Game Bugs Are On The Rise? Here’s Why

With the gaming industry in the midst of large change, so too do the issues that arise in games continue to evolve and get worse. Game bugs are a large part of that issue, but what are “game bugs”? Game bugs, often referred to as just “bugs” or “glitches”, are issues that create circumstances in video games that the developers did not intend to have happen. Bugs can range from being completely harmless or even helpful to the players, to being totally game-breaking to the point where the game is unplayable. Either way, bugs are harmful to the games they appear in, and unfortunately, they are on the rise in games of shapes and sizes. Often conflated with performance issues, bugs stem from the oversights that performance issues do. While performance issues and bugs are very different, the issues discussed about current game development practices below apply to both.

Historically, video games bugs have been rare. If there ever was a bug found, it was often very minor. This was because games were released on cartridges or disks, and once a game was put on a cartridge or disk, it could not be changed. Put simply, major bugs on the games of old were far too expensive fix, requiring a developer to replace all the cartridges/disk sold. Thus, these developers did everything in their power to avoid and remove bugs in their games prior to release. A large part of this was spending large amounts of man hours and money on Quality Assurance testing (QA). Dozens or even hundreds of people would be hired to play a game before its release to find any issues or bugs. If an issue was found, it would go back to the game developers to fix the issue. Once fixed, it would go back to QA once again. This process would continue until basically all the bugs and other issues were hammered out, sometimes taking thousands of hours. After all this iteration, the game would finally be ready to put on cartridges/disks and released. Long gone are those days.

Indeed, this iterative process between game developers and QA still exists, but it is a mere husk of what it once was. Because of this diminishment of QA, more often than not, games are now released in unfinished and bug infested states. It is ultimately gamers that pay the full game price while also being the de facto unpaid QA testers for these games. There are a few reasons why this is so prevalent in gaming.

The first and biggest reason for this is that all modern games are now cloud based. Even a cartridge/disk is just a key to access the game from the cloud of whatever platform a player gets their game from. This allows developers to release unfinished games now, and fix the issues and bugs weeks, months, or even years after release – all they have to do is upload a new version of the game to cloud and it triggers a “patch” update for all the players. There are plenty of recent examples of this, but the most egregious are No Man’s Sky, Cyberpunk 2077, and Mindseye. All these games were released in unplayable states due to bugs. No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk 2077 have recovered and become successful after many years and patches that fix the issues, while Mindseye has never recovered.

The second reason is the use of early access. Many low-budget games release in early access because they do not have ability to hire QA, so this allows them to cashflow and fix their game by the full release date. However, companies and developers that do have the ability to retain a QA team are beginning to abuse early access. Instead of using the early access money on more robust QA, they use it on marketing to sell their game to a wider audience. The wider audience of players are then used as unpaid QA to find the early access bugs so the developers can then fix them. There are also many examples of this, most recently, Palworld, Hytale, and Path of Exile 2 have done or are still doing this.

It was touched on above, but the third reason for this trend is purely monetary. Not having a QA team is big money saver for many developers, and using early access is a huge money maker for these developers, especially ones with already established franchises. This is not an inherently bad trend for the gaming industry to adopt, but as it plays out year after year, it also does not seem good. All this means is that games with bugs will continue to become more prevalent, perhaps even to the point where bugs will soon be called unexpected “features”. Although gamers around the world hope it never comes to that.