I am sure you have experienced this as well: You have bought a new game the day it is released and the day after a patch is already out. Of course, you feel happy that a bugfix is released so timely, but if you think about how long patches take in development and QA, you can't stop but wonder, that the patch must have been in the making BEFORE the game was released, maybe even before it went gold.

If you think further, you start to believe, that a game with known bugs has been published! While I agree, that there is no piece of Software that is 100% bugfree, I do think, that some games are released with nasty bugs knowingly and that it is some kind of sculduggery to do this!

Mostly, it will be publishers who are pushing the developers to a timeline and release the game, regardless of its known bugs. Those pushing businessmen do actually miss the fact that customers will eventually not buy any more games from them when they are annoyed by an unfinished product and its bugs!

There is no other business really, where you can sell buggy, defective or malfunctioning wares: You can't sell a car that won't start or needs repairs every 100 miles, you can't sell a book where a few pages are missing or you can't sell trousers with one leg only.

But more and more companies in the video game industry do sell us games with known bugs or limitations: But why is that? Don't the companies know that buggy software will ruin their reputation and if it happens to often, the customers may move away from their products or start pirate copying them instead of buying them (where also the more and more minimized boxes and manuals do their job as well, but that is another story)?

The video game business has changed a lot in the last decade, it has moved from a fan or niche business to a full market business with millions of dollars depending on blockbuster games, so one reason is the financial pressure on companies, to decide a prior release.

Another main aspect is the Internet: Actually almost everybody who plays on a PC has access to the internet in one or the other way, and the readyness of publishers to release knowingly unfinished software has drastically increased with the internet over the past years, because patches are now so easily distributed via Internet. While the Internet has brought us many good things, this is definitely one of its downsides.

But I wonder about console games! Those cannot be patched and must have been tested thouroughly. Obviously, console games are more or less bugfree, and still seem to be published in time. The reason for this is twofold: Firstly, console games are much less complex than PC games, there are mostly action, sports or combat titles available while PC games are like Morrowind or Arx Fatalis have literally unlimited possibilities in gameplay and therefore bugs! Wait a minute: Morrowind, hasn't that been released for the Xbox as well? I really hope, there are no major bugs in it, otherwise it will be difficult for Bethesda to keep track of the patches in the Xbox version. The second reason is the fixed hardware in consoles, where the PC has thousands of possible hardware combinations, consoles have theirs set.

Concluding this futile matter, I do really hope the development does not make PC gamers to beta testers worldwide and that boxes will still hold real manuals in the future, instead of just pdf files, but I fear, the situation will get even worse.