So you're saying that the only reason to have any quality-control at all is if there is a chance it might kill/injure people ?JaFo, that difference comes down to one important thing: Software can't kill you. A bug in Black Ops might make you cry until your eyes bleed, but that bug isn't going to cause your death.
Unlike material sales (like cars, electronics, etc), software comes with no risk, does not have a manufacturing cost, and really contains no liability. Exhaustive testing for something like safety is not required, instead best effort testing takes place. Sometimes not even that is done, as seems to be the case on Blops PC, but, guess what? Nobody died.
Maybe it's because I'm a software engineer myself, but I really can't understand why it is acceptable at all to have major/critical bugs in any software at release. Even in a best-case scenario you'll be hurting your own product and give consumers even more reason to chose 'unconvential' means of acquiring it just to be sure it is works on their system.
I wasn't claiming that Indie developers didn't have such issues.To claim indie developers are not having the same kinds of issues that other developers are is simply wrong. Lots of indie games have issues that get fixed through patching. If anything, indie games tend to be tested less because they can't afford the range of system configurations required to completely test issues across computer configurations (even among simply processor/video card combinations).
I should have said that the ones that don't have similar issues to 'real' developers probably are just lucky or just maybe they are using proper design and planning (which is unlikely given the generic attitude towards software development for non-critical systems)
The answer is easy : kill the features that would require the additional overhead.The biggest problem is that publishers find it acceptable to release games that not only have issues, but are practically completely undesirable products because of that. What is a development studio to do that can't get their publisher to sign off on two additional months of development time, and will lose $10,000 a week for not releasing on time? Eat the $80,000 or release what they have? I can tell you what I would choose.
There's nothing that can't be fixed by proper planning, because that demand for extra time isn't going to appear out of nowhere.
Remember you're supposed to be improving your ability to estimate your resource-requirements each and every time.