How do you feel about games needing "Updates" on release day?

[Hi-Dro]

I think its a ridiculous practice. It's something that has been bothering me for many years now, and as time go's on it continues to bother me more and more.

As many of you on here, including myself, archive games to play in years to come. It's big a concern of mine that one day we will no longer be able to play these games in their finished or intended playable state. Not only this, but my biggest concern lies in paying £50 for a physical copy of a game, which I then have to spend another hour downloading a 10gb update for, in order to play it. I'm lucky enough to have a stable internet connection, but there are many places even here in UK that don't have that privilege. This must be infuriating for those people, especially if you love games as much as I do, as the above mentioned, I don't like waiting an hour to update a game I bought on release date, I just want to play it now honestly.

Essentially a physical game appeals to certain people, like me who are old school and want to feel like we are getting our money's worth, but the fact of the matter is, we are being massively conned, by the very industry we love and are happy to invest our time and money into.
lets also look at the retro gaming boom that's happened in the last 10 years, people are digging out their rare games that they have in the loft and reselling them, yes sometimes at ridiculously inflated prices but that's besides the point, its a great way to recycle and also grant an interest into old stuff for future generations.
I believe this is why many people are here on this forum, to archive and show their kids what they used to play or just for the nostalgia effect.
In someways I feel like this may well be the very reason the game industry uses the update method, because it actually stops you from being able to sell these games as retro rarities, and at high prices as they actually become worthless, just an unfinished disc with some pretty artwork on the front, and the way things are going maybe might try to stop us reselling/trading them altogether.
We all know how that idea turned out for Microsoft when they mentioned they would implement this idea for the Xbox1 thankfully they did a U-turn on that in the end, but it feels like that's what these companies and studios really want.


Is there any other media industry that follow this practice ? I cant think of any except the software industry.
I can understand why software companies like Microsoft employ this practise for their operating systems, however I don't feel games should fall into this category, as it currently stands.
I'm sure this topic has been discussed many times over, but how would you feel if you bought a Bluray, only to find there were textures missing on the special effects, or the guide ropes used for stunts were still visible, and could only be fixed by an update? Or you bought a magazine and you read down the page till you got a link saying "to read the end of the story go to 'playstationmagazine.com/update' Must have a PC with an active internet connection".
This can actually be extended to any product on any market really, you wouldn't buy a chair that was half finished.
I know by law we are not legally allowed, unauthorised lending of dvd's, or copying of newspaper articles etc but you don't see production companies and editors developing countless number of ways to restrict this as the gaming industry does.
So how are the gaming industry getting away with it? It just doesn't feel fair not just to the consumer but also to the other media industries that work so hard to bring us finished products.

Personally I would like to see a change in the way games are produced and traded within the media market place, to bring it in line with other media industries that work just as hard as they do, rather than software companies like Microsoft with Windows, which clearly has a shelf life that we are all aware of by now, and is not a creative industry.

Why does the software of games follow this suit ? and not follow that of the movie industry.
Why do games have a shelf life but movies do not?
Who actually benefits from this practise ? Because it certainly doesn't feel like the consumer does.

 

[ThoD]

If a game comes out incomplete, I will simply always pirate it and NEVER buy it even after it becomes a proper game. Games used to come out with hardly any bugs, well optimized, with everything included and without crap like DLC, so unless a game comes out properly, meaning beta tested and debugged well and not by random idiots who know nothing, well optimized, is an actual complete game and doesn't have DLCs AND at a reasonable price (not 80€ for a game) I'm not buying, end of story.

Developers need to learn that they should stop being so damn greedy! Games MAY cost more than they did in the past to make, but that's only if you go in over your head with systems and things that don't really matter, on top of selling a LOT more per title compared to how things used to be. If in the past a game took X amount of money to make and made due with, say, a hundred thousand sales, nowadays most games sell million+ and at twice the price old games were, without counting in DLCs. I highly doubt that games nowadays take more than 20 times as much to make than games did in the past. Technology has evolved and making games is way easier than ever before, so in reality, the cost has gone DOWN and only depends on how many people work on it, but the greediness and lies have gone up!

