Three IT Failures
My 1st post is going to be about failures in the field of
IT. The three I choose and want to concentrate on are: Steam Machine (SM),
Telltale Games (TG) and the security breach of Department of Defense (DoD) in America.
Let’s start wit the Steam Machine. For those who are not familiar with it,
Steam is a company specialized in gaming, they made games like “Half-Life”, “Counter-Strike”
and “Portal”. The SM is a prebuilt gaming computer focused entirely on gaming. Its
operating system is the Steam OS which is Linux based. The first of these PCs
were introduced in 2013 to solve the notorious problem: gaming PCs are very
hard to build. Steam offered a prebuilt gaming PC around the price of a PlayStation
4 or and Xbox One. There was one slight problem with it, because of the OS the
SM was good exclusively for gaming and nothing else. Players didn’t want to
invest into something that would only be as good as a gaming console but for PC
games. The other problem was the timing. Around this time Microsoft gave the
free Windows 10 update for everybody and the SM’s OS just couldn’t compete with
that.
Next on the list is the game developing studio Telltale Games was founded in
2004 their work before 2010 was based on using intellectual properties with a
small but dedicated fanbase. In 2010 the managed to gain access to more famous titles
but their big breakthrough happened in 2012 when they made the story driven
game The Walking Dead (TWD), based on the comics, with butterfly effect (the
butterfly effect in video games means that the player’s actions alter the store
and can lead to multiple different endings). This game was praised by critics and
said to revolutionized story driven gaming. TG followed and episode-based
system meaning that their games came out in parts just like comic books. This
was a huge pressure on the developers since they had to work hard to get the
next release out in time. Because of this pressure the engine they used were
never upgraded and optimized and the games were time consuming and expensive to
make. For such reasons TG couldn’t keep up it’s existence and went bankrupt in
2018. Some of their titles were adapted by other game studios and the last
chapter of TWD was financed by another company so it could be finished.
Last but not least let us discuss the security breach of the DoD. In 2020 October
4th Pentagon officials were alerted about a data reach that involved sensitive
information of its personnel such as credit card numbers and many other. This
data was accessed through a database that contained travel records of employees.
It was stated that this system was not handled by the DoD but an unnamed third-party
organization and that it only effected a “small percentage” of the workers. While
it might be true that the percentage is small it definitely means a lot of
personal information. As the nation’s largest employer with 1.3 million
enlisted personnel meaning that the estimated people affected by this breach is
more than 30.000. The vendor that is affected was not named as it is an ongoing
investigation.
As we can see even big companies can make bad decisions that could even cost
their existence.
I hoped you enjoyed reading my first post and thank you for
doing so!
Balint Adam 2/1/2021
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_Machine_(hardware_platform)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telltale_Games
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