Ignoring the fact that shipping broken games is a business decision, not a technical one, what is the point of cherry picking examples? Why not consider ET for the SNES or plenty of other broken games from the past?
Besides the amount of software in a modern game vs something from the 80s is so insane that often something like an 80s arcade game is an easter egg.
OP in not cherry picking, practically all AAA games are a pile of garbage on the day of release. You'd have to cherry pick the ones actually in a relatively fine state on launch day. Yes, it's a business decision but fuelled by a few factors that did not exist 2 decades ago:
1) Pre-orders
2) Massive marketing machinery employed to boost game's popularity
3) Shareholder value; the game studios of today are part of large media/entertainment conglomerates
4) Younger generations' "flexibility" for low-quality products. They tend to settle on mediocre quality more easily which is not helped by today's narrative that every form of critique is "toxic" or "hateful".
5) Online nature of the product allowing for fixes at a later date
Obviously, but just as obviously buying games on day 1 is a frustrating waste of time. We’ve reached a point where it’s just not worth the hassle.
I’m not cherry picking just looking at categories. ET wasn’t even close to a AAA game, but look at the top 10 games from each year (total sales or preorders) and you’ll see a significant increase in day 1 bugs. Start looking at AA games and some of those never get the patches they need to be playable.
People may have complained about the balance etc of each game, but Diablo III didn’t have anything like the massive number of bugs Diablo IV dropped with.
Hmm what bugs? D4 had a pretty smooth launch, didn't it?
But also
> We’ve reached a point where it’s just not worth the hassle.
YOU have reach that point. As many do. And that's fine. Clearly there's still plenty of people who would rather play a somewhat buggy game sooner than wait. Why do we need to get on a high horse about it?
That’s 8 months after release, when it launched people were complaining about everything from floating monsters, broken quests, and a slew of crashes and about 12 different bugs preventing them from starting the game and connecting to servers.
Personally my favorite was this one: I came across a post mentioning the possibility of transferring items between the standard server and the seasonal server. At first, I thought it was a joke, but the method was very detailed, and eventually, a few users who followed the method actually succeeded in transferring their items, standard to seasonal and vice-versa.
it had one awkward mechanic in its control scheme. It took all of 5 minutes to learn to cope with it. And it was not a bug. People just didn't read the manuals back then either. It was actually a decent game (i still have an original cartridge)
Besides the amount of software in a modern game vs something from the 80s is so insane that often something like an 80s arcade game is an easter egg.