The Whole Patch Debate

A lot of people are "sick of" games released with errors.  Guess what?  All games have errors.  Most are not obvious.  If you remember the Atari and PC days, they'd test these puppies until they were sick of even the best games.  Then they'd publish and ship.  What happened when an update was put out?  Nothing.  The newer versions of the games would be published from that point on, but unless you contact customer service and exchange your copy via mail (usually for $10 + S&H), you never new the AI was flawed or that the penalty for letting the timer expire on level 6 is NOTHING?  You know what "sequels" and "special additions" were?  They were fixed software plus some extra levels (not that that's a bad thing).

I've had software on all of my systems freeze the console.  Now with the harddrives, which should've been done a long time ago, you can apply patches to games.  Half of the time, I have no clue what's being updated, and I never see it.

Do developers use updates as crutches or extortion for downloadable content?  You betcha.  Here's the golden rule to updates and DLC:  If it was supposed to be in the game, it should be free.  Those "cheat" downloads are still acceptable under this golden rule, because the game wasn't programmed with them in it (hopefully).  If they were free, they'd probably have to disable achievements on any "cheated" gamesave.  It's obvious that Gears of War was delivered incomplete.  This was probably not due to them missing a deadline, but most likely a funding deadline.  Then, if the game succeeds, DLC and further advances can provide the rest.

So most of these are patches that would normally cost $10-20 bucks, so I think it works well.