I've recently watched some of IGN's "developers react to speedrun" videos. Do game developers often watch speedruns? More importantly, do developers try to study speedruns to learn how the runners broke their games?
Yes, many of us watch speed runs. AGDQ and similar events are very popular among game devs, especially designers. A good number of our discord members were commenting live during this past AGDQ and I saw many office workstation secondary monitors set to stream it in the background during work hours. Watching games get played at extremely high levels of execution is fun and interesting. Game devs are usually among the most invested 5% so we’re interested in this stuff - especially if we’ve worked on the project. As long as the speed runner doesn’t do something ignorant like calling the devs lazy, we’re usually pretty good with what they’re doing. I tend to get annoyed and tune out if the runner starts badmouthing the devs on stream.
We usually don’t specifically study speed runs - I’ve mentioned before that every game that ships has a list of bugs a mile and a half long that we never got around to fixing. In most cases (>90%), the skips and exploits the speed runners use are known issues that were found, reported, and deemed to be too low priority for the dev team to address. That should make sense if you think about it - the skips and exploits speed runners use won’t break or crash the game (or they wouldn’t be used in a speed run, which requires completing the game), and they’re pretty hard to use right. This automatically makes them less important than any bug that does crash/break the game or any certification issue. If the exploits are obscure and difficult to set up, it’s probably an even lower priority for us to fix.
This isn’t to say that we necessarily understand exactly when specific exploits can be used for skipping ahead under very specific circumstances. We just know that we found them and chose not to fix them. That’s what I feel whenever I see somebody playing one of the games I worked on and exploiting bugs to get ahead - “Oh I never knew you could use that bug to skip this part of the game”. We usually know about the bug but not necessarily the full range of its application.
The FANTa Project is currently on hiatus while I am crunching at work too busy.
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