There is a serious issue plaguing the gaming world and it shows no sign of slowing. Developers are delivering a lot of product, that’s for sure, but some of these games are being released before they’re really ready to hit circulation. We recently saw one of these broken games release this past Tuesday with Watch Dogs 2.

Granted, the game is not unplayable, but Multiplayer is completely offline and not available. Watch Dogs 2 has multiplayer integrated into the single player experience, (when it’s working, that is) players can enter your game and vise versa. However, Ubisoft completely pulled the feature after claiming it caused lag issues and periodic hard-crashes. Ultimately it was a good move on their part because if the game was lagging in single player and crashing all the time, gamers would be up in arms. Yet they may have benefited from holding off on the release for a couple weeks in order to resolve the issue. I’m not sure a delay would impact our decision on whether to buy the game or not, but now they’re just continuing the trend of developers releasing unfinished games.

Watch Dogs 2 isn’t the only AAA game that came out in the recent past which had issues straight out of the gate. Batman Arkham Knight by Rocksteady Studios made headlines when it was released on June 23rd, 2015 for game breaking issues on PC. It would rain inside, crash without reason or be simply unplayable. There were unprecedented refunds given by Steam. Although the game did well it ultimately didn’t make the money they needed.

The list goes on. Far Cry 4 was another game with unfortunate issues right off the bat. Just another addition to Ubisoft’s long list of games decimated with bugs and errors on launch. This isn’t just a trend isolated to one developer, it seems to be a growing phenomena. A few years ago, it was almost unheard of for a game to be released with so many problems the consumers couldn’t even play it. But now game developers only seemed concerned with releasing game after game and if one doesn’t function at first, they’ll just patch it later and move on. A bit of a slap in the face to the committed gamer, if you ask us.

An Unfortunate Trend

We here at Gigamax understand that these developers need to keep up with the competition, releasing new games at an incredible pace. When looking at the sales reports, it doesn’t even look as if these game breaking issues are having a major impact on their bottom line. Sure, the community has a lot to say when a developer releases a broken game but a big name like Ubisoft can brush bad PR off and move on. Hopefully developers will move on past this unfortunate pattern. For now, we’ll keep buying the games and reporting to the gamers so you don’t have to waste your own money.

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