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The former GTA developer criticized the practice of «zero patches» for games: «Encourages poor development and degrades the user experience»

Published by Ihor Panchenko

Bought the game — download the 100 GB patch. Romance!

Colin Anderson, who worked as a sound manager and created music for the first two installments of Grand Theft Auto (GTA), criticized the current practice of releasing «zero-day» patches in the gaming industry.

«As a developer, I miss the discipline of knowing that it was impossible to fix a game after it was created. Today’s zero-day patch mentality only encourages bad development and management practices, and degrades the user experience», — wrote Anderson at X (Twitter).

The developer compares this trend to similar phenomena in the music and film industries:

«It all started with “fix it during mixing” in music, then “fix it in post-production” in movies, and finally “fix it with a patch” in games».

In recent years, players have increasingly expressed dissatisfaction with rushed releases. A striking example was the release of Cyberpunk 2077 from CD Projekt Red, which was accompanied by numerous technical problems at launch, although the developers later fixed most of the shortcomings.

Today’s users are forced to download huge patches of tens of gigabytes immediately after purchasing a new game to fix bugs that remained in the game at the time of the release of physical copies.

Source: Gamesradar