They actually did, but the updated versions were for new sales only.

OTOH, software update is being widely abused nowadays, there's no pressure to get it right off the bat. As long as the update framework is robust, everything else can be weak since you can send another patch whenever you want.

In the 90's game publishers started to make things available via BBS, FTP, AOL and CompuServe and others. And it was already taken advantage of in quality control. Also "mail me a floppy."

Yes they absolutely did, they just couldn't get them. Games still shipped buggy, you just had to get used to it, tough. I work with people who were in the games industry in late 90s and the idea that games shipped without bugs is just funny to them.

The question is, were those games shipped as buggy as today's games?

Today's games are more buggy, in part because they're much more complex, and in part because software update allows to ship them unfinished.

Yes, of course modern games are more buggy, because like you said, they are more complex and yes, the assumption is that they can be patched later. But the "old games didn't get patches and they were fine!" Thing is really really not true.

Now an update can "fix" broken business models.

I loved the "fixes" to Plants vs Zombies when EA bought popcap.

i have bought some nintendo games a year or two ago, some of them received 0 update, still operate as a charm, without any (at least noticeable) bug.

Survivor bias: the games people fondly remember and want to go back and play decades later are generally the ones with few if any problems. The buggy crap got purchased by an unlucky few and then was quickly abandoned and forgotten.

It's also why classic music, books, movies, etc are great - decades of pruning leaving a short list of best-ofs.

I was talking about the ones for Nintendo Switch. And they are pretty much complex games.

Back in 90's in order to survive game producers had to have sense of quality and knowledge of definition of "finished".

Switch or retro? Retro was specially hard because once you shipped the cartridges/CDs, the only way to get a revised game was to buy it twice.

Still, Nintendo does a pretty good job of avoiding most critical bugs before release even on the Switch.

Also video games that didn't get regular, free content updates. Top of mind because my partner and I are doing another playthrough of Terraria and there's once again a bunch of new content for us to go through.

OTOH, those games didn't have microtransactions or lots of paid DLCs.

OTA Updates negates proper testing. Read this as good or bad but most everything is working this way now.

It’s very important to still test them otherwise you might break the update mechanism!

Software updates were necessary to bring about internet play without rampant hacking and cheating, and also can provide general fixes to you giving you better value over time, so I’d have to disagree. If you don’t want to play online, you really don’t need software updates anyway.

I hit plenty of game-breaking bugs before updates were a thing.

I imagine people would love a original PacMan update that solves the overflow issue

How does fixing that bug get more quarters into the machine? :)

IIRC MAME has a cheat that solves that issue.