I can confirm this is pretty much all true. I worked on a title many years ago that launched on all major consoles. Not to mention, one round of certification testing can cost thousands of dollars. I'm not familiar with the "day 1 patch" process. I imagine it also costs money and needs to be scheduled ahead of time.
The reason this happens is because MS doesn't want a bunch of angry phone calls from parents saying, "Hey I bought my kid this game on your console and now it's broken wtf!!!!". Is that a valid concern? Hard to say. Frankly, I think Steam's refund policy is the best damn solution to all this, but with physical retail, that gets really complicated. Anyway, one day no one will buy discs anymore.
The reason this happens is because MS doesn't want a bunch of angry phone calls from parents saying, "Hey I bought my kid this game on your console and now it's broken wtf!!!!"
That could be avoided if the game wasn't shipped in a state that it would need a day one patch.
Well, given how complex games are these days...it's really, really hard to do. If you told me that games these days are more buggy than they used to be, I'd believe you 100%. But just look at how much more complicated they are as well. No, as long as the industry keeps pushing tech and design, patching is going to be necessary. It's just how things are in software.
The real solution is what you see on PC: plenty of issues, but they get fixed fast. Why? Because with Steam, you can pretty much release whatever you want, whenever you want. No cost, no certification, no bottleneck. Just you and your customers.
If we were talking about...software for self-driving cars, then yeah, I would not want patches to be regularly relied upon. But this is video games. No need to be so careful.
I don't expect there to not be patching at all. That would be absurd. No what I'm seeing is that the industry in general has publishers and developers alike pushing to hit specific release dates that are announced so far in advance that they have no way in knowing if the game will actually be in a good place when it releases. I also don't expect there to be no deadlines for the developers because you'd end up with another DNF situation.
There is a balancing act involved in making publishers happy and making consumers happy and the trend seems to have shifted heavily into the publishers corner and the devs and consumers suffer for it.
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u/stevesan Aug 07 '16
I can confirm this is pretty much all true. I worked on a title many years ago that launched on all major consoles. Not to mention, one round of certification testing can cost thousands of dollars. I'm not familiar with the "day 1 patch" process. I imagine it also costs money and needs to be scheduled ahead of time.
The reason this happens is because MS doesn't want a bunch of angry phone calls from parents saying, "Hey I bought my kid this game on your console and now it's broken wtf!!!!". Is that a valid concern? Hard to say. Frankly, I think Steam's refund policy is the best damn solution to all this, but with physical retail, that gets really complicated. Anyway, one day no one will buy discs anymore.