People are REALLY complaining about the number of patches? Most games get a patch day 1. Even a game like Black Ops that has used almost the exact same engine for several years of sequels has been through a series of patches already, and the online was badly broken for almost a month after release.
Yes, the game was in development for a while. You are only saying 5 years because thats how long ago GT4 released. Early developmental stages comprised of just planning and layout can take close to a year. Do I think that development took TOO long for the end product? Sure. But I'm not going to complain about the patches.
Why? Because bugs were going to be found regardless. 5 years or not. For some simple math... lets say they had 25 people play-testing the game for 3 of those years, for about 6 hours a day, 5 days a week. In total, thats 117,000 collective hours of play-testing.
The game sold over a million copies on day one. If EACH of those buyers played the game for a mere 10 minutes on the first day of purchase, then the cumulated play time would be greater for those 10 minutes after the release than it was for the entire 3 years the game was playtested during development.
I'd say that after a week, with ~2 million buyers playing the game for on average just an hour a day, thats 14 million play hours, or roughly 120 times the amount of play time the game received during testing. Bugs were 120 times more likely to be found in the first week after release than during the entire development process.
Sorry, but patches were going to happen. Even if the game was in development for 10 years, the figures still wouldn't add up.