 

[Sicklyboy]

If a game comes out incomplete, I will simply always pirate it and NEVER buy it even after it becomes a proper game. Games used to come out with hardly any bugs, well optimized, with everything included and without crap like DLC, so unless a game comes out properly, meaning beta tested and debugged well and not by random idiots who know nothing, well optimized, is an actual complete game and doesn't have DLCs AND at a reasonable price (not 80€ for a game) I'm not buying, end of story.

Um... have you seen how utterly broken games like Sonic the Hedgehog and pretty much any of the Mario games across the NES and SNES are? They're very full of glitches that the average Joe playing the game might not recognize or encounter on his first, or second playthrough, but most of these bugs don't get discovered on purpose. Same with games now. Look up speedruns of your favorite old school games, find me a single one where the world record is held by a guy who is just really good at playing the game properly, no glitches, etc.

Also,

Games used to come out with hardly any bugs, well optimized,

Pay no mind to the fact that old games used to take up 4MB, and newer ones are >50GB

Edit - also, with some games, keep in mind that physical media can only hold so much. If you have a very long, in depth game, and want to load it with nice textures, your only option might be to include low-res textures on the disk and include the proper high-res ones in a patch, since most games nowadays need to be "installed" off of the disk to the console. I'm not aware of any games though that once you have the physical media, a person without an internet connection will be totally unable to play without updating it first. If I am wrong though I would love to see some examples.

 

[smileyhead]

If a game comes out incomplete, I will simply always pirate it and NEVER buy it even after it becomes a proper game. Games used to come out with hardly any bugs, well optimized, with everything included and without crap like DLC, so unless a game comes out properly, meaning beta tested and debugged well and not by random idiots who know nothing, well optimized, is an actual complete game and doesn't have DLCs AND at a reasonable price (not 80€ for a game) I'm not buying, end of story.

Developers need to learn that they should stop being so damn greedy! Games MAY cost more than they did in the past to make, but that's only if you go in over your head with systems and things that don't really matter, on top of selling a LOT more per title compared to how things used to be. If in the past a game took X amount of money to make and made due with, say, a hundred thousand sales, nowadays most games sell million+ and at twice the price old games were, without counting in DLCs. I highly doubt that games nowadays take more than 20 times as much to make than games did in the past. Technology has evolved and making games is way easier than ever before, so in reality, the cost has gone DOWN and only depends on how many people work on it, but the greediness and lies have gone up!

This. Like Jim Sterling said, it's not about needing money, it's about wanting money. All the money.

 

[ThoD]

Um... have you seen how utterly broken games like Sonic the Hedgehog and pretty much any of the Mario games across the NES and SNES are? They're very full of glitches that the average Joe playing the game might not recognize or encounter on his first, or second playthrough, but most of these bugs don't get discovered on purpose. Same with games now. Look up speedruns of your favorite old school games, find me a single one where the world record is held by a guy who is just really good at playing the game properly, no glitches, etc.

Also,



Pay no mind to the fact that old games used to take up 4MB, and newer ones are >50GB

Edit - also, with some games, keep in mind that physical media can only hold so much. If you have a very long, in depth game, and want to load it with nice textures, your only option might be to include low-res textures on the disk and include the proper high-res ones in a patch, since most games nowadays need to be "installed" off of the disk to the console. I'm not aware of any games though that once you have the physical media, a person without an internet connection will be totally unable to play without updating it first. If I am wrong though I would love to see some examples.

True, there were SOME games that were actually buggy when they could have been better, but they were all poorly made games just capitalizing on franchise names or poor attempts to maintain an IP. Also, almost all bugs in older games come from system limitations, NOT crappy programming and design. When the game hardly fits in the memory when it only gets something like 64KB RAM to work with, you can expect problem to arise with values causing overflows/underflows, but nowadays bugs are from things more like the dev being too lazy to make proper hitboxes or animations or too stingy to hire proper beta testers and instead goes the Steam route. Finally, if you think about the vast majority of buggy games, in the past, they may have been buggy but at least they weren't game-breaking bugs and you could have played through the game fine without encountering a single one, whereas nowadays you got games coming out literally unplayable due to bugs and at twice the price!

