Quote Originally Posted by NM View Post
All of this cost's money, which most companys don't like to spend anymore than they have to. So if they know they've got a turky instead of paying more money to make it better it's just thrown out as is.
Exactly, that is what it all comes down to. No company intentionally tries to make a bad game, or even move forward with a concept that looks bad from the get-go (yes, this even applies to movie licenses). Usually it comes down to finding out late in development that it's just not turning out to be as good a game as they'd hoped. By that point you really have no choices other than to constantly delay, and essentially start over again to fix a lot of what's wrong with it, or you can get it done and just shove it out into the market. Taking the time to make a bad game good very often isn't worth it. You're looking at costs piling up so high that if you do that you have no hope of making a profit, or possibly, taking an even bigger loss than if you cut a project off and make whatever sales you can.

It sucks for the developer since they've got a bad game on their record, but at least the consumer can try and make an educated purchasing decision.

And about your testing comment Devil Man; true, games sometimes ship with bugs that testers found, but you've got to look at it this way; aside from time pressures to get the game out, sometimes the bugs just aren't big enough to warrant delaying release any longer to fix. If it's not a common thing and has no major effect on gameplay, then they may let it slide, since it's not worth the extra time and money at that point. It may sound pretty lazy, and I'm not trying to defend it, but it's the way things go sometimes.