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The gaming industry as a whole is allowing the competitive nature of the market to bite into the quality of their products. Games are released unfinished because the longer they stay in production the more they cost to make, and even when they do hit the shelves there's no guarantee they will shift and make money.
With very few exceptions, publishers of games tend not to admit that there is a quality problem. In a sense you can see their side, if they say up front there's something wrong then they're shooting themselves in the foot - nobody will buy the game until it's fixed.
However, there comes a certain point where if you compromise on quality (by that I mean the quality of the game functioning on a typical entry-level gaming PC, not the actual quality of the game's content or playability) you run the risk of damaging your reputation as a software publisher, and thereby diminishing current and future sales.
Of course this is a vicious circle because no matter how good your quality assurance is, the pressure to get the product to market will circumvent it. In fact, in a concession to this 'sell now, patch later' policy which is becoming increasingly popular with publishers and increasingly unpopular with gamers, I'll wager that games are now designed to be rushed. After all, what's the good of telling the programmers to get the game ready to be pressed and distributed if it takes six weeks to get that done assuming no hitches? You might as well say to them to take as much time as they need to get everything straightened out, if the game doesn't hit the shelves at the right time of year well, it wasn't meant to be
Of course, if I had some real evidence of this 'designed to be rushed' ethos I would tell you, but mostly it's just speculation on my part. I like what's been done with Civ IV content-wise, love playing it in fact, but this constant cutting of corners is going to one day spawn another MoO3.
With very few exceptions, publishers of games tend not to admit that there is a quality problem. In a sense you can see their side, if they say up front there's something wrong then they're shooting themselves in the foot - nobody will buy the game until it's fixed.
However, there comes a certain point where if you compromise on quality (by that I mean the quality of the game functioning on a typical entry-level gaming PC, not the actual quality of the game's content or playability) you run the risk of damaging your reputation as a software publisher, and thereby diminishing current and future sales.
Of course this is a vicious circle because no matter how good your quality assurance is, the pressure to get the product to market will circumvent it. In fact, in a concession to this 'sell now, patch later' policy which is becoming increasingly popular with publishers and increasingly unpopular with gamers, I'll wager that games are now designed to be rushed. After all, what's the good of telling the programmers to get the game ready to be pressed and distributed if it takes six weeks to get that done assuming no hitches? You might as well say to them to take as much time as they need to get everything straightened out, if the game doesn't hit the shelves at the right time of year well, it wasn't meant to be
Of course, if I had some real evidence of this 'designed to be rushed' ethos I would tell you, but mostly it's just speculation on my part. I like what's been done with Civ IV content-wise, love playing it in fact, but this constant cutting of corners is going to one day spawn another MoO3.
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