I'm taking a class on ethics in games, and one of our teachers (I'll call him that, since He's technically not a Professor) is Brett Douville, one of the Lead Programmers for Skyrim. Although I tried to avoid it, I just had to ask him how it is that games like Skyrim can be shipped, when there are very obvious things wrong with the game.
In so many words, He said that it comes as a result of limited marketing timelines; as I understand it (and perhaps I'm misunderstanding him), He explained that a lot of money is spent on advertising, and a lot of planning put into the game's release date. Pushing those things back can be costly. Additionally, a game only has to have a certain amount of functionality in order to pass both Microsoft and Sony's standards for game publishing. These companies set standards at a certain standard, because if Microsoft (for instance) sets the bar high, and (for example) Skyrim doesn't meet it's standards... guess whose console gets it on launch day? And guess what console consumers will have to buy it for until it catches up to Microsoft's standards?
Combine those two, along with the ability to update games post-release, and that's one reason why we see games (with obvious flaws) being released. Announcing release dates, then holding off the game, is costly for the company; it's cheaper and more convenient to send out post-launch updates.
That's a defense I hear companies use for this a lot, but there's a gaping hole in it.
This is a new thing. Before developers had the ability to patch games post-launch, games had to be solid at launch, and they were. It's only now that they have the ability to patch after release that developers are getting lazy, not because they have to, but because they can.
If developers stopped being so trigger-happy with release dates they'd have enough time to tweak it before launch.
This doesn't bother me all that much most of the time, but when I come home from buying loads of games it is a huge pain to have to wait for them all to update before I can play them. A single update can take hours. And it goes without saying that people who preorder or buy at launch one of these sell-now-patch-later games are paying money for a broken mess of a game in some cases, and likely by the time the developers fix it it'll be cheaper to buy, so they essentially paid more for an inferior version of the game.
Trust me, He wasn't necessarily defending that point at all lol.
Obviously, it can be problematic.
But, people vote with their money, and money says that (most) players don't mind the system. I imagine that it bothers this group of people so much, because we're the demographic that's thinking about the future of gaming as much as the past... or, more modestly, we just think about it comparatively more.