PS: Something to note on top of it all, you can't liken something that was cheaply made in the 90s to a big budget game made recently to justify the newer game's bugs. Try playing the unpatched Batman Arkham Origins and Knight (both of which are literally impossible to beat due to bugs), then tell me bugs like climbing over the map in Mario were bad.

 

[smileyhead]

Also, I hate day one patches. Not to mention, sometimes they aren't even automatic!
I've had a really bad experience with them once. I bought Rayman Origins, progressed to World 2, then encountered a game-breaking glitch (I couldn't move on the map). It remained even after restarting the game. I didn't know what to do. It was only by chance I stumbled upon the updater exe in the game's folder.

 

[Deleted User]

True, there were SOME games that were actually buggy when they could have been better, but they were all poorly made games just capitalizing on franchise names or poor attempts to maintain an IP. Also, almost all bugs in older games come from system limitations, NOT crappy programming and design. When the game hardly fits in the memory when it only gets something like 64KB RAM to work with, you can expect problem to arise with values causing overflows/underflows, but nowadays bugs are from things more like the dev being too lazy to make proper hitboxes or animations or too stingy to hire proper beta testers and instead goes the Steam route. Finally, if you think about the vast majority of buggy games, in the past, they may have been buggy but at least they weren't game-breaking bugs and you could have played through the game fine without encountering a single one, whereas nowadays you got games coming out literally unplayable due to bugs and at twice the price!

PS: Something to note on top of it all, you can't liken something that was cheaply made in the 90s to a big budget game made recently to justify the newer game's bugs. Try playing the unpatched Batman Arkham Origins and Knight (both of which are literally impossible to beat due to bugs), then tell me bugs like climbing over the map in Mario were bad.

Maybe in the case of the Super Mario games on the NES it's because of hardware limitations, but from what I can tell, most of the glitches in SMW are definitely from shitty programming. Look up stuff like the powerup incrementation glitch or block duplication.
There's also the gen 1 Pokemon games. Those games are like, held together by staples and scotch tape. They're a mess. Some of the glitches you have to intentionally be looking for, but in certain cases they can be found entirely on accident. (I'm not just talking about stuff like Missingno either)
There was also something in the original Zelda that I think could be blamed entirely on shitty programming but I can't remember what it is right now.

 

[shadoom]

try then buy
that involves piracy

 

[emigre]

Meh. Game development is hard and it's getting complex and more challenging, QA can only do enough. What would be unforgivable is not fixing games.

 

[Hi-Dro]

Maybe in the case of the Super Mario games on the NES it's because of hardware limitations, but from what I can tell, most of the glitches in SMW are definitely from shitty programming. Look up stuff like the powerup incrementation glitch or block duplication.
There's also the gen 1 Pokemon games. Those games are like, held together by staples and scotch tape. They're a mess. Some of the glitches you have to intentionally be looking for, but in certain cases they can be found entirely on accident. (I'm not just talking about stuff like Missingno either)
There was also something in the original Zelda that I think could be blamed entirely on shitty programming but I can't remember what it is right now.

I've played SMW time and time again and have never ever encountered a glitch, I'm not saying they don't have them, but the game is finished and its in its intended playable state, which can be completed without any issues time and time again without problems, so if you need to search the internet to find the glitches then in my view its not game breaking enough to mention, obviously games will still have glitches, so I disagree with your angle here about it being shitty programming, as I said never had a problem, and it just so happens to be my favourite game, finished it on original hardware multiple times, through emulation on PC, GBA and 3DS, never seen a glitch, if you are actively looking for something you will find it. also if you are a coder then you will be more susceptible to pick up on graphical errors.

 

[Taleweaver]

It's a nice rant. You give clear examples, give solid analogies and give decent underlying reasons for your feelings towards the topic. Unfortunately, there's one major flaw unfortunately getting in the way for a large part: reality.


