Does anyone else remember the days when video games didn't need 200MB patches to be installed every few months?
Back when I was a nipper, games used to be play tested for many months before they were released. The purpose of this was to find and iron out any bugs, rather than release a broken game. So why lately does every new PC and seemingly, 360 or PS3 game need such extensive repair work after release.
On the PC side, of course I understand that there is a wealth of hardware and software divides, and so releasing a game for the PC to be compatible for every possible combination is impossible. But then, wasn't DirectX designed to sort this problem out years ago? You can argue that a lot of patches are to fix online issues, but once again, online services are not difficult to test, even on a mass scale, so why are we the consumer, still having to install fixes for our own games?
So the PC does have a small excuse, compatibility. But how can the consoles have such issues, their hardware is fixed. You don't get different graphic cards in every Xbox 360 or different types of CPU in the Playstation 3. Sure they have online functionality too, but that doesn't explain the choppy performance found in the single player campaign of The Orange Box for the PS3, or the performance woes of Bully Scholarship Edition on the 360.
Fact is that the increased competition in the market place and the general subdue of the genre is forcing development companies to release their game early to avoid clashing with a similar project from some other developer and gain critical extra sales. Game testing, a trade in which millions of gamers have wanted to work professionally in for over the past twenty years is now becoming quite rare, in actual development studios that is. The game buying public (you and me) are now becoming non paid employees and asked to find and submit bugs themselves via a website.
I don't know about you, but I don't want to pay £40 for a video game which doesn't work properly, have to spend my own time finding and reporting bugs, then wait months for a thirty minute download to fix the problems.