this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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At the same time I hear you but still I feel like it's still not acceptable to release half done or poorly optimized products and hope that they'll be done over time. For those who pay for the product it's almost an insult.
I absolutely agree, but so long as it remains profitable developers will do it. Skip a whole lot of QC, rush to release the game, then use the launch to gather bug reports and fix those. Costs saved not hiring a ton of QC testers, get a return on the investment much sooner, get early players to pay to be QC testers basically. It's a tried and tested formula now and it will keep happening until too many people won't pre-order games.
Why do you care? Seriously, think about it. Shitty products in every possible category come out everyday and it doesn’t bother you. You do need these products. if they don’t meet your standards, don’t buy them and move on with your life.
Like, you don’t need to get on line and act as thought you have been personal insulted when there is a moldy apple at the grocery store. Just leave it and keep shopping.
I have thought about this for far longer than warranted I think it comes down to a combination of several factors.
The first is that substitutions among video games are indirect at best. Paradox for example makes strategy games but a fair portion of their fans call them "Paradox games" because of the particular connotations cultivated by their DLC campaigns, multi-year support and mechanical granularity. Also within the strategy genre are the Total War series of games produced by Creative Assembly, fans of that series are throwing fits on YouTube because the handling of the series has been dreadful in their eyes. No competitors have emerged yet to make an alternative Total War experience and several fans were excited about the final entry in a trilogy within the series so the sunk cost fallacy keeps them around.
The second is that any video game player born before about 2003 has witnessed the maturation of the video game industry as we know it. As the rate at which profit is earned in the industry falls, practices and standards change to recoup perceived losses. In video games this manifests in unusually tangible ways for the consumer. Instead of entering cheat codes left in for debugging purposes, you buy power ups with real money. Instead of unlocking alternate outfits and characters by completing challenges or secrets you buy them with real money. Instead of a game having to wait until it is finished to be sold, publishers leverage internet connectivity to ship first and patch later. Many of these practices are striking to the consumer because they are monetizing aspects of their hobby that they once enjoyed at no extra cost, and these practices are appearing in a context of escapism.