Enough with the Games, already.

[N5329K]

I also agree with the OP that it’s as juvenile as fart jokes. Oh, wait.
But I also think it shows how Tesla is very different from, oh, just about every other OEM. Like the little superbottle icon in the heat transfer/cooling system. No one else would do that. No designer would even be able to suggest it without fear of being curbed. Designers at Tesla are allowed to have fun, and it shows. And that’s good, even though I wish someone would build a game to help QC actually do QC, instead of handing a good bit of that job to the buyer.
Robin

 

[Mr X]

I can't imagine how boring ones life is if they don't play video games. Been playing since 6. First car game was NFS High Stakes on PC and now my soon to be car will have video games built into it

 

[timk225]

I play the games now and then, but fart mode needs to disappear, it is an embarrassment to Tesla that it ever existed.

 

[Boomer543]

Games are important. Tesla is getting one new customer because the games put them over the top of wanting one. This happened to someone I gave a ride to last week.

No offense, but you'd have to be an idiot to buy a new car because of a game it has. $45K will buy a lot of Xbox and PS4 games....

 

[T3SLAROD]

If only there was a Tesla Performance Division...

 

[Atari2600]

No offense, but you'd have to be an idiot to buy a new car because of a game it has. $45K will buy a lot of Xbox and PS4 games....

I stated it put him over the top, not because of.

No offense, but reading comprehension fail on your part.

 

[jordanair45]

It is cool, if I had nothing else to do. I use my phone for entertainment.

It's good for when you leave your kids in the car though (joke, sorry if insensitive)

 

[dmurphy]

It’s great when charging. Or when showing the car off.

An excellent, low cost way to show how unique the vehicles are. They really do help the sale.

Porting games is fairly easy. Doesn’t take much. Big return for small effort - sales and satisfaction. Want to know why Tesla always leads the customer-sat surveys? There ya go.

And to be clear - I strongly suggest anyone saying “those resources are wasted and should be working on XYZ instead” needs to read “The Mythical Man Month”.

 

[hcdavis3]

I’ve never played any of the games and couldn’t care less. It’s a freaking car not a PS 3.

 

[MXWing]

"Working is one of the most dangerous forms of procrastination."
Gretchen Rubin

I just don't give a rat's ass about the "entertainment" features that seem to figure prominently in Elon's vision for the cars. I would rather have him take those coding teams and devote their engineering horsepower to better wipers, cross-traffic alerts, CarPlay and Android Auto, text message integration, sentry mode on the dashboard and mobile app, etc.

Anybody else not care one bit for Fart Mode 2 and Enhanced Missile Command?

If it helps assuage your frustration any, I doubt the same team working on fart apps is the one that works on anything important.

Adding the person who is helping to port missile command to the autopilot team could slow down efforts and not help it. Sometimes less is more.

Tesla also has to stay in the news every five minutes. These little updates help with that and gives Elon something to tweet about.

It’s look bad if the last thing on Elon’s Twitter is Enhanced Summon coming soon and the tweet is a month old.

No offense, but you'd have to be an idiot to buy a new car because of a game it has. $45K will buy a lot of Xbox and PS4 games....

Relatively wealthy “idiot.” They already have an XBox and PS4 already. That’s low hanging fruit for a gamer.

People decide to spend how they spend. If that one little thing pushes them over - it’s their money, their hobby.

 

[jordanair45]

I’ve never played any of the games and couldn’t care less. It’s a freaking car not a PS 3.

Going to pay dividends in the future...

My little nephew is hard core into gaming, as well as a lot of other kids....they're going to grow up, think its the coolest thing in the world, and there ya go....sold

 

[timk225]

In the same way we might see an old Road Runner or (for example) 1971 Plymouth Valiant in someones' back yard that hasn't moved in 20 years but they claim "They are going to fix it up someday", 20 years from now, someone will see the front bumper of an old 1st gen Model 3 poking out from behind someone's garage, and after running an extension cord to the car, they will climb in and try out games on the touch screen.

 

[qdeathstar]

when is fart mode 2 comming out? My toddler nephew loves that feature!

 

[Knightshade]

While you are almost certainly right, that one could not say, "Bob, today you shall stop work on Asteroids and, instead, work on Enhanced Summon," I have to believe that the Asteroid budget could be reduced to zero and the Asteroid bucket of money could be transferred to the budget of the Summon team.

The asteroids budget effectively is zero.

It's a decades old game running in an emulator that has been around for a long time now and already ran natively on the OS the car is running.

The entire "work" involved in offering it in a Tesla was:

A licensing deal with Atari (or whoever has the rights these days) that is likely boilerplate and done in minutes given how often their games are licensed to things.

and

One UI programmer adding it to a menu...also likely doable in minutes.

In exchange for which they got a ton of free publicity and press about offering free games in their cars, and as noted here continue to get a lot of interest from younger folks for doing so.


Even the newer stuff they've brought in or talked about (the racing game, or fallout shelter) are games ported by someone ELSE and Tesla is doing little more than making the license deal and adding it to the in-car menu.

 

[shplatt]

+1 for Fart Mode 2... Wife's gonna FLIP! Perhaps fart when the wipers wipe... or you accelerate too fast... or coal-roll attempt detected. Oh, man, there's endless potential.

 

[Dan203]

There is a false assumption in the common consciousness that more programmers means things get done faster, and that when someone is working on a "stupid game" they’re wasting time because they could be working on something more important. But that's not how it works. Having more people work on a program can actually slow it down. Unless you're super efficient at breaking up the work into chunks, which isn’t even always possible, having more people on a project just creates overlap, conflicts and deviations that have to be resolved.

The point is... the guy(s) working on the games probably wouldn’t be working on something more important instead. They'd likely just be out of a job.

 

[spindrome]

I’d prefer Tesla resources go toward sentry video upgrades (how about being able to view them on screen while in P) vs more video games.

 

[insaneoctane]

Not a big gamer here, but I understand the goal. Elon is clearly on the record that he wants people to really love their cars. Tesla is going for fun. Tesla is going for differentiation. Tesla is going for the future as they see it. The differentiation is very important. Even if other car makers decided to mimic Tesla and try to put in some games, Tesla almost certainly has WAY more compute power in their cars and while others will chase them with the "me too" approach, games like Beach Buggy will simply showcase Tesla's commanding lead in tech because no one could possibly do that for years...

 

[KenC]

Never been a gamer, but I don't mind it at all. Probably not more than a single engineer working on this. Probably less.

 

[silentcorp]

ITT: People that have no idea that a team adding in already emulated games isn't the same team who can work on sentry updates or other features.