Quote Originally Posted by Vivi22 View Post
Quote Originally Posted by Bolivar View Post
The great majority of AAA games ship fine. The few that don't are over-sensationalized by the media to generate clicks, or by forum posters so as to fit their agenda.
The launch of Sim City was most definitely not over a sensationalized. And I'm sure the people who bought BF4 and couldn't even play it didn't feel like they were exaggerating to fit some fictional personal agenda.

The reality is games do get released in a poor state to meet deadlines far too often, and just because they worked well enough for some does not mean that is the experience of the majority, or at least a sizeable minority. And I don't blame anyone not willing to tolerate paying money for a game that doesn't work until days or even weeks later (such as with BF4 where they eventually pulled everyone who was working on DLC so they could try and fix the main game weeks after release). It'd be like buying a computer, getting it home, and finding out the monitor doesn't work. It's a situation that may be fixed in relatively short order, but you still paid money and have to wait or go through even more effort to get to even use it. Except it's worse in the case of games to some extent because their QA frequently find most of the issues and the game is still released anyway instead of being pushed back another week or two.
If someone points out that a game is broken or is upset it's not working, that's just calling a spade a spade.

The sensationalism and agenda come in where people pretend this is somehow endemic of AAA game development or happens "far too often" as you say in your post. We are well into Q2 2015 and there have not been any high profile broken launches this year. I bought four AAA games and a slew of downloadable titles last holiday and only 1, Drive Club, had issues. And in that case, it wasn't because a greedy publisher rushed it out the door, they just under projected sales and the servers were not ready for the day 1 load - even then, the single player ran beautifully. Conversely, Destiny and Advanced Warfare were the biggest multiplayer launches of the year and both went off without a hitch.

Maybe if you actually played these kinds of games I would give your argument more credit but right now it reads like under-informed paranoia.