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this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2026
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Gaming
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This comment rings too true. There's a lot of games I play and I wonder if the developers ever just actually tried a playthrough from the start. But developer delusion does exist.
I remember working with a dev team for a patch on a AAA title.
They didn't even know what some of the values and variables that governed the game did. They'd cycled through so many people they didn't have anyone left who understood the engine.
To be fair, a shitload of devs are under horrific crunch hours to meet un-meetable deadlines set by higher-ups. Not saying that that's what happened here, but QA testing is one of those things that gets the axe early in development far too often
It gets the axe because, like a lot of support roles, if it works then it's "what do we pay you for" and if there's a bug then it's "what do we pay you for". Any time that there's a leadership member doing bean counting instead of actual product quality it's one of the biggest targets for the funding axe.
"We just won't program in bugs", oh okay sure buddy.
"AI can catch all the bugs", uh huh.
"Customers won't see most of the bugs, it's not worth the time and money", yep.
"What do you mean players don't invest time in something that can break for no reason", that's what we told you months ago.
"QA should have caught this, how did we miss this??", there's two QA and they've been pulling 80 hour weeks for a year, they did. it got put in the backlog to hit arbitrary deadlines.
"This bug is unacceptable, what does QA even do?" gestures at pile of hundreds of other system breaking bugs that they caught before this one edge case that got missed in the dumpster fire of development
That basically describes the development of Star Citizen but with an unhealthy amount of scope creep sprinkled in at every opportunity.
Although I'm not convinced that scope creep is necessarily the problem anymore. I think they've fundamentally designed themselves into a corner and won't be able to hack this game engine into being able to deploy anything close to the desired/promised player experience.
QA doesnt exist in most games. I mean why bother? Players will buy a game in "early access", stumble over bugs, give you a positive review and aggressively defend against anyone who criticises it. Why pay for QA, when you can get paid for it. Industry is fucked and customers stopped demanding better.
It's one of (several) reasons I almost always wait to buy games till they are older and on sale. Why pay a pile of money today when I can pay less later and receive a more-polished game?
And if it never gets polished or never goes down in price? Well, the wishlist does get purged from time to time....
This is the way to do it. "Oh this looks neat" Early Access "....into the wishlist until it's done."
Either it'll be finished and good, finished and bad, or a flop and I saved my money. There's no reason besides FOMO to buy it.