I've worked at a couple game publishers, so this is what I've seen at my time there. Games are not made intentionally bad, of course. However, most of the time, by the time you can see that a game is going down the wrong path, it's already too late. This is because the engine is already in place and a lot of time and money has been spent on it. At this point, people do their best to tweak it as much as they can to make it better. Yes, many times, deadlines must be met and games must be shipped out before they have been properly run through all the cogs of development (usually, QA time gets shafted and games come out looking buggy). I worked on a PSP launch title, and that happened. It also depends on the profile of the title. Gaming is also a business, so publishers and developers have to balance quality and time and money and try to max out quality and money made while keeping time and cost as minimal as possible. Unless you work at some place like Rare, where your titles are expected to be perfect, it's very unlikely that a deadline will be missed in order to tweak the game some more. It's just the way it is... missing a street date will probably lose more money than releasing a product that isn't quite finished yet. Or in some cases, it's best to just release a crappy game and make some money off it rather than completely can it. You'd be surprised on how much work goes into making even a horrible game... Some ideas look great on paper, but don't turn out correctly and it's too late to turn back. Of course, if it is early enough in development, and things just don't seem to be going right, it may also be a better idea to can the game. It all depends on the situation.
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