It's not. As publisher they are responsible for quality control / assurance. If they allow a release of a buggy game, that shit is on them. And only on them, devs have the right to make a buggy game, publisher's job is to stop them from being released.

Says who? Apart from USA and probably Germany, in most countries applying a crack on a game you bought is 100% legal.

What.

No, sorry, quality control is the devs' job. How exactly is a publisher who didn't code or had anything to do with the game except for distribution and marketing supposed to debug games?

Read the game credits. QA and supervising is only a publisher's job.

You're REALLY fooling yourself there.
The EU has the same kind of anti-piracy legislation as the US concerning media, and since Poland is a part of the EU last I checked, you ARE doing something illegal if you crack a game, even one you bought legally.

I'll agree it doesn't make any sense, but it's still true.
That's complete bullshit. Typically the QA job is outsourced to a third party company. And the only thing that company can do is report any bugs they find, only the devs can fix them.

"Supervising" is part of a publisher's job I suppose but what exactly is that supposed to mean when most publishers don't know anything about making games.
If a developer says that a game is ready to ship, I don't see how a publisher is supposed to know better when they didn't actually have anything to do with making the games in the first place.

I can't speak about entire EU, but I'm 100% positive it's perfectly legal to crack a bought game in Poland.
ARE YOU SERIOUS?

You claim publishers who risk their fucking money and good name by publishing a game know nothing about the products they release?

You know very little to nothing about law and about publishing ANYTHING...

*sigh*
You do know that Poland is part of the EU, and that EU supersedes national laws right? Meaning that if EU law says something is illegal it is illegal in every EU country, including Poland.

Until you provide me with binding provision that says you can't crack a legally bought product, your words mean pretty much nothing.

Paradox:

Good...They are just about the last major game company that will put out hard core,historical strategy games, and set in periods that are not particularly popular.

Bad. Their inital releases are often buggy ot the point of being borderline unplayable. Granted, this is usually corrected in patches, but that is no excuse to release what amounts to a beta version of a game. Seems to me that Paradox should do a better job ot testing a game and sending it back to the developers if it is too buggy.

Frankly, their games are not for the casual game or those uninterested in history.. If you do not have a real interest in the historical era the game is set in, don;t buy it. A real knowledge about the period can actualy greatly improve your game play and make the game more enjoyable.,something not true of a lot of history based strategy games.

If you buy a game on Steam it has Steam DRM. It may not have DRM if you buy it from another source. I though everybody had that figured out by now.
At times gamers are just,,well, stupid about things like that.

I thought people would've had figured out by now that game being sold on Steam doesn't need to have any sorts of DRM and there are many games on steam without it.


by the way, I was wrong. Cracking games and jailbreaking phones is perfectly legal in USA:

http://www.destructoid.com/hacking-iphones-games-legal-in-us-under-dmca-revisions-179962.phtml

Right.
And you're completely ignoring the fact that QA for video games is HARD. It's not like books where you just have to get someone to proofread the thing and suggest a few corrections.
You can maybe locate a few bugs, but as long as you're not the original programmer, you have no way to solve them, you can just report them.

Bottom line, if the devs says any bugs identified in the QA stage were resolved, the publisher has no choice but to believe them, because he can't do anything about the bugs himself.

And your comment about publishers' "good name"? Are you completely ignorant about the history of gaming? Because it's been proved, time and again, that every publisher in the video game industry cares much more about making a quick buck than about their "good name".
As a result I can't think of ANY decently sized publisher that actually has a good reputation. Some of them are just less horrible than others about releasing unfinished, buggy messes. But they've all done it at some time or another.

Actually no, that's one of the very first thing you learn in professional software development: developers should NEVER, EVER, handle QA testing themselves; heck they should never be directly involved in QA testing at all, their only job is to fix the bugs found during QA testing.

When developers QA test their own code is when the problems starts.

I don't know how it works in the game industry but normally you don't have to "believe" anything; bugs are identified, reported to devs who fix them (unless it is decided not to), then the updated version is given back to QA team who make sure the reported bugs are really fixed and that there are no regression.

Also usually it's the publisher who decide how much money and how much time to allocate to QA testing and also who has the final go/no-go decision on whenever the product can be released with unfixed issues or not.

Well that's probably how it's supposed to work, in a perfect world.
However, since in the real world publishers are the ones who are only in it for the money and the ones who want to cut corners, the devs are usually in practice the ones who're left to do the QA, together with the 3rd party company that was hired to do it.

Seriously, gaming history is rife with examples of publishers pushing devs to release games before they were ready. Conversely I can't think of a single example where the publisher pushed back a release date for additional QA, it's almost always the devs who do that.

Last week's Three Moves Ahead podcast was actually an interview with Fredrik Wester and Shams of Paradox, covering a lot of this same ground. And they were very frank about the fact that while they're doing a better job of QA on games from other devs compared to recently (March of the Eagles was good to go very quickly after launch, compared to a mess like Sword of the Stars 2), they still need to get better and are focused on it. So it isn't as if they're trying to sweep everything under the carpet.