PS France Head: Driveclub Issue Is In The Code, No Idea When It’ll Be Solved

The ‘Driveclub issue’ is slowly becoming a thorn in Sony Computer Entertaiment‘s side. After a one year delay, Evolution Studios finally completed their work on Driveclub when it released on October 8th, but it was quickly clear to everyone that there was something wrong when most people couldn’t connect at all to the game servers. Things have been slowly improving, but for a game so focused on the social side of racing, having frequent connectivity issues three weeks after launch (not to mention the delay of the PS+ Edition of Driveclub) is almost a disaster.

 

Some users (myself included) have been repeatedly wondering why Sony didn’t simply throw more servers at the game, but today we have an answer directly from Philippe Cardon, Vice President of Sony Computer Entertainment for France, Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg; speaking in a video interview recorded at the ongoing Paris Games Week 2014 (and published by the Gameblog folks on their Dailymotion channel), he clarified that the Driveclub issue is in the game’s very code, rather than in the number of servers.

First of all, I really want to apologize with all the players for the connection problems. While coding Driveclub, an error has been made which prevents a lot of people to play at the same time. This is being fixed, but it takes a lot more time than adding 1000, 2000 or 3000 servers since it’s not a server problem. This needs more than a simple patch, the problem is in the code, in the way the network accepts sessions. I don’t know when it will be solved, but every day we’re allowing more players in and all of the development team is working to improve the gameplay experience. Yes, it’s not normal and I apologize again.

This explains a lot, though I still cannot fathom how they could make such a mistake when the entire game was so focused on multiplayer. Here at Worlds Factory, we held off our Driveclub review for a while to see if the problems were going to be fixed eventually, but this statement coupled with Shuhei Yoshida‘s message on the official Driveclub page on Facebook clearly means that the ‘Driveclub issue’ is going to stay, at least for a while. Look forward to our verdict very soon.