Is it me, or do gaming companies seem to be pushing out games far to quick in the quest to capture market share, but in doing so, they publish games with bugs galore? It seems if they publish a release date, they will release the game, even if it is not ready, and will release a patch shortly thereafter. How do others feel? If you agree, does this impact your decision about pre ordering the game, or waiting a while until its release?

They always have.

That is really nothing new and has been ongoing for the past 20 years.
If anything, we're in a better situation today because while games do get released with bugs and problems, usually the developers work on patches and you get them a lot easier than 15-20 years back.

Does anybody remember Outpost? That is a great example, the manual even has game play features that don't exist in the game at all and it was highly bugged. Gaming magazines gave rave reviews based on empty promisses and i think Sierra never properly fiinished the game at all.

The absolute prime example of a game being released prematurely, unfinished and just so because they wanted to drop it right before christmas is Bundesliga Manager 97. It caused a huge controversy and major backlash against Software 2000 here in Germany.
The game was released as a Beta version that constantly crashed, features didn't work and the game was so unfinished that even the CD-Rom was completely blank (back then i thought that maybe the game is so huge it filled both sides of the CD :D But nah, they just "forgot" to print a label on it)
Gaming magazines back then praised the game like crazy, dropping awards left and right and of course they had a lot of explaining to do ("we played a test version and were promissed the bugs will be fixed before the release"). Software 2000 only released a small statement "We sent the wrong gold master to the pressing plant" which was a total lie. For the next 6 month they released Patch after Patch (which sometimes even broke other things in the game) and then just dropped the support altogether, announcing Bundesliga Manager 98.

Of course it does suck that companies release games prematurely and unfinished, mostly so they can cash in during christmas (Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines is a great example for that) but as long as consumers buy games on the first day of release or continue to support companies that are known to release unfinished products that never will be finished (Bethesda for example), nothing will change about that.

Blame it on:

- Inexperienced developers.
- Impatient management, pushing games out before christmass.
- Lazyness, "oh we'll fix it after release" mentality.
- Running out of funds.
- A combination of the above.

uh yeah ?
you only noticed this now ?
they have always been doing that but these days its easier to do because almost all pc's and consoles are online and they can push out huge day 1 week 1 or first month patches to repair their shoddy work

It took you this long to notice this? Don't play many Obsidian games I take it. :D

No, it merely affects when I want to play the game. I rather play my games quite long after the release, in order to have important fixes included, and possibly some important expansion packs etc.

Price and DLC madness are normally the reason I opt not to buy a game pre-order, or even as a new. Wait until the inevitable Gold version comes out, with everything included.

or bethesda games

It was for a long time and still is the norm, unfortunately.
But I'm not buying 0-day releases anyway ...and when I do eventually buy those games after 1-x years after their initial release they are patched up, complete, very cheap etc for the best possible experience.

I don't know, nothing will never scare me quite like Fallout New Vegas head spinning bug. That was scary! lol

True, but it wasn't nearly as bad (I'm talking 80's / early 90's)... back before the rise of the internet and patching, overall games were done pretty well because devs knew you could no fix them after release. So the bugs that slip through were more rare and some were even pretty cool.

Better situation? No, today is worse, sometimes they don't even provide patches and just abandon the game..

I can't argue with that, but then in the early 90s I lived in a bong so it could have been terrible and I wouldn't have noticed.

God I miss those days.

Yes. Next!