The Negatives of a Patched World

When switching off of her parents account to mine, my wife decided she wanted a new cell phone. We browsed the store for awhile, and she decided on the one she wanted. There weren't many issues with it in the first month, but after awhile the touch screen grew increasingly frustrating.

It would click things that she didn't want to click, to the point where you could set it down on the table and it would continue randomly clicking on things. It was annoying, but our 30 day return had past so we just put up with it.

Then I called Verizon about something else entirely, in the conversation I mentioned that my new phone credit would probably go to my wife as her phone was a piece of junk. The agent looked up which model she has, and informed me that there has been a patch released since the time she purchased it that fixes, among other things, the touch screen functionality.

So essentially, LG released this phone broken, and then just patched it later without informing any customers. It got me thinking about the gaming world. I'll bring up two examples from both the 360 and the PS3, Castle Crashers and Fat Princess.

In case you were unaware, both of these games released to the public with online functionality in a state that many would call broken. Day 1 purchasers just had to sit around and patiently wait for an update that would allow them to play without issues.

A world in which a game developer could pump updates to their game while it was sitting on your consoles harddrive is something we might have only dreamed of when we were kids. Now it is commonplace, but is it being used as a crutch?

We all know that game developers can have some pretty strict deadlines to meet. So if they know they won't make it, do they just release the game anyway? They can always just patch it right?

This is a trend that I want to see disappear. I'm perfectly fine with bugs being corrected that went unnoticed during development, but they shouldn't be game wrecking things, and it shouldn't be a regular occurrence.

So how do we stop it? Microsoft and Sony could issue some sort of penalization if a game released in a broken state. It'd have to be on a case by case basis though, and then it'd take a lot of resources for a small outcome.

So it's probably in every ones best interest to just do things the way they have been, that is, except for the consumers. We're the ones getting shafted by their practices. It might not be cost effective to try to crack down on this sort of thing, but don't they owe it to the people who are giving them the money they need to stay in business? I don't know the solution, but Microsoft and Sony need to figure it out.