In my more formative years I was pretty devoted to whichever one console I was able to acquire during a given generation. While news would ring out about newer, better hardware from different companies, I had usually made my choice (or at Christmas had the choice made for me) as to which console I would support and followed blindly through the fog. When the Xbox was first announced, I wasn’t on that side of the fence, and the argument I used to detract against it was always directed towards their online focus and all the talks about patches. My fear was that developers would start to push out broken games, and we would have to wait weeks past release date to actually get products that didn’t freeze before a final boss, or cause game saves to be overwritten. What if this became an industry trend?

Now we can actively witness how often it does happen to consumers (especially for online-games); bringing a game home, throwing it into your console of choice only to see a notice come up that a patch is needed. It’s usually not much of a break in the excitement, but when you finally get the game started up and it is busted in a very noticeable way, having an error that directly affects your daily use of that game. It’s frustrating and can often result in hesitation or complete avoidance of a product during the next iteration. The worst part about it is that as unacceptable as it may be to ship a game to customers that has serious flaws, it seems to be an unavoidable trac given the state of development and publishing for major titles.

While some bugs are made more devastating than others, and rarely does a game ship that either bricks a system or basically won’t run at all, there have been a few notable failures during the last few months. One that has just recently seen a second large patch go through to fix glaring online issues is Gears of War 2 which has had significant issues since day one. While the single player remains in tact, and the multiplayer was still easy to use with friends and through Horde mode, using any matchmaking system to connect to other players often took well over 10 minutes and warranted just giving up altogether until a patch was pushed through. Even games that gained significant critical acclaim and playtime, like last year’s Castle Crashers had its share of issues up to the holidays that caused lots of network issues.

Some games have more than just online connectivity issues that may cause one element of their game to suffer, some games have come to market with issues that cause their games to stutter, slow or barely even work at all. Take LittleBigPlanet as an example, the game is essentially built around an online community and even the single player aspect of the game is constantly connecting to an online server hosted by Sony. So when the game hit stores and was basically unplayable online for the first week and a bit, causing slowdowns and issues within the rest of the game, it seemed like a punishment to gamers and a wild underestimation of exactly what kind of traffic the game would receive. Fallout 3 was another game where the game had a few glaring bugs that caused certain quests to be unplayable in certain situations, and the PS3 version even had consistent freezing when you had PSN notifications turned on.

As much as these issues persist, they are increasingly accepted by the masses and it has become something that we expect when a game launches. Online games will freeze, crash and sputter, and there will be balancing issues and even major bugs within single player components. The issues stem from the sheer expansion and vision of a lot of these games and the limited time frames in which they are set to develop, with budgets to fulfill and stockholders to appeal to publishers need to have their games ready to specific launch windows. While betas can often be a good litmus test for online work, you need to play everything close to the chest lest you give away an unfinished product that will instantly turn people away or simply just offer a free taste that will suffice for more casual observers. With the massive worlds and online complexity, having bugs and issues on day one is not hard to understand, but is still not a good enough reason for the players to allow publishers to think that it is a safe and effective practice.

The only real way that people can voice their opinion against things like this is by voting with your wallet, and yet it’s hard to tell whether or not issues are blown out of proportion until it is staring you boldly in the face, and it’s also easy to forget those issues once a game is working well and the true vision and quality shines through. It’s something we all seem willing to suffer through in order to get to that final product, like having a game’s release date pushed back months while still enjoying the pieces that work. It is a slippery slope, though, and it doesn’t take all too much to put down a franchise with mainstream appeal by delivering a truly broken product. Even quality issues like the lack of surround sound that Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock had for the Wii could have been a bigger issue had it ended up alongside news reports of how well it was doing on the evening news. If we allow a culture of complacency, the issues will continue to a point where it won’t become easy to ignore, and perhaps could do major damages to sales in a time when smaller companies are already clamouring for as much as they can grab.