So physical purchases only then. Understood
Until they aren’t being offered anymore. On PC, physical games are practically dead and on console, they are only making up less than 20% of sales at this point (which is why both Sony and Microsoft are offering versions of the consoles without disc drives). Not to mention, there’s often mandatory day-one patches in the tens of gigabytes or (particularly on Switch and Switch 2) the physical media only containing some of the game files, requiring a download to play.
Ahh good point. That’s frustrating and something I always forget. The numerous updates and adjustments required for games is annoying. There’s certainly something to be said about the days when games were thoroughly play tested and then released in a mostly solid state
Or 100% solid-state, if you know what I mean.
Believe it or not there was a time when all games on all consoles shipped 100% complete. No patches necessary.
Now it’s about maximizing quarterly earnings and seeing how far you can screw the customer before they leave your product and ecosystem altogether.
Greed-fueled enshitification.
I’m sick of it.
Has this ever been the case? For as long as I’ve been playing games (early 1990s), there have always been buggy games that were clearly not thoroughly playtested. The difference was that back then, patches were either impossible (console - at best there was a silently patched re-release later*) or required PC players to purchase a gaming magazine to get them (if there were any). Perhaps the fact that it’s now easy to distribute even large patches has incentivized developers to adopt a “we’ll fix it eventually” approach, but I have no actual data on this resulting in worse games on average. If there is an actual measurable decrease in software quality in the gaming world, it could just be that the increasing technical complexity of games makes it impossible to detect the majority of bugs these days.
*GTA San Andreas is one of the better known examples of this. There were game-breaking bugs in the original PS2 release that made 100% completion impossible. Only later releases (and ports) had these issues fixed.
I think the best way to put it is that a game at release today is more like a game in beta in the 90s.
A game in beta at the 90s would mostly work and would probably be almost thoroughly playable, but the difference is here you don’t have a cartridge that you can’t update. You have a piece of software that’s sitting on a hard drive anyway and is fully updateable after launch. And so they’re pushing the production further and further down that line, right? The enshittification comes where they push it further and further towards Alpha so they can cut their losses if the game doesn’t turn out to be all that profitable or interesting to the players.
