FITCamaro :
The dev team will certainly still be working on the game after it goes Gold to fix remaining bugs and anything else that can be patched in. They will merely cut their release build when it goes gold. None of you must be software developers.
And it won't be released on digital first because they don't do that.
Don't make sweeping statements about other people without knowing their educational/career background. Just makes you look like a jerk and doesn't actually contribute to the discussion. I do actually have a background in software, and am fairly familiar with how the usual process works.
"They don't do that" =/= "They can't do that." There's nothing stopping any developer from making that leap from a technical standpoint, just a financial one. If it were truly just a manufacturing delay, there's no reason they couldn't just release the disk copies they have printed presently as well as the digital release. If there's something preventing them from having
ANY physical copies available on release day, then I can certainly see the appeal of waiting.
Obviously, yes, that time can be used to spend longer on a day one patch. But if their production schedule hasn't shifted, then that leads me to believe that in the grand scheme of things, that either isn't a huge concern, or, like how most other software devs operate, that's already being worked on in tandem with the team pushing towards the "gold" date.