While i agree that fat piles of patches are quite annoying, I can't remember things being that much easier back before broadband. I certainly remember encountering bugs on PC and console games alike, and if there was a fix - there usually wasn't - it was a 30MB patch that would take around eighteen billion years to download. With consoles, all you could do was eat shit and suck it down.

That said, I generally don't buy games upon release due to financial reasons, so I inevitably end up playing a version that's completely or almost completely patched, so I probably encounter fewer bugs than most others... New Vegas being a major exception.

I don't think you're looking far back enough to be honest. 30MB for a patch in 1995 was enormous. The vast majority of patches were usually in the 1-2MB range. It wasn't until broadband started seeing some major penetration in the early 2000s that patches approaching 3 figures became commonplace.

As far as pre-PS3 consoles were concerned, I've never seen a truly game-breaking bug. There's a simple reason for this - letting such a bug through to a production release would have required a recall of copies in the wild, which would have been far more costly. There was a massive financial penalty for such lazy behaviour. Nowadays, developers are just sloppy in the way they work - deliver a broken product and hope that you can fix it at a later date.

If Sony had let such a bug as the save game issue in The Last of Us slip through in the PS1 era, they probably would have been faced with lawsuits.

Heck, you couldn't even rely on patches on PC, because not everyone had a modem. So if you released a game back then in a broken state, you probably would have been inundated with refund demands.

I've always maintained that major developers and publishers need to face the threat of financial penalties to be at their best. If they feel they can be lazy without repercussions, they will be, and they are.

Sadly they seem to be going the other way, charging full price for games on places like Steam for example for a game that isn't even out yet and wont be out for 3/6/9 months or more or whatever and calling it "Early Access" when it really means "buggy crap alpha development release we hope you'll buy now so we can eat because we're low on funds". It's an eyesore too because they even go on sale and otherwise make you think they're released games until you click on the actual game page and then you're shown a big message that it is "Early Access" or whatever, so there's little likelihood you'll buy it by accident unless you're blind, but it still seems like a dishonest practice and a poor business model to follow IMHO. All of the people who are beta testing the game essentially are PAYING for the PRIVILEGE to do so? And by the time the game comes out, people are likely to be able to buy it at a cheaper price without having to pay a premium to be a beta tester.

Lazy indeed. But, I can't really fault them for it either if people out there think it's reasonable and are willing to pay for it and both parties get what they want. Perhaps it's a sign of the times, but I think it's a little shameful personally. I'd rather see all of those games relegated to some other sub-area of Steam than mixed in with all of the released games.

Ah welll... I'm getting old I guess...