Outspoken game director David “Glistening Bull” Jaffe has criticized games that release huge amounts of patches in a short space of time, suggesting that a game should be updated four times a year at most.
“Hardware manufacturers, I feel, should only allow one to four updates to the software per game per year,” he suggested, to a large applause from a GDC crowd. “None of them should come within the first one to two months the game is shipping.
“When I first started, when the disc was shipped it was our last chance [to get rid of bugs] off the bat. If developers could make it work then, then today they can at least make sure our games don’t have to be updated the first week they hit shelves.”
I’ve long been against the “patch culture” that seems to encourage the development of rushed games, and developers who concentrate on shipping a game first, and ironing out problems later. While I do agree with Jaffe, I’d like to see him extend his criticism to the hardware itself — having Sony restrain its stupid PS3 Firmware updates would be lovely.
Jaffe: Console makers should limit game updates to four per year [Joystiq]
