8 Lies The Video Game Industry Can't Stop Telling

1. That Launch Dates Matter Anymore

When was the last time you bought a game and it worked as expected on day one?

No bugs, no glitches, no meaningful content add-ons or mechanics that should've been there, attached weeks later?

When was the last time a developer's vision for a title dropped fully-formed on day one, and stayed that way?

I can point to 2018's God of War, The Last of Us 2 and Red Dead Redemption 2... and that's about it.

The overwhelming majority either use players as glorified test audiences, patching in gameplay tweaks or balance fixes weeks or months later, or a game is released in a genuinely unfinished state.

It's got to the point now where we actively expect something to not be optimum on day one. We actively take to social media or speak to friends wondering if X element will get fixed in the next patch.

It's a truly bizarre state for a medium to be in, and the single-most jarring reality to come to grips with, the newer you are to gaming.

Most titles go from being fixed post-launch to being completely overhauled. Even the term "patch" went from minor performance upticks across the 7th generation, to Assassin's Creed Unity being completely replaced on Xbox One in 2014, Cyberpunk 2077 still being in active development a year after launch, and No Man's Sky overhauling itself and releasing multiple sequels' worth of content into the same game.

Launch dates, early access, a crowd-funded prototype? Save for the biggest studios on the planet, they can often be the same thing.