Let's get one thing straight: this situation is almost uniquely to AAA-type titles. Indie titles have two "luxuries":
1) they're mostly if not completely built within a prebuilt engine. While these engines aren't flawless, they're usually robust enough to seriously limit the amount of gamebreaking bugs that may happen, which means indies are mostly a walled garden. They're limited in what they can achieve, but get a tradeof on this field
2) indies have less marketing, so they're less restricted by certain time periods that the game should be done (e.g. pre-christmas season).

The former is a problem because the size games are nowadays, multiplied by the variations that can occur (PC games have to attest a whole range of different windows versions, screen resolutions, visual optimizations, and so on). Bugs are going to be found after the game is complete but before the game actually hits the shelves. It would be stupid NOT to create a patch, and it would be equally stupid to withold the audience this patch because someone might be too impatient to use it (sorry, but that's really what I'm hearing you say). And both are less stupid than gathering back all discs that went out to stores, physically destroy them and re-release new discs with the patch preinstalled (which would both drive up costs and delay the date).
The latter means that AAA-titles can sit on developers hard drives for a long time before the best timing occurs to release the game. Because the programmers need to be payed, they are usually tasked to work on the game further (yes...DLC that's being produced before the actual game is released). Bugs may be found in that process as well, so again: would you rather they be ignored? Especially in these days, where anyone with a youtube account can post that one-in-a-million-time-occuring glitch and thus make the game look much worse than it actually is ?

As many of you on here, including myself, archive games to play in years to come. It's big a concern of mine that one day we will no longer be able to play these games in their finished or intended playable state. Not only this, but my biggest concern lies in paying £50 for a physical copy of a game, which I then have to spend another hour downloading a 10gb update for, in order to play it. I'm lucky enough to have a stable internet connection, but there are many places even here in UK that don't have that privilege. This must be infuriating for those people, especially if you love games as much as I do, as the above mentioned, I don't like waiting an hour to update a game I bought on release date, I just want to play it now honestly.

Wasn't preloading invented to prevent that issue? Also...since the patch is available on release day, doesn't that mean you can start downloading the patch even before you go out to the store to pick up your physical copy? It might not be a solution, but it'll cut down time a bit for wherever you happen to live that's still on 56k speeds.

Is there any other media industry that follow this practice ? I cant think of any except the software industry.

Most other industries don't work with projects of this scale and/or complexities. The worst an article can contain that's bad is a grammar error (which can be "debugged" by proofreading it once...compare that to the software industry where debugging takes up half the project time or more). It won't render the rest of the article worthless. Likewise, a movie can quickly be checked for anomalies.

I also feel like stating the obvious that PC software is in an almost unique position that they CAN do this. I can google quite some devices (usually electrical ones, or cars) that had to be collected and returned to sender because they weren't stable. Sometimes the callback even has to be enforced by the government because the risks are larger than the company is willing to admit.

Essentially a physical game appeals to certain people, like me who are old school and want to feel like we are getting our money's worth, but the fact of the matter is, we are being massively conned, by the very industry we love and are happy to invest our time and money into.

You're only being conned if you're being lied to. Just don't buy on launch day and investigate things for 5 minutes. If it's really that important to have a working physical game, then that can't be too much to ask.

lets also look at the retro gaming boom that's happened in the last 10 years, people are digging out their rare games that they have in the loft and reselling them, yes sometimes at ridiculously inflated prices but that's besides the point, its a great way to recycle and also grant an interest into old stuff for future generations.
I believe this is why many people are here on this forum, to archive and show their kids what they used to play or just for the nostalgia effect.

To be honest, I seriously doubt you can name a truly retro game with a 10GB patch on its first day of release.

I also don't see any problem with archiving the game on a storage medium, later on. GoG neatly provides for just that, and I'm sure that any retro addict has no problems burning purchased games directly to DVD (or heck...CD-ROM while we're at it ).

