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Yay, Next-Gen Is Here; Boo, It’s Still Using Last-Gen’s Crutch

Yay, Next-Gen Is Here; Boo, It’s Still Using Last-Gen’s Crutch

The recently released 13 GB patch for Dead Rising 3 is a troubling sign of things to come, when you really stop and take a look at what is happening to the business side of video games.

Last year, Battlefield 4 garnered huge amounts of criticism and coverage for releasing functionally broken across multiple platforms. To this day, the game still isn’t up and running at 100%. When you juxtapose that information beside the Dead Rising 3 patch, things start to look more than a little troubling.

While studios and publishers have always released games with issues, it really hasn’t been up until the past console generation that we’ve seen titles in desperate need of patches just to run properly and as advertised. An early example of this was the 360 release of Bully: Scholarship Edition . Now, however, publishers are rushing titles out the door to retail faster than ever, and the result is a mentality that’s having a negative impact on their consumer base.

Yay, Next-Gen Is Here; Boo, It’s Still Using Last-Gen’s Crutch

The mentality that any remaining bugs and other issues can be patched out post-launch is leading to an altered gaming landscape where the consumer is growing to expect their brand-new purchase to be broken in some fundamental way before it’s even been used. Publishers and studios are in such a hurry to meet a release window and generate as many sales as possible, that they’re willing to risk their consumers being upset with the product instead of taking an extra month or two in order to clean up the game’s remaining issues.

How much this bothers you is, of course, a personal decision. Just be aware that in this current cycle of consoles, the ways in which games are broken, and the sizes of patches it takes to fix them, are only going to grow and multiply.

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