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First I will start by apologising for my poor english.

I would like to start a small discussion here about new games and all that happens in their development before they go on sale. I don't consider myself to be an hardcore gamer, but I do like to browse around looking at new stuff and spend some extra time reading the news and forums of the games I like the most.

In general, I assume that all games have similar development stages: betas, tests and demonstrations, presentations, gaming sessions with invited gamers, etc, etc. But something is very wrong considering all of the previous was done. I will highlight some games like Borderlands 2 and latest Skyrim just as examples. I cannot understand how a game, that was supposed to be tested to exhaustion can reach the final consumer with such numerous, big and serious problems.

We should all agree that a lot of what can be read around forums, general or specific to a game, is mostly "trash", situations of "I don't like this and that" or are situations outside the game itself like improper usage or hardware problems. However if all the so called "trash" is filtered, in some cases we can reach a simple conclusion: the game wasn't tested in "real" gaming situations with "real" gamers either in single or multi player.

More and more the videogame industry, in all platforms, is more concerned about the timing to when their product is placed on sale, is more concerned about pre-sale numbers, rather than making sure that the product that me and you buy has the best possible quality. I think we're living in "the patch era".

Everything is patched. In the end what we buy are games that never passed the last development stage, the stage where the last errors are cleared and the game refined to it's best. The consumer buys an unfinished product, of inferior quality and is in fact paying to help making the game better for the others that buy it later, because it's their frustration and feedback that truly allows a company to reach and clear the last development stage. The arrival of the internet has made this events as bad as they can get, because it's that easy for a company to just throw a product into the market and then patch it as they please or problems are detected.

I agree that it's impossible to make a perfect flawless game, it's impossible to see and guess all the problems that might or not happen. Companies cannot recruit hundreds of thousands of tester players, testers cannot simulate all of the gaming environments that a game might be played in, especially worse when we talk about pc platform, but if by one hand some errors are only possible to detect after the game reaches us gamers in the real world, some errors just seem like the company rushed, didn't care or just didn't try hard enough to see them.

Patchs for pc has been around for decades and in the old console gaming days having a game with problems would just plainly mean you're screwed. Patchs can indeed improve a game after release and should be used and abused for that purpose not for correcting errors that shouldn't have happened in the first place, errors that do indeed question the ability for a gamer to play the game as it should be played and ruin the entire experience. What I do say is that testing in later stages in not as intense as it should be.

We are living in "the patch era" whether we like it or not.

People appear to forget a couple things when talking about patchs.
We live in a age more and more things are connected to online elements as a result more stuff to go wrong.
Also alot of parts to a game which can go wrong you won't notice it until it goes live. No matter how much testing a company does it does not beat millions of people playing it.
PC gaming is a good example of certain hardware types to do this day still don't run that good with certain games. That problem is gone on consoles but lack the power compared to the constant upgrades PC can get.

Betas/Demos cost money to run also cost money to release and update. Also costs money to release a patch. In most cases companies release a patch once they have enough to make it worth releasing it. Look at BF3 for a good example they pack all the DLC/Patch into one it works out cheaper.
Hotfixes do take less time but they still need to wait weeks before it goes live.

Time tables for release dates is a problem too. With a big game like MOH if that game had a serious problem in beta but is meant to be released weeks ahead do they delay it or what ? delaying it would cost millions until the problem was fixed that if it could be fixed or could patch the problem at a low cost. So is a balance between making a product that weeks and keeping the people funding it happy.
MW3 is a good example of that ^

Also patchs cost a bomb to make and release most companies hate paying the fees for paying stuff.

Of course are some things that need to be tested like a new concept or major change but they are not tested.
Also the problem of people seeing it as a demo over a test build for a game.

A PR problem which is why alot of devs don't show stuff off until it completed or won't allow people to film test builds.

Thanks for sharing your point of view on this subject. I do agree money dictates most of the options companies choose in terms of timeline, contents ,etc, etc.

Somehow I feel that we, as users and customers, are becoming less demanding when it comes to quality. We have learned to accept some things that should never happen, we keep on supporting companies that constantly overlook the quality aspect of their products and in the end we don't help ourselves or the market itself.

That's why I "try before buy" :ha!: