> They represent more work, work that you don't want to have to do, because at the end of the day these are people who already bought the game. You've gotten as much out of them as you're going to get out of them.
This is such a bad attitude. The game is supposed to work correctly without any bugs. People who paid money for the game deserve continued support. It doesn't matter how much time and money the developers have to spend, that's their problem.
If the software is defective, consumers should be entitled to a refund. That ought to motivate companies not to release shoddy work.
> The game is supposed to work correctly without any bugs.
This is not real-world software engineering :)
Pretty much any software has bugs; maybe surprisingly to non-programmers, games are especially complex (in primis, architecturally).
In real world, one can realistically talk about, let's say, an acceptable threshold of bugs.
> People who paid money for the game deserve continued support
And this is not real-world (game) business. Whether one likes it or not, there is a per-unit profit, and the corresponding value in terms of support is very limited.
An ideal solution to this is open sourcing games after a certain time (Id Software used to do it), but this is not realistic. I wish it, though!
> That ought to motivate companies not to release shoddy work
One can't really force a company not to do shoddy work. The gaming market is a radically free one, unlike other constrained markets, like internet providers. Customers are actually entitled to have the money refunded, at least on Steam. Gaming journalism actually has been including bugginess in games evaluation for a while, so buyers can decide in an informed fashion.
Which is why developers don't release on Linux, since they would have to test for so many strange driver setups to ensure things works correctly. The bug reports you get from linux are not "this gameplay is bad", but stuff like "my mouse cursor isn't displayed correctly here" which works fine in windows but somehow their setup screws it up. Trying to get graphics to reliably work in all linux versions is a lot of work.
This is such a bad attitude. The game is supposed to work correctly without any bugs. People who paid money for the game deserve continued support. It doesn't matter how much time and money the developers have to spend, that's their problem.
If the software is defective, consumers should be entitled to a refund. That ought to motivate companies not to release shoddy work.