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Comment by timboslice | Hacker News Reader

I get the sentiment (they should have tested more thoroughly), but I for one appreciate the on-demand update mechanism. Would you rather play a game with previously unknown bugs, or have them smashed on launch day and get a patch to make your experience more stable?

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I'd rather play a game that, if I should want to play it 20 years from now and there are no update servers - which I do still do with my old consoles - I can pop it in and not worry about bugs I have to figure out how to get patched. Games will inevitably have bugs, but developers have become too reliant on the update mechanisms and games have shipped completely busted.

That's an interesting point. I hadn't considered the impact of ondemand updates to future abandonware - looks like another case where pirated illegal versions might have better preservation than official ones.

Some fans even made patches for bugs in Master of Orion, in the binary.

Command&Conquer: Red Alert 2 and its expansion pack also received community patches (I contributed to them a lot) to its binary. When EA later released The First Decade bundle with all the old games in it, they removed the old copy-protection. Most games in the bundle were simply recompiled to remove it, but for the expansion pack they hex-edited the copy-protection to keep it community patch compatible.

Games were stable enough before. And the stability of an average game in the first few month definitely went down with the introduction of on-demand online updates. Not only that, it's not entirely uncommon to see half-gigabyte patches.

Is that so much when the games themselves have ballooned into the double-digits of gigabytes? A .5 gig patch isn't a whole lot when Dragon Age: Origins takes up 20gb in the first place (and thats a pretty old game)

A lot of that is sounds, textures, models, animation info.

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