I've been having all kinds of issues with the new call of duty game. It lags and freezes all the time. I just played a round of domination not to long ago and it laged the whole match,which effected gameplay. I've also had some issues with assasin's creed 3,but to a lesser extent. When I played some of the single player in that game,it froze on me a couple of times and I had to restart it. Then I remember playing skyrim and pretty much gave up on that game,after a 100 hours,because the lag was so bad and it would start to freeze up on me so often,that I said screw this and traded it in. I hear people say,that the games are so big,that all these gltiches and bugs really don't matter. I personally think,that's just an excuse. Are game companies becoming so lazy,that they don't need that much quality testing. I mean,most of the time,they'll just release a day one patch are a patch later on. So,should gamers,just accept glitches and bugs in there games as the norm? Should gamers,demand a better product,for there hard earned money?

Games are getting more complicated, more expensive, and are running on very old hardware. So yes.

For something like CoD, the devs absolutely have to hit the November launch date. So the QA phase gets pushed to after launch.

Gamers seem to accept DLC and patches as a normal part of the game. For $60 they could be demanding a polished, self-contained experience.

Damn I really fking hate day one patches. It kills the excitement of playing a new game.

games with the ability to be patched have always been released glitchy.

For instance bethesda games have been glitchy since the start of their existance... but, for the most part (aside from skyrim PS3) they eventually get it up to snuff. Bigger open games have many more places where glitches can happen compared to say uncharted or rayman.

You can argue it's an excuse and they should put in the extra work, but also the games are big so, it's a bit difficult for the QA to meet deadlines, to replicate and test absolutely everything, and they use the public to find the bugs report etc. Maybe it's wrong, but then the public would bitch about the game getting delayed for a few months.
 
The only way gamers can demand it, is not to buy it if it's reviewed to be glitchy.

obviously, that idea isn't working too well.

This is true.  They just can't be compared to the games of yesteryear where everything could be easily replicated in testing.  I accept that there are going to be more glitches now than before.

My only complaint is that many developers never fix those glitches.  Boss farming in Borderlands 2, for example, where BNK-3R glitches at about a rate of 1-in-5 for me.  I have to super careful about how I kill him.  That should be absolutely unacceptable to never be fixed.

Old hardware = more glitches? haha

Apart from that, yeah. It's more about the money, though. They could handle the games' complexity pretty well and minimize glitches but they wouldn't hit deadlines and/or the companies would need more people working on it. The more people play video games the more it's about money and keeping players entertained. It's not about fun and at the same time profession anymore and I bet most people who work for gaming studios are not as crazy as they were like 15-20 years ago.

What it amounts to these days is a change in economics and technology.

Used to be that a game wouldn't come out unless it had a vast majority of its bugs squashed. My dad used to beta test for Sierra and, having helped him out, he would receive entirely new builds of the game every couple to three weeks, by mail and on CD, with new changes. Betas would go on for close to a year, occasionally, if there were enough bugs to try and crush. It's the same reason that when you think of games back in the 80s and 90s, you can't really pin down a lot of bugs in the games you played. Costs were lower, naturally, so they seemed to have more 'make it work properly' money.

Since the early 2000s, companies have been working with higher graphics and far more complicated programming tools and needs to make games that will still shock and awe us, which is what a lot of people want. When we start a game, we want to feel like we're there and that costs a bundle. So, you're getting bigger, better looking games and they're in a market that is surprisingly competitive. Thus, if it comes down to it, they burn a game, with known bugs because QA might catch the bugs but it might be too big to do before the final release candidate, into the Gold version so they can send it off for mass production, then start working on the patches they couldn't get at that time. The internet and connectivity has given them the ability to do that, so they use it liberally.

Basically, yes, games these days tend to be far more broken than they used to, but it's typically for reasons such as complicated fixes at a critical time before release or economics. And this doesn't count the fact that bigger companies can't do what companies like Mojang can, which is release snapshots that allow a million people to find what a a couple hundred can't, so they don't know some of these bugs are in the final game because it's only after release that they figure out its there.

you tell me

We actually pay less right now than ever before.  Adjusted for inflation, gaming has never been cheaper.  Which means, with development costs skyrocketing, gaming has become a profit-by-volume business like never before.  What we get for what we pay is pretty amazing.  It's just a much, much more complicated product on all levels.