Nowadays, it is impossible to imagine a game working properly “out of the box”. Any sufficiently large-scale project requires improvements and fixes, which game authors implement with patches. But the composer and audio manager of the GTA series, and now game developer Colin Anderson, is very unhappy with this practice.
Anderson said this on his social networks when GTA: San Andreas turned 20 years old. The developer would like to return to the old days, when studios did not have the opportunity to finalize the game after release. The modern approach normalizes poor developer work at the main stage of project production, Colin believes:
“As a developer, I miss the days when you knew you couldn't 'fix' a game after it was released. Today's practice of “Zero-day Patching” simply encourages poor development and management practices, and it also degrades the quality of the player experience itself”
In one of the replays, Anderson compared game development to recording music or producing films, noting that such practices began there a long time ago: “It all started with music 'we'll fix it in the mix', then film 'we'll fix it in post-production', then gaming 'we'll fix it in the patch'”.