A $30-40 game (even in 1990 a fairly standard price) 30 years ago would be inflation-adjusted an 80-100 dollar game today. If you could sell a STANDARD, non-AAA game at $100 retail the amount of bug-fixing and QA you could budget would be astronomical.
I think that's way too simplistic. The gaming industry has exploded in those 30 years, and the number of people who will buy any given game has increased quite drastically. Development costs have generally decreased, and the switch to online sales has decreased the costs for publishing.
Overall, I don't think the argument that inflation is to blame for bad Q&A really holds up.
But to be honest, I don't think Q&A is the important factor here anyway. It's more that there are three major factors at work when it comes to any update:
- Wanting to add certain features to the update
- Wanting to publish the update at a certain point in time
- Wanting to release it in a stable state
If it's not possible to achieve all of these goals, then something has to give. If we look at 2.2, it's pretty clear that just cutting some features to make more time for other features wasn't really possible, as the economy is one big entity that needs all parts to be there. I can also easily see it being a much bigger project than they initially thought, because such a major change to a core system probably causes a lot of problems that weren't obvious at first - which might have increased the overall work they had to do by quite a bit, possibly much more than they had planned for.
Postponing the release was probably also not an option from their perspective, because the Christmas sales are huge. I assume they have the numbers and know whether they have to meet that deadline or not.
So really, it's possible that all that could give from their perspective is the stability of the release. Q&A wouldn't have helped with that, because the bottleneck here isn't finding all the tiny bugs that only become obvious through extensive testing, the bottleneck are the programmers. Because even if you have extra people in the company that could be added to the project, a lot of things just can't be worked on by multiple people at once.
So in conclusion, I think what lead to the release state of 2.2 is that the ambitions were set above what was reasonably doable in the time that they had, and potentially that they underestimated the scope of the changes they were making.
Sure. But initial realize ON AVERAGE was of better quality. Not always.
I think the phenomenon at work here is called "survivor bias". The games that have managed to become part of the cultural narrative are the most polished, most enjoyable games that were released back then, while all the crap that was released inbetween has been lost to the ages. I mean, the video game crash was partially caused by the flood of low-quality games that made consumers unwilling to put their money on the table, and Nintendo's Seal of Quality was ultimately born as a result of it.
In contrast, some of the most polished games of all times have been released in the last few years, despite the fact that games are larger than they've ever been. It's true that there are some companies that have built a business-model around releasing half-finished game after half-finished game, but that's in no way the state of gaming as a whole.
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