Think about how, even in software, knowing that a physical shipping of a product (CD / Blu-ray) can be updated from "day 1" has led to poor quality releases with last minute patches.

The cost of having to physically recall / resend CDs back in the day meant that what went out had to work. The cost of sloppy software has now been externalised.

Back in the day it was a major milestone for video game projects to "go gold". It meant that the rigorous QA process was passed, and that retail copies were ready to be manufactured. Since that involved significant costs and physical logistics, companies certainly didn't want major bugs shipped at this stage. There were some exceptions, but ultimately this led to much higher customer satisfaction. Removing this "inconvenience" for companies and allowing them to ship updates and fixes at any point is a major reason why most modern game releases are a clusterfuck at day one. They treat it as public betas, and day one customers (or, worse, preorder suckers) are testers and a replacement for a QA process they don't have. It's essentially crowdsourced development. This also allows them to hype the game up to boost initial sales, and then go "oops, sorry" while they finish implementing it. This scam has been pulled numerous times over the past decade+, yet these companies keep doing it because it's profitable and there's no legal accountability for it.

The fact these practices are now seeping into software on which human lives depend is criminal, and should be prosecuted and strictly regulated.

I had no idea. That sounds like fraud.

Those two somewhat offset and you end up with the classic business decision of whether quality is important.

Tell that to your kid this December, when you gift them a new console and a newly released game. Watch the wonderful experience of it taking forever to download a few gigabytes of patches from overloaded servers, and then not starting anyway because auth/billing/DRM/other bullshit server couldn't handle the demand.

Game studios love releasing around Christmas. I'm surprised they're not being held accountable for ruining that holiday for kids year over year.

I hope industry heads realize that they're actively pushing consumers towards piracy. These days you often get a better experience with a pirated game than a legally bought one: it runs better without DRM and doesn't infect your system, you can play it offline, and no license change will take it away from you. At least GOG seems to be the only store giving you DRM-free and offline installers, but not all games are released on it.

In the US there are still a lot of regions where a 50-100 GB download is just not reasonable.

I know console manufacturers hate retail and the used market, and want that sweet direct income. but it would be a powerful brand move to set higher standards for the physical release. I believe Nintendo has gone this direction.

For example, no copy of Space Station Silicon Valley for the N64 is completable because of a bug that prevents you from collecting the final plot device.

I'd say it's definitely worse now, with nothing meaningful being on the disc you pay $70 being insane.

It's not a matter of not relying on patches or updates altogether. The issue is when companies use this as a crutch to offset their shoddy development practices. Or worse: scamming consumers into buying their broken/incomplete game, and then taking years to deliver a stable experience or what they advertised (No Man's Sky, Fallout 76, Cyberpunk 2077, etc.), shutting down (Redfall, The Day Before, etc.), or straight up taking the money and running. Consumers are lucky if they even get their money back. Thankfully most storefronts have decent refund policies, but that's not an excuse.

The saddest thing is that a lot of people either don't care, or end up forgetting about this if companies appear to work hard to ship updates, which is how they eventually gain their good will back. The reputations of studios like Hello Games, CDPR and even Bethesda are practically untarnished despite of their scams, which gives them the freedom to keep doing this.

For the manufacturer this is still mainly a win I'd say... possibly even for the customer (because he gets features and fixes faster, at least), even though it sounds bad.

The same way that updates to Google Maps and Apple Maps kill people due to UI changes.

All systems are safety critical.

Back in the days before home internet was common I worked at a place that developed software for personal computers. The software was sold in retail stores such as Egghead, CompUSA, etc on floppy or CD.

Management was very insistent on high software quality. If a bug got through that was bad enough that an update to existing customers was needed the only option, aside from the small number of customers who would be able to use a modem to download an update from a dial up BBS, would be for us to mail them a floppy or CD with the update.

Even minor bugs that could be easily worked around by the customer were bad, because we had no means of contacting our customers except by writing or calling those who had filled out and returned in the prepaid registration card that was in the box when they bought the software. Instead what would happen is they would call our toll free support line.

Remember, this was not a subscription service. It's a one time purchase. If someone needs a long support call to solve a problem that could easily wipe out all profit made on that customer and more.

This wasn't just about bugs. If they had trouble using some feature due to poor UI or inadequate documentation that also meant calls to the toll free support line and so management also was very insistent on clear, well written, comprehensive documentation.

Compare to today. Updates are easy, you can have FAQs and searchable support articles on your website, someone will make a Reddit group where your customers can help each other, there will be bloggers and YouTubers posting tricks and solutions that in the old days would have been in the manual, and no one expects everything to work in any given release.