10 Things Developers Wrongly Think About Gamers

5. We're So Desperate For A Game We'd Rather Have It Now Than Have It Complete

The internet has brought with it many amazing things. We can talk to people on the other side of the world for free, business has been revolutionised, and there are literally millions of pictures of dogs wearing hats to look at. On the flip side this has led to the scourge of the modern day gamer: Patches. Before, developers used to want to put out the best product possible, so they€™d pay people to test their games and find any faults so they could be fixed before the title was released. Then some bright spark realised that with the advent of broadband and the internet they don€™t need to pay people to test their games, people will pay them! So now a game gets released into the wild, thousands of copies are sold, then the forums light up a few hours later with gamers complaining about all the faults. The developers have all their research done for them for free, and via patch they can fix the faults they were too lazy to look for in the first place. There€™s not even a need for them to finish a game either, they can just release the bits they haven€™t completed later, call it an expansion pack and charge players again.
 
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Richard has been playing video games since the days of the BBC Micro, (and incidentally when is Chuckie Egg going to get a reboot?) He is currently available for the post of Head of Marketing at Nintendo, seeing as no-one else seems to be doing the job. He's also a major fan of fantasy/sf books and is just waiting for his novel about an assassin who doesn't wear a hood to get picked up.