The one thing that really angers me is when a game is released that does not work properly, you go onto the official forums where people are posted their justified displeasure only to be met by people who respond by telling them to stop complaining.
It angers me because if you spend your money on something you have a right to expect it to work as described from day one. Video games are not cheap to buy and the least you should expect from a developer and publisher is that the game is fit for purpose on day one. Now I am not stupid enough to realise that there will always be bugs that slip through the QA process, but recently the level of bugs has been totally unacceptable. In many cases we are seeing game breaking bugs that render the software almost unplayable, whether it is the game crashing all the time or save files becoming corrupted. These type of errors are not acceptable.
You see the thing that these people who post in defence of the developers on these forums assume is that everyone has their consoles connected online. This is simply not the case. It may surprise some people to know that there is still a very large portion of the gaming community that don't have their consoles connected for online play. If they purchase one of these games with these problems, just how are they supposed to get the fix? There is no obvious solution I can think of, so they are effectively stuck with a broken game. That is hardly fair or acceptable is it?
Now game fixes are nothing new. As a one time PC gamer I always expected a patch to come out after a game was released to address issues but this tended to be more to do with the developers having to cater for many different configurations of PC's in the market. There are no such excuses for consoles games, yet this problem has not only crossed formats but is getting worse.
One of the reasons I think this has become the case is that now game release schedules are controlled by the accountants of the publishing companies. Releases are being shoe horned into financial periods to boost the value of the company and to ensure that sales revenue is maximised. There is nothing wrong with this on one level, but when it means that games are being put into the market place when they are clearly not ready for release then it is wrong and something needs to be done about it. The current attitude of shoveling the game out and saying you will fix the issues post release should not be acceptable.
The defenders of these publishers and developers don't seem to see this. The moment you start telling people to stop moaning about something that is broken is the moment you accept the theory that it is OK to sell unfinished games.
If you purchased a film and it stopped halfway through and you were advised that a fix was in the works, you are more likely to return it for something else or a refund, the same if you bought an album only to find half the songs missing. Therefore why do people think that it OK for games to be released in this fashion.
Without people willing to draw a line and say enough is enough, things don't improve they just get worse. As long as game developers and publishers get away with this then they will continue to do so. It is left to the people who complain and who take the game back for a refund to fight against it and they should be encouraged and more people should join then, rather than be shouted down on the official forums by those who are looking to do nothing other to score points with the developers.
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