In someways I feel like this may well be the very reason the game industry uses the update method, because it actually stops you from being able to sell these games as retro rarities, and at high prices as they actually become worthless, just an unfinished disc with some pretty artwork on the front, and the way things are going maybe might try to stop us reselling/trading them altogether.
We all know how that idea turned out for Microsoft when they mentioned they would implement this idea for the Xbox1 thankfully they did a U-turn on that in the end, but it feels like that's what these companies and studios really want.

Now you're diverting away from your own topic. The backlash and U-turn were about games that required online at all times (and perhaps connection to a server as well, which in effect means corporations can just prevent you from playing your own games). It has nothing to do with day 1 patches.

Personally I would like to see a change in the way games are produced and traded within the media market place, to bring it in line with other media industries that work just as hard as they do, rather than software companies like Microsoft with Windows, which clearly has a shelf life that we are all aware of by now, and is not a creative industry.

This essentially comes down to "software programmers aren't allowed to make any mistake anymore, ever.". Or perhaps more specific "if a single furniture maker can produce a chair without flaws in an afternoon, then why can't a large team of programmers cannot make something that's infinitely more complex without flaws?".

Who actually benefits from this practise ? Because it certainly doesn't feel like the consumer does.

This is one of the weirdest hypothetical questions I've ever read. What do you mean, "who benefits"? Dude...the situation is a consequence of how things are. As a consumer, you've got the right for software that works as intended. Sometimes it accidentally does not turn out that way, but luckily programmers (who acknowledge your right for that and are willing to provide for that) can and will provide extra work and will create patches for you. From a purely capitalistic stance, they have no reason at all to ever create a patch: you've already payed so any extra cost can be considered a wasted effort, as it doesn't generate more money. The fact remains that long term reputation aside, they have no reason to create patches. So in my view, it's mostly the consumer that benefits (hey...try playing games like no man's sky or that sim city reboot without patches and see if you can maintain that point of view that you as a consumer don't benefit from patches).

 

[Sonic Angel Knight]

It's normal? My best guess is cause of early access games being sent out (Review copy) so to prevent full access to the game, such as online mode, it has a day one patch for various reasons. Not all games have that though. None of the switch games I know have a day one patch. Again is probably for review copy being sent out earlier than the game should have been. Prevent access for online modes and such, fix last minute problems and polish.

 

[Ryccardo]

For games where the update is not required (somewhat-good-faith bugfix):
The devs are cheating (= having an allegedly unfair advantage) by pushing a rushed product, most likely in the attempt to cut costs. Since reviews usually consider the game and update as a single package, in the good old times (or, for Nintendo, until last gen) they could not pull this trick and had more incentive to defend their reputation by doing it right the first time!
(What would Pokemon 1st gen be today, were it not for the bugs?)
(Would I have appreciated SSB4 a lot more, if it had download play and didn't fucking wipe my replays after sometimes more than monthly updates? YES)

For games where the "update" is a required content pack:
I guess it's better than a multidisc game, but it has severe consequences about long term replayability (assuming the console is not cracked wide open first, with the ability to "share backups"); both this and server software not released to the public are what I consider major faux pases of video game studios (who want their products be arbitrarily classifiable as either art or mass market products depending on the benefit they need at the moment)

 

[Hi-Dro]

It's a nice rant. You give clear examples, give solid analogies and give decent underlying reasons for your feelings towards the topic. Unfortunately, there's one major flaw unfortunately getting in the way for a large part: reality.

You started with the positive and ended on the negatives, It's commonly good practise to do it the other way round.
There are many things I disagree with in your post, but that being said I don't want to get into a debate here about this topic, which is why I opted for a poll to see what the general consensus is regarding this matter.


I will however say I think you have missed the point quite a bit and, misread many things and linked them unnecessarily. That could be my fault for not being clearer in OP.
You raise some good points however none of them suit consumers needs and rights, you mentioned GOG for example, I buy physical games so that I don't have to continuously re buy them over and over and over again.
The fact you mentioned Sim City is exactly one of the reasons I feel this way

and also this...

