Not universal though. Besides your example, even for single player games patches can be basically malicious. I've had Fallout 4 locked on updates for like 3 years at this point, everything Bethesda has added has degraded the experience for zero upside. But I can't think of any software besides a game where I have been anything but dreading an update in years. Slack wants to update? Great, it'll probably break/degrade my work flow in some minor way, and they're one of the lesser offenders on my work machine.
* relatively small purchases
* paid for directly by the user
* expected to be enjoyable
Most other software fails at least one of those tests, reducing the ability to shop around and make an informed decision.
hahahahah. Games are steering further and further to this not being true. Where each player explicitly doesn't pay for it, and instead they contain an increasing series of dark patterns in order to steer players to fleece their money in a series of microtransactions.
Sadly we’re way past the point where games became like all the other software in that regard
I don't. The only thing i want to see when i want to play is: Please wait, downloading update.
hopefully it doesn't get removed.
(This of course is excluding things like the big “Flattening” of data structures that happened around 1.13 or so)
Patching it out would be more “correct” but serve to only limit user creativity and inventions.
That was a glitch that made minecarts go fast and far. Notch chose to add a simple block that accelerates minecarts and then fix the glitch.
Meanwhile some non bugged workflows like breaking and replacing the lectern a million times to get the right trade exist because the enchanting table is so horribly broken no one would use it.
The enchanting table used to be a rare reward. You had to get to level 50 and roll the dice once. You get a random upgrade to one item and that's it, you're stuck with it. It was gambling. Now the cost is trivial after several reductions, and people minmax their enchantments, and Repair means you never have to re-roll, and you can get all your enchantments anyway from villagers if you do a bunch of ridiculous nonsense. That's an accidental game that overtook the actual game, and it seems like not a very good one.
And game developers who care about this are the ones that preemptively take the fun out of games. If someone ruins their experience by looking at tutorials that's entirely self afflicted.
In competitive games unintended mechanics are much more frequently patched but there are plenty of examples that are straight up iconic. Wave dashing in melee, magnum damage in Halo CE, sword cancelling in halo 2, b-hopping and surfing in CS.
And when you get to games like mmos where saving time is of major value glitches are like gifts. I am still mad they patched out logout skips in classic wow.
I can't remember a single time I was disappointed because something changed.