10 Most Insulting Video Game Industry Habits (That Have To End)

Remember the days of purchasing a new game and being able to play it immediately? Picture the scene, it’s Christmas morning and you unwrap your first-ever games console, ignoring the rest of your presents to boot it up for the first time. A couple of decades ago, you’d have to be dragged away from it several hours later to eat dinner. Nowadays you’d still be doing hardware updates, system configurations and software installs by the end of Boxing Day.

Installs are an unfortunately necessary evil that have come hand-in-hand with the technological developments that make modern games possible. Though its painful to watch a gauge trickle along at a snail’s pace in areas with lower internet speeds, once it’s done it's done. Or so it should be.

Patches are another necessary evil. Bugs and glitches should be identified by developers through their in-house testing, but the ability to stamp out any that emerge post-release or amend unbalanced gameplay without needing to recall products is a godsend.

What isn’t necessary are huge patches that immediately follow the initial install, often taking just as long to process. A game shouldn’t ever be pressed to disc or released to a digital marketplace unfinished, but the fact that they are and that day one patches are now often the norm is a damning indictment of quality control procedures.