True, there were SOME games that were actually buggy when they could have been better, but they were all poorly made games just capitalizing on franchise names or poor attempts to maintain an IP. Also, almost all bugs in older games come from system limitations, NOT crappy programming and design. When the game hardly fits in the memory when it only gets something like 64KB RAM to work with, you can expect problem to arise with values causing overflows/underflows, but nowadays bugs are from things more like the dev being too lazy to make proper hitboxes or animations or too stingy to hire proper beta testers and instead goes the Steam route. Finally, if you think about the vast majority of buggy games, in the past, they may have been buggy but at least they weren't game-breaking bugs and you could have played through the game fine without encountering a single one, whereas nowadays you got games coming out literally unplayable due to bugs and at twice the price!

PS: Something to note on top of it all, you can't liken something that was cheaply made in the 90s to a big budget game made recently to justify the newer game's bugs. Try playing the unpatched Batman Arkham Origins and Knight (both of which are literally impossible to beat due to bugs), then tell me bugs like climbing over the map in Mario were bad.

 

[Taleweaver]

You started with the positive and ended on the negatives, It's commonly good practise to do it the other way round.
There are many things I disagree with in your post, but that being said I don't want to get into a debate here about this topic, which is why I opted for a poll to see what the general consensus is regarding this matter.


I will however say I think you have missed the point quite a bit and, misread many things and linked them unnecessarily. That could be my fault for not being clearer in OP.
You raise some good points however none of them suit consumers needs and rights, you mentioned GOG for example, I buy physical games so that I don't have to continuously re buy them over and over and over again.
The fact you mentioned Sim City is exactly one of the reasons I feel this way

and also this...

Fair enough. I started out with the positive because it's interesting to read. We clearly have a different view of the matter, but that doesn't mean yours or mine is wrong.


I mean...it's not that I can't see flaws in the update policy. The fact that developers can just throw the game out on release date with the "we'll patch it later" policy isn't nice. The apparent policy of some game developers to go for smaller switch cartridges so they'll have less production costs AND have a sort of antipiracy mechanism in place (which forces everyone to download the rest of the game) is also something I absolutely dislike. And I remember an instance on a LAN-party where I had forgotten to install a game (supreme commander, IIRC) on my PC in advance. That small thing I thought was an oversight took almost an hour of relatively scarce gaming time to install and patch (it literally took me longer to install than that we played the game ).

Still...weighing the pros and contras, I still feel the average is more a gain to me than a cost. Sorry...it's just how I feel about it.

 

[Hi-Dro]

Fair enough. I started out with the positive because it's interesting to read. We clearly have a different view of the matter, but that doesn't mean yours or mine is wrong.


I mean...it's not that I can't see flaws in the update policy. The fact that developers can just throw the game out on release date with the "we'll patch it later" policy isn't nice. The apparent policy of some game developers to go for smaller switch cartridges so they'll have less production costs AND have a sort of antipiracy mechanism in place (which forces everyone to download the rest of the game) is also something I absolutely dislike. And I remember an instance on a LAN-party where I had forgotten to install a game (supreme commander, IIRC) on my PC in advance. That small thing I thought was an oversight took almost an hour of relatively scarce gaming time to install and patch (it literally took me longer to install than that we played the game ).

Still...weighing the pros and contras, I still feel the average is more a gain to me than a cost. Sorry...it's just how I feel about it.

Cheers mate appreciate your views and comments.
Oh good old lan parties always some issue, dont think I've ever done a lan party where the setting up/installing time has been less than gaming time .

I think there could be a solution that would benefit both points of view, like some kind of regulatory board.
For example games must be in a finished sate on release without ground breaking bugs, and if need be have patches that fix only minor bugs, with like a 2 patch limit for each game, and a max time frame. like 2 months for example.
I know I make it sound easier than it is, but I do feel there should be some kind of regulatory system in place.

I just feel that games studios like Ubisoft, EA and Microsoft exploit the patch/update thing to only their advantage, Some games like a lot of SCE and Japanese Studios in general (excluding Capcom and Konami for obvious reasons) are playable and complete-able from day one, or have tiny patches, This is in my opinion a good example to set, rather than the lacklustre approach of EA, Ubisoft and Microsoft.

