It doesnt always work to fix the game after release. Fallout new vegas is one example. I've played maybe 50 hours or so and i've made a lot of choices. I dont want to start from the beginning again, and have to make the choices again just because the game is broken and wont let me do the missions I would like to do.

LOL! Xbox fans arguing about games/patches again? Get a ps3 and you will know what it is to have a variety of fully supported games. For example, take a look at DCU, an online only game. It got patched like 3 times last week with all noticable fixes. Not like the other kiss ass devs that are only in it for themeselves with their game breaking "hot fixes" that are biased towards certain consoles. Lets face it, games are online now. Its about the quality and work in those patches. I totally undestand how you guys feel though, I just thank God that I'm able to play first party games that are made by AAA devs.

Patches should be a convenience for devs, not a crutch. It's obvious some games weren't ready to be released.

Modern day games are incredibly complex, relative to their previous-gen cousins.

We're talking 500K - 2M lines of code here (according to GamaSutra). Over 50 engineers can often be involved with making a game, over the first-game development cycle of 3-4 years (sequels take less time, and are somewhat less buggy, typically... although Treyarch CoD games certainly stand out as an exception). This is like 2-4 times as many people as last gen.

There are *thousands* of bugs in any shipped game (I'm not exaggerating here). Sure, a lot of them are typos or localization errors, but EVERY game ships with bugs, and modern games ship with more due to their much more elaborate nature than previous generations.

Games publishers spend MILLIONS of dollars on marketing, and this like reserving spots at disc manufacturing plants for disc printing, manual and cover printing, etc. That money is TIED to a shipment date, and shipping late costs HUGE amounts of money. Developers don't ship games in unplayable conditions, but if they ship with lesser bugs in a patchable system, that's okay, in my book, because otherwise we'd never see the kinds of games we see.

Multiplayer bugs are inordinately hard to catch, particularly without a public beta. Networking architectures are unbelievably complex, and covering all the bases before ship basically requires three things: a previously working engine, a phenominal network engineering team with experience with the networking code, and a mountain of testing data. There are VERY few games that are ever able to put that kind of work into fully debugging network code. Many of those bugs CANNOT be caught in a regular development environment, and reproducing them in a debugging environment is often next to impossible.

Moral of the story: Don't shoot your mouth off about how modern games should or shouldn't do this or that, without knowing what you're talking about. Saying "They should just do it better" just makes you look like a fool to anyone who has ever participated in software development.

You want fewer patches? Go play some games with tiny budgets and tiny teams -- like DS games. You want the high-end experience? Deal with the fact that its made by humans, and developers sink their lives into these things, often only barely able to recover the investment, because at some point, they had to ship their product.

It's disgusting to hear gamers whine about how "devs are lazy" and the like. The same people who put in regular 50 hour weeks, and 60 hours for the final 6 months of development, to make a game they feel they've put their heart into -- are "lazy" in the minds of some gamers. Game development is not a high paying job, nor are there royalties to speak of, except in very rare situations. These jobs are done by people who sink their lives into making great games (and many great games have tons of bugs -- workable bugs, but bugs nonetheless) for the sake of making something cool and fun only.

Divide the price of a video game -- a new one even -- by the number of hours of enjoyment you get out of it. Now do the same for a football ticket, or a movie ticket, a music show ticket, a night out at the bar, or heck, almost anything. The ignorance of some people is... astounding.

I assume it is more the publisher making the devs release the game before it's completely ready.

Well - it is not a 16KB ZX Spectrum game anymore you know.

Helix will be expensive but it's still a day one for me.

Oh, my days...
So Nadella meets with the US president multiple times to ensure AI regulations are minimal if any at all, donates to the inauguration and ballroom, and his boy not only won't regulate AI as farmers lose land and billionaires/corporations buy up farmland to build data centers...but because he's insane and compromised, he starts a war on behalf of a rogue colonial zionist state and [further] destabilizes the Middle East, restricting component access and helium supply.

Now the head of Xbox is saying the hardware pricing "could impact" next generation hardware pricing? Asha,...your boss at a minimum played a direct role in this. What are we even talking about?

Yea because a $3 trillion company can’t absorb the majority of the cost to keep the product lower for consumers.

Expensive… oh no, here comes another flop.

Could? Strange how prices rise for virtually everything we buy, yet when things settle down, prices don't come down. This has been happening in the UK probably before I was born. With that, how much is a next gen console going to cost? Look at the price of the PlayStation 5 Pro, which has been a flop for Sony. On that note, we don't need the next consoles for another 5 years.

I guarantee if people just stopped buying this kinda stuff all together. This would all be sorted within 2 weeks and everything would be back to normal.

We seen the exact same thing through the COVID period. Companies just jumped on the bandwagon realising that they can get away with charging far more under false pretences and fear mongering.

Consumers now have this fear of "you know what, I only live once. I'm going to spend all this money I earned through my hard work" Or "I only live once I'm going to take a loan out and enjoy my time here".

Silicone Valley spends literally billions of dollars researching how much they can push society to the limits to increase spending. You can research it yourself. There's published written documentation about it. Have a look for yourself into their group research into subscription programs to see how evil they are and why it's such a giant focus of current civilization. Its the very essence of corporate capitalism.

Just delay all new consoles. I could easily go another 5 years with my base PS5.

could? it's already affecting current gen pricing.

It is greed. Apple are selling at the same price, while Microsoft Surface increases 500$ per unit. Karma will tell.