That is not true. Games released physically for video game consoles must pass platform certification requirements and only then manufacture, distribute, and release the game. The lead time required for this in my experience is on the order of 2-3 months, during which time the development team cannot touch the "gold master" build of the game.

The build that ends up on the disk is not "completely broken or even mostly empty"; it is what the development team and publisher were satisfied shipping as the finished game 2-3 months prior. Any software, and games moreso, can be improved with more time so the intervening time to release day is often taken up with development of a launch day patch to fix bugs that were triaged to be ok to ship with, and/or to add features/systems/content that just missed the cut before.

Launch day patch sizes is more of a symptom of the build pipeline (maybe there is some non-determinism that is introducing larger diffs than are otherwise necessary) or late optimizations (to build packing, asset management, etc) that can force you to download the majority of the game again.

>The build that ends up on the disk is not "completely broken

...Well, then. Would you care to explain Assassin's Creed Unity, and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5? I suppose you classify them as "not completely broken"?

Assassin's Creed Unity suffered from a lot of bugs for its PC release, namely graphical glitches on some (not all) hardware. Additionally, it had a number of bugs that could be broadly described as "open world jank": funny physics interactions, NPC spawning issues, etc. The game should have been delayed more on PC to allow for better hardware compatibility testing, but no, I wouldn't classify it on release as completely broken.

Tony Hawk Pro Skater 5 was a rushed project and generally poor game. It was buggy but that was the least of its problems. Many people considered it the worst, or at least one of the worst, major releases of that year. I don't think it is representative of contemporary games as your comment would imply.

The point is that AC Unity had very serious problems, which would have no doubt been fixed pre-launch in a pre-patch world. Also, if testing is as thorough as you claim, and you actually do have to have a fairly playable game to relase without obvious, terrible, bugs (Unity was unplayable for some on launch, and it was difficult to play for many others because of just how buggy it was), than Unity should have never seen the light of day.

Are you talking about Final Fantasy XV? This case is ridiculous, they are even modifying the story after the launch day. It would be like releasing a movie and changing the end one week after the release because of the bad reviews. Hopefuly the sales of FFXV are relatively bad.

Sorry but why is that a bad thing?

I can understand that it's "bad" that their story was lacking at release, but isn't it awesome that they'd go to such lengths to serve fans and buyers and have a good product in the end, if not in the beginning?

pretty quick we will end up with nothing but the worst graphics/story when you buy a game because you can just patch it and fix it later.

> It would be like releasing a movie and changing the end one week after the release because of the bad reviews.

To me this is not that uncommon. Let me tell you a story (I cannot provide a quotable evidence for a central point of the story except for multiple friends who independently had the same feeling after seeing Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets two times in few weeks when it came out in cinema in Germany).

At that time when this movie came out in Germany there was a law that "FSK 12" movies must only be watched by people who are at least 12 years old. The problem was: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets was rated "FSK 12", while Warner would have liked it to be "FSK 6". So they cut some scene parts out of the movie to get this rating for the German cinema release (BTW: this incident lead to a change in the laws that now children under 12 years old may also go to "FSK 12" movies as long as they are accompanied by a parent). So far this is a story where for every claim I could provide strong evidence.

Now the strange part comes: (#) People who saw this movie shortly after release day and a few weeks after (in Germany) all could point out to some scenes (and they were the same) that they clearly remembered when they first saw the movie, but not the second time. So it seems to be that there were some cut alterings done afterwards and there were actually two different versions to be seen in German cinemas. I personally assume that this had to do something with the stated age restrictions (they forgot to cut some scene parts when they initially released the movie in the cinemas, so they hastily changed things afterwards and released a new version to the cinemas).

As I said: I can provide no independently verifiable evidence that (#) happened - but I deeply trust the independent persons that claimed so and I deeply trust their visual memory (I would only trust people who have a really good visual memory for such strong claims).

TLDR: changing a movie shortly after release is nothing that deeply surprises me.

It seems like many movies these days get released with two versions when the theater run is complete; one version that matches what was shown in theaters, and one Director's Cut. The latter often includes scenes that were cut to get a specific rating, but it also often changes things that caused bad reviews. Superman v Batman is a good example; the theatrical release got bad reviews for being confusing, and the Directors Cut includes a lot of backstory scenes which help the movie make more sense. (Can't help the overall plot holes though.)