Yeah, it’s really fucking dumb that so many games are beholden to an arbitrary release date that gets picked strategically around the holidays or at the end of business quarters to pad out a businesses quarterly earnings.

I think the ubiquity and accessibility of patching games has a lot to do with it. Like, I remember getting games back in the day and not even knowing patches were a thing. You couldn’t ship a game that was a broken piece of shit and then patch it later, because patches weren’t really a thing due to internet access/game clients like steam not being as widespread. So you’d get a lot more of “We’ll launch when we’re ready” because you knew you had to ship a finished game and couldn’t rely on fleshing it out over the months following release. (or even worse, selling the fixes/expansion of the game to consumers with DLC after the fact)

I could also be speaking out of my ass, I’m no game dev.

I feel like marketing whips people into a frenzy to buy the game, but it also has this useful side-effect of creating a kind of “organic” pressure for game devs to meet these impossible deadlines set by the shareholders. The mindset of “you wouldn’t want to let down your fans, would you?”. If fans had any awareness of video games as these incredibly labour-intensive media objects made in sweatshop conditions, they would stop being so complicit in pressuring game devs to crunch until their bodies give out and their personal lives are ruined.