How did we end up normalising day-one patches the size of the game itself?
You buy a new release for £60. Maybe you even preloaded it. Midnight hits, it unlocks, and the first thing you see is a 40GB patch. You finally get into the game, and something’s off. Frame drops. Cutscene audio out of sync. Dialogue triggers twice. Your character falls through the floor. And this is before the first checkpoint.
This isn’t some bizarre fluke. This is launch day now.
Games used to be delayed when they weren’t finished. Now they release on schedule, finished or not. Patches are expected. Players joke about it. Everyone shrugs. “It’ll be fixed in a week,” they say. But that week comes and goes, and suddenly there’s a hotfix for the last patch, and a note that “we’re aware of issues with performance on some configurations.” You’re not playing the game. You’re waiting for it to become playable. I’m looking at you, Cities Skylines 2.
Studios will point to complexity. Bigger teams. Open worlds. Dynamic AI. Variable hardware. That might explain some bugs. But it doesn’t explain launching with broken save systems, busted quest logic, or game-breaking crashes on the title screen. That’s not complexity. That’s lack of QA and a rushed production schedule.
And the schedule is the point. These games don’t ship when they’re ready. They ship when the release window is locked in. Publishers time them around fiscal reports, quarterly earnings, or major competitor releases. What you get at launch is whatever they had working by the deadline. The rest comes later.
This has been normalised across the industry. Cyberpunk 2077 might be the biggest example, but it wasn’t alone. Jedi Survivor launched with severe performance issues across platforms. The Last of Us Part I on PC was nearly unplayable for a chunk of the audience. These are major titles from high-budget studios. They shipped with glaring problems and expected to fix them later.
Meanwhile, games like Baldur’s Gate 3 arrive in better shape with far fewer resources. It’s not about what’s possible. It’s about what’s acceptable. If publishers know players will tolerate bugs at launch, they’ll keep pushing games out the door half-finished. Refunds are rare. Most players wait it out. Reviewers often don’t even see the worst of it because the pre-release build was patched two hours before embargo lifted.
And when patches do come, they often create new problems. One thing gets fixed, something else breaks. Save files vanish. Performance tanks. UI bugs appear. Months go by. Some of it gets fixed. Some of it doesn’t. You’ll see “Known Issues” on patch notes that are copy-pasted from the last five updates.
What’s worse is when this becomes the entire post-launch plan. Instead of adding content, they’re still patching basic functionality. You paid full price to be an unpaid tester.
And we’ve let it happen. We pre-order. We buy in at launch. We praise the transparency when devs admit things are broken. We post memes. We wait for the patch. The industry took that as a green light.
Not every game launches like this. Some developers still delay a release when they need to. Some take the hit. But that’s rare now. The expectation is clear: get it out, clean it up later. The bar has dropped, and no one wants to pick it back up.
You didn’t get an early access discount. You didn’t agree to a beta. But that’s exactly what you’re getting.
Would you accept this from any other product you buy?