Also one thing to note, is that once a game studio gets big and bought out by the big wigs, the directors and creators of those Studios, soon leave the studios they created, some times within a matter of weeks, due to disagreements to, for the most part how the games are made or new time constraints and released as unfinished products.

We've lost a lot of great games designers from the industry due to this kind of thing happening. I just feel like there are less and less real gamer's making games these days and more and more business men.
Take Final Fantasty 1 as an example, it took a fresh Grad student (Pure Gamer basically) to create something massive.
Ironically now even the Final fantasy games uses the patch system massively to their advantage, and it does piss people off.
But yeah, as in you said in your first post Reality, is sadly a big factor to why this multi billion $$$ industry uses such methods.

 

[ThoD]

I just feel that games studios like Ubisoft, EA and Microsoft exploit the patch/update thing to only their advantage, Some games like a lot of SCE and Japanese Studios in general (excluding Capcom and Konami for obvious reasons) are playable and complete-able from day one, or have tiny patches, This is in my opinion a good example to set, rather than the lacklustre approach of EA, Ubisoft and Microsoft.

I agree with your post and all, but I can't help but be kinda confused why you would exclude Capcom. What are those "obvious reasons"? At least on all the Capcom games I've played, they either had 2 patches tops (almost all their games on the 3DS) or not a single one (eg: MH3U), so I don't see your point. Konami I understand as they kinda abuse it sometimes on PES and games like that (which ironically could just get a yearly patch instead of coming out as a "brand new" game), but I've never experienced a bad case with Capcom and updates.

 

[Arras]

True, there were SOME games that were actually buggy when they could have been better, but they were all poorly made games just capitalizing on franchise names or poor attempts to maintain an IP. Also, almost all bugs in older games come from system limitations, NOT crappy programming and design. When the game hardly fits in the memory when it only gets something like 64KB RAM to work with, you can expect problem to arise with values causing overflows/underflows, but nowadays bugs are from things more like the dev being too lazy to make proper hitboxes or animations or too stingy to hire proper beta testers and instead goes the Steam route. Finally, if you think about the vast majority of buggy games, in the past, they may have been buggy but at least they weren't game-breaking bugs and you could have played through the game fine without encountering a single one, whereas nowadays you got games coming out literally unplayable due to bugs and at twice the price!

PS: Something to note on top of it all, you can't liken something that was cheaply made in the 90s to a big budget game made recently to justify the newer game's bugs. Try playing the unpatched Batman Arkham Origins and Knight (both of which are literally impossible to beat due to bugs), then tell me bugs like climbing over the map in Mario were bad.

Twice the price? If you adjust for inflation, they aren't really more expensive, and if you factor in all the sales nowadays, they're actually pretty cheap.

 

[ThoD]

Twice the price? If you adjust for inflation, they aren't really more expensive, and if you factor in all the sales nowadays, they're actually pretty cheap.

How is it "cheap" when games come out at 60-80€ launch price? Games hardly ever were 45€ in the past. What sales? Basically only the PC gets sales and it's still years after the games are released that any good deal pops-up! Inflation? What do you mean? Don't know about where you live, but in the age where games came out at reasonable prices, salaries here were almost twice as hefty, while now you can't even buy a single game without saving up for months!

 

[Arras]

How is it "cheap" when games come out at 60-80€ launch price? Games hardly ever were 45€ in the past. What sales? Basically only the PC gets sales and it's still years after the games are released that any good deal pops-up! Inflation? What do you mean? Don't know about where you live, but in the age where games came out at reasonable prices, salaries here were almost twice as hefty, while now you can't even buy a single game without saving up for months!

Let's take the US - https://www.indexmundi.com/g/g.aspx?v=67&c=us&l=en . About 20 years ago, the GDP was about half what it is now, so on average and adjusting for inflation, people have twice as much money. Most new games are 60$, some 70. It's somewhat hard to find a proper source for old game prices, but looking around a bit gave me this: https://www.giantbomb.com/forums/ge...-in-the-day-487807/?page=1#js-message-3931567 . Looks pretty fair to me. Greece is just an exception because of the recent economical issues.