8 Reasons The Video Game Industry Is Headed For Disaster (Again)

Thanks to the gift that is digital content delivery, returning to the days of a one-time purchase equalling ownership of everything a game has to offer is a pipe dream. The ability to patch, hotfix and add-to an existing base has become the standard form excuse for releasing games in an unfinished state and, really, it's unacceptable.

Ludicrous as it is, to consider the concept of paying full price to watch half a film or read half a book, that's exactly the buyer-seller contract institutions like Bethesda have come to rely on as commonplace practices.

Fallout 76 crashed and burned in a hellfire of its own making upon launch for believing it could get away with charging full retail price for a product that all but the blind could see was fundamentally unfinished.

In lieu of its fall from grace, Bethesda has continued to remedy the mess it made with massive patches and bug fixes, but why, oh why, wasn't the base game simply withheld until these features were ready from day one? Not only could it have saved itself from committing corporate suicide, but justified an otherwise insulting upfront cost.

Customers are NOT beta testers. Stop treating them as such.