Quote: Original post by makeshiftwings
Second, the consumers like to point the finger at the publishers and blame them, somehow letting the developers off scott-free.

While I don't absolve all the blame from the developers, I do think the publishers have a fair share of the blame for releasing a bugging game. It's the publishers who make the call of when a game is ready to be shipped, so ultimately it is up to them whether they want to ship an unfinished buggy game with their label on it. Plus these days a lot of QA is done by publisher based teams.

Sadly though it's true that developers often mislead (and sometimes outright lie) to publishers about what they can or cannot do (or more accurately when they can do it). However it's the publisher who controls the money, and if they really cared about quality they'd stipulate that in the contract. Correct me if I'm wrong as I don't know much about the console publishers, but don't Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft assure the quality of their console game by a rigorous set of QA tests that every developer must comply with?

That being said, I do agree that developers need to take some of the blame, as often I suspect the problem is due to devs not being able to stop feature creep. I do find it telling that developers with a tendency for releasing unfinished buggy games tend to repeat that performance on their next title (Troika was a prime example). And I might be rare in that I'm not that fussed when a publisher cans a game due to quality concerns. And I wouldn't be adverse to seeing more strictness from publishers over quality issues, or working more closely with devs to ensure a relatively bug-free product.

Quote: Original post by wodinoneeye

Quote: Original post by makeshiftwings
It does not have to do with games being harder to bug fix these days: console games are still relatively bug-free when they ship because they are harder to patch and thus subject to stricter quality control. It is never a case of the developers being unable to fix it, it's always a purposeful decision of just how much they think they can screw the players over yet still stay in business.

I think that the console games usually are simpler (10-15 hour ??) and have fewer combinatoric options for the players (read that NWN2 review in the link and see how much situational specific and class/skill specific many of the problems are). Yes, there is the reason that patches are harder (less an option), but the PC games can be much more complex

I have first hand experience having worked on both console and PC games. The reason console games are less buggy is that publishers must submit them to the console company for testing and if they find bugs they will reject the game (there are some very high profile games that get past this but not many). On PC this second round of testing/quality assurance doesn't exist and publishers know that, as most PC games are installed to hard drive, a patch can be written to the installed game easily. This greater freedom results in them sticking games out the door before they are 100%.

The developers are not to blame for the release of bugged games because they don't have any control over the release. A game must be approved by the publisher before it ships so the only times that games come out with bugs are:
1. When neither the developer or publisher knows about them (or the dev knows but keeps very quiet)
2. The publisher forces the game out the door early to meet their year/quarter end (IE for financial reasons). I have seen this happen on several occassions.