Will PS4 start tracking playtime soon?

[sabvre42]

Zkuq said:

sabvre42 said:

Zkuq said:

Assuming the system is reasonably programmed and there's a programmer that knows the system, it ought to take that programmer a couple of hours max to program the feature. And if it's not reasonably programmed... Well, there's bigger problems.

My point is that it should be so easy to do that there's two possible reasons why Sony hasn't done it yet:

• It's not in their interests for some reason.
• They haven't thought of the idea (in which case they suck at their jobs).

Its called prioritization. In a REAL programming environment it takes a lot more than rogue programming.

I know it takes. That's why I said a couple of hours instead of an hour. If it's a programmer less familiar with the system, it ought to take even longer. But overall, it shouldn't be a big job. And the feature also directly add value to their services, so it should be pretty high up on the priority list in my opinion.

 

There is requirement gathering; requirements writing; design + design review; code writing; code review; quality assurance testing; uat testing; patch creation (a patch doesn't USUALLY overwrite the entire code.... just the modified DLLs).

On top of that you also have significant UX work in order to implement a user friendly system -- and ANYTHING UX requires insane design and test work.

Your "hours of work" is more than likely an entire 2-4 week sprint for a small dev team, and probably costs closer to $50,000 in development overhead before the database costs of storing all this data.

In terms of a DB schema (if they chose relational)

You'd need a table (billions of records) that stores Userid, game, begin date, time spent, etc
You'd need an additional table with every single game ever released (which would require SUBSTANTIAL work to build).
ETC

If you aren't a developer, you don't understand the amount of work that is required for what appears like a minor change.