So I read a great article that really talks about how the bar has been lowered for gaming recently.  This particular excerpt caught my eye.

"Keith Fuller is an experienced production consultant/developer and has worked with Activision for over a decade on projects like Call of Duty: Black Ops, Quake 4, and more. This was before he went on to work as an indie dev. In a recent interview he revealed some facts about the development process by saying:

Developers rarely get to tell Marketing ‘We can ship it now, we fixed all the bugs. Rather, the marketing department will tell you when you’re launching regardless of fixing bugs. If you want that arrangement to change, figure out how to sell millions of units without telling anyone your game exists.

Pressure is put on developers to prefer flashy gameplay elements over stability. Annual franchises are required to be bigger and better every year with a very limited amount of time available to developers for fixing the game.

He further adds:

The last game I worked on as a studio dev was Call of Duty: Black Ops, and Activision’s legal team would go into cardiac arrest if I shared with you how few months before launch that game was almost entirely unplayable. That’s due to the pressure of annual franchise instalments and the competitive landscape."

Here is the link:http://segmentnext.com/2015/01/09/aaa-devs-share-their-views-on-the-release-of-broken-games/

How do you feel about this growing trend? Do you think it is exagerrated in this article or is it becoming a big issue with publishers?

This is the type of trend that can crash an industry... Actually it has before.

I think its terrible! I hate when companies ship unfinished products because its always the consumers that get the bad end of the stick. We are giving them our hard earned money and they have one job and that is to give us a fairly finished product that works! The publishers seriously need to get their act together cause 2014 is a year that I hope doesn't get repeated

Aside from certain Ubisoft titles, I don't know why do people think many AAA games were broken in 2014.

Could anyone give me a refresh?

DriveClub, Halo MCC,  Sonic Boom to name a few. But the point is that a lot these games are being shipped unfinished and that publishers know this and want to ship an inferior product out there.  The day one patch has become so common that games are needing them as opposed to supplementing them. 

Yup it's publisher fault, it always is , the same happened on 7th generation with EA, and now with UBISOFT etc.

Black Ops 1 multiplayer was barely playable after launch too. Atleast the PS3 version. Horrible port that had to be patched many a times. Traded it towards an electric shaver at best buy.

Am sure people in-charge can step in and change how things work. Though another trend is ship the game with big advertising campaign. Post huge numbers and then leverage that to get an even better job at another studio or in industry.

Is Sonic Boom a AAA title? It's still bad by nature, anyway. Were the issues in the MCC that huge? Driveclub, well, that's one; and Unity and Watch Dogs count for Ubisoft.

But, I mean, GTA V worked on the new consoles, The Last of Us worked on PS4, Dragon Age Inquisition worked, so did Advanced Warfare, Far Cry 4, Shadow of Mordor, Titanfall, Sunset Overdrive and many more.

If that's fine with you then there really is nothing for you to discuss....

The amount of games released unfinished recently, tell the guy is right about what he is saying.