Home

 › 

Articles

 › 

What’s So Bad About Day One Patches?

What’s So Bad About Day One Patches?

On the surface, free “day one” patches seem like they don’t hurt anybody. From the time that a game is done to the time that it hits store shelves, development teams don’t really have anything to do, and unless they are moving on to other projects, that amounts to a whole lot of time sitting on your hands. As a result, many development teams have started using this time to work on their day one patch, which usually serves to fix a bunch of bugs and adjust game balance to the best of the team’s ability. Since its free, we all get it, so it doesn’t hurt anyone, right?

Well, there are a couple hidden problems with the day one patch, and they aren’t problems that people think about all that often. First of all, there is the fact that not everybody has an internet connection. If you remember, the Xbox 360 was originally released with an “arcade” version that sported no hard drive and no way to connect to the internet. This was less than ten years ago. There are still plenty of people who don’t have the internet and as a result won’t be able to access the day one patch. So if this patch fixes any potentially game breaking bugs, people without the internet are just going to be stuck playing the bugged version of the game forever.

Secondly, the question of what happens when patch support is dropped comes up. When a company drops support for its game, all the servers that hosted patches go along with it. As a result, this game will never be able to be played in its intended form past a certain date. These dates are getting shorter and shorter, as well. Some games have had their online support cut off in as little as six or seven years. So now, for example, you can play Marvel vs Capcom 1 and 2 the way they were meant to be played if you still have your old Dreamcast and copies of the game, but Marvel vs Capcom 3 will never be played as intended in ten or twenty years.

But both of these are problems with patches in general. A problem that is specifically limited to day one patches is one that is small but creates lasting effects: it creates another hoop to jump through before you play the game. Let me give you an example. Many games are now 60GB or bigger, and that’s nothing to scoff at. Certain consoles install these games on your hard drive in order to reduce load times, and that installation progress takes time. Then, on top of that, many users will be faced with yet another day one patch download, which yet again bars access to the game they just bought.

What’s So Bad About Day One Patches?

This wouldn’t be a serious problem if it weren’t for the fact that several games are literally barring access until these day one patches are downloaded. They cut off certain parts of the game, like multiplayer, replay modes, certain types of versus modes, until the patch is applied. As a result, you are only getting a portion of the game until you connect to the internet and patch it, and as I said before, this service won’t always be around. This means that at some point, whole sections of some games will be lost to gaming history forever.

What do you think? Do you think there are negative ramifications to day one patches? Let us know in the comments.

To top