$70 console games are good for developers, but they’re getting harder and harder to swallow as a consumer

Cyberpunk 2077 was a turning point for a lot of people. CD Projekt Red’s long-teased RPG masterpiece fell at the last hurdle, and its release was marred by immersion-breaking bugs, failed console versions, and a community of gamers completely underwhelmed by this premium title they’d spent upwards of $60 on.

Veteran gamers complained that “it wasn’t like this in their day,” that the halcyon days of picking a game cart off the shelf and plugging and playing were long dead. Your average gamer was beginning to complain about unfinished products being hawked for top-end prices, and patience was starting to wear thin. I have zero patience for the “lazy developer” criticism that’s flung around so casually in this industry (in 10-plus years of doing this job, I have never once met a “lazy developer” – the people on the ground floor care a lot), yet it was development staff that began to take flak for publishing-level decisions.

Perhaps a studio would rush a patch out in the first week, make an apology, then ‘fix’ their game with a groveling roadmap aimed at allowing a game to ‘reach its full potential’, but this isn’t what the consumer paid for, is it? If you booked off a day from work, spent $70 on a new entry in your favourite series, and then realised it was unplayable in its current state, you’d be frustrated, too, right? A lot of gamers will tell you this habit of patching things until they’re in the state they should have launched in is all too common these days, and perhaps they’re on to something.

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