Baby, You're a Video Games Tester! Options

[The Ghost of Inept Pig]

Well, the Gamedaily article does point towards such things being true - how many recent games can you think of that have not required some form of patch to fix the bugs within the game? And sometimes, one patch just isn't enough...

But what's going on lately that so many games are being released unfinished? Why are the people now paying to essentially beta test the games rather than purchasing completed games? It's happening more and more often. If you scan through the PC reviews, on this and any other site, you will notice an overabundance of games that lost points or otherwise hampered their players' experience by being unpolished, full of bugs, and sometimes downright annoying to play. Everything from controls and camera movements to balancing issues, broken quests, and of course graphical errors are abundant in probably half the titles on the shelf these days. It's become habit to look for any patches to a game while I'm installing it, and that's not right.

In recent years, many developers and publishers have been turning to the ability to patch PC games not as a way to improve what they had already been proud to release, or to fix the really little problems that they simply overlooked, but seemingly as a replacement for play testing and dedication to having a quality product. The games getting released are more and more advanced, so theoretically there's more and more that can go wrong. However, this is no excuse for little or no testing of their games. Along with all of this new technology, games are selling at higher prices and in higher quantities than at any time in the past, so these companies have the resources to find and resolve these problems. Publishers have been more and more often taking a stance of set a date and release then with whatever you've got. 'We can always patch it later,' is becoming a mantra. I don't like it one bit.

GameDaily