't get to hear about, that's my Springboard perspective, my operator perspective is that those sorts of things need to be communicated better and my mixed perspective shows me that the team have realised this and are trying to do more to get this across and fix it and we'll start to see that very shortly I hope.

gameovr

NickFSVR

[quote="NickFSVR, post:3, topic:497"] I wouldn’t be overly concerned about not being able to launch, infact this should make things MORE robust in the end, [/quote]

Hi Nick, thanks for the reply and your perspective. Day one of the update to cds multiple arcades were unable to launch games through Springboard so there is one perfect example of why we would want to have an alternate method of launching the games. How about Loco Dojo which isn't capable of joining people in multiplayer through the cds version? How about the common glitch with springboard where the games simply dont load, or the station doesnt register that you put time on it. In 2 years of using Springboard we have seen any number of bugs/glitches that made it impossible to launch a game through Springboard. Thankfully we can lauch the games directly through steam in a pinch, but with that option gone we are relying on Springboard being 100% functional at all times forever and thats not very realistic. What happens when i come in on a busy Saturday and Springboard is having an issue when 3/4 of my games are locked into CDS? Im looking at thousands in lost revenue and a load of bad reviews. Its great if you have enough faith to operate without a contingency, but I do not.