In a society where gratification is instant, video games may be getting performance anxiety.
Video game developers spend hundreds of millions of dollars developing games, but only have a month or less to make back their money. Comparatively speaking, movies have to make their money in the first weekend. So, even though video games seem to be going in that direction they are not as bad as the movie industry yet. However, they do appear to be heading down that same path.
These days people have extremely short attention spans, and like to push through games quickly. That means video games no longer have the longevity they once did. In turn, that means that developers need to focus on not launching their games until they been completely tested.
Otherwise you run into the situation where, by the time companies puts out patches to fix game errors, people have already finished the game. For example the single-player campaign in Mass Effect 3 takes approximately 30 hours to complete. Depending how much time people have on their hands they could have that done in the first week. Many ME3 players reported multiple crash bugs in the first week and by the time the developer responded, many players had already finished the entire game.
Developers are scrutinized when launch dates are pushed back, but isn’t it better that they get all the bug fixes done before launching the game? As long as the game doesn’t end up having indefinite push backs of course. Otherwise once it’s out there, it’s out there. And they end up looking more amateurish and damaging their reputation with a game that constantly crashes or has strange glitches.
With the short life of video games, getting it right the first time should be the only play. You never get a second chance to make a first impression especially if you are already on the used rack at the local GameStop.
