[citation][nom]welshmousepk[/nom]in THIS day, development cycles are longer and much more costly. developers are expected to put in much more work, and deal with much more complex issues. as a result we have much more advanced software, that is being constantly updated free of charge, and most importantly it can scale to more powerful multi-core systems allowing enthusiasts to benefit from increased performance more than ever. don't rant about the 'good old days' in an industry driven by hard work and immensely talented individuals. the industry is stronger now than its ever been, so don't bash progress because you think devs have it easy.[/citation]
Updated for free because half the crap released doesn't work as advertised out of the box, or in some cases at all. In the case of games, it's hard to think of a single major release this year that wasn't hosed on launch.
Don't pretend like commercial software companies primarily use the update process as a "value-add" to include new features rather than to patch the beta/swiss-cheese code they pushed onto consumers as a final product.
Don't get me wrong, I'm grateful for the the far and few between for-profit developers that follow the add new features for free model, but I'd rather be stuck with a strictly predefined feature set and a product that does as advertised, without crashes, or limitations upon first use.
So, don't rant about "an industry driven by hard work and immensely talented individuals" where a comparable quality product in another industry would not only result in mass-returns, but also many lawsuits. Toyota anyone? Yeah, they can update that too, right?
You're industry is the most protected. FFS, you can't return retail opened software, even if the actual product is completely non-functional, only exchange in case of bad media. Until software companies have to start accepting responsibility for the constant string of failures, I'm not going to wait for you to come down off your soap box, I'll come kick it out from underneath of you.