It’s becoming increasingly common these days for products to not work properly. The video game industry is a huge culprit here. From consoles to accessories to games themselves, everything is broken when it ships.

Let’s start with consoles, shall we? I’ve never had consoles die on their own accord. Sure, there have been wrestling matches when I was a kid where a Genesis or NES got smashed, but you have to take those in stride. Even with the last generation, hardware problems weren’t that prevalent. Fast forward to today, and we see hundreds upon hundreds of Xbox 360’s failing every day. Personally, I’m on my 6th Xbox 360. Microsoft knows there’s something wrong. They wouldn’t be changing the warranty and upgrading their product replacement systems if there wasn’t. Maybe some testing could fix the problem up front.

The same goes with accessories. I hate to point at the finger in the same direction again, but the wireless headset for the Xbox 360 has seen countless problems which have, to this day, not been officially acknowledged by Microsoft. You can scour the official Xbox forums and countless other message boards across this wide sea we call the Information Super Highway, and you’ll stumble upon quite a few angry customers. Again, I’m on my second wireless headset. Thankfully, I have some friends who know which model numbers have updated chipsets, and you can spot those model numbers through the packaging. In another debacle, I’m sure everyone has heard of the problems with the X-ploder guitar for the Xbox 360 version of Guitar Hero II. If you haven’t, there’s two model numbers where the whammy bar doesn’t work. Again, yours truly was affected, and now I’m without my beloved Guitar Hero II for a while until I can find a working guitar.

Probably the biggest problem with product bugs is games themselves. Long gone are the days of game testers spending months locked in a dark room forced to play the same levels over and over. Now we get half finished, barely polished games pushed out the door with the expectation that a patch will come later. Isn’t the whole point of console gaming to not have to deal with all the issues of the PC, mainly patches and such? Before all the consoles went online, you never saw this. Games were tested before they were shipped. Now, you see patches for games the day they’re released to retail. It’s almost commonplace. It’s pathetic and it needs to stop.

There’s one driving force behind all of this: money. The almighty dollar has driven these large companies to care less about what makes the customer ultimately happy, but what will make them rich in the short-term. What used to a be a case of “delay the product until it’s right” has turned into “push it out the door as fast as we can and we’ll fix it later.” While it has somewhat worked, I think it’s going to backfire on these companies soon. Console gamers are getting more and more frustrated at that they have to patch and update their games. We, as gamers, don’t want to have to find bugs in a game, then wait weeks or even months for a fix. The fix should have been implemented before the game got out. Period. End of story.

I’ll pose an open question to anyone in the industry who would like to discuss this further… When is the industry going to realize again that Quality Assurance is a necessary part of development? Pushing the consoles, accessories, and games out quickly and bug-ridden may boost the company’s profits in the short-term, but it’s going to hurt their reputation in the long run.