It seems like every developer is in some form or fashion, releasing unfinished products. Is it so hard to finish a game before releasing it? Is the only reason they release unfinished products because they know they can patch the bugs/glitches/ect post launch? Look at assassins creed unity with the frame rate issues, I'm sure the issues were smacking them in the face before release, but the publisher wanted a product on market regardless of whether it was finished or not. They could have taken time and optimized the game, but Ubisoft wanted the game out for the holiday season. Travesty I say!

i remember when developers would finish games before releasing them, at least we still have nintendo.

Yea, it sucks! But to them, money is far more important than quality control so sighhh, what can you do?

It is worse now, but even back in cartridge days they released buggy games. classic example is ET

I do miss the old days when a game was supposed to work when you first bought. Now devs just rush any old thing out and say they'll patch it later. Really irritates me but as long as people continue to not care then devs won't have any reason to change.

To answer the question, no. They would do it once and then have a bunch of people demanding refunds.

A decade or two ago games were so much less complex. They were easy, fast and cheap to develop. The simple engines didn't even leave much room for bugs. If an engine is not able to do much it will not produce bugs.
Nowadays we have giant projects like ACU that are in fact so big that you can't handcraft every centimeter of the game but are forced to invent dynamic features. And whenever something is dynamic it will produce unwanted results in 1% of instances. These are the glitches and bugs we see today. Because it's just not feasible anymore to manually control every thing in a game. Players even expect random behavior.
Games always had their fair share of bugs. But back then the gaming community was tiny and the internet not a thing. That's also why we didn't even see how broken the games really were. Nowadays we have a lot of material of bugs and glitches that didn't happen to us but will add to our consciousness of the game having a lot of bugs even though we didn't experience them. So actually through the internet we just perceive every possible bug that could happen instead of just the few bugs that will happen during a single playthrough of a single person. Which is much much less.

I'm not excusing ACU since it is a special case and it's quite obvious that those bugs und badly optimized performance was known to the developer and publisher. Yet they made people pay for it which is downright criminal instead of just ethically disgusting.

Just don't compare today's AAA games to earlier games.

Unfortunately, games don't have to be finished these days. And honestly, they rarely are. Both in terms of content (Cutting out content for DLC later) and in quality (bugs and glitches, with the excuse that they can be patched later).

It seems the trend lately has been to sell unfinished products, with AAA devs splitting up unfinished games (See paragraph above) and with many indies using the "Paid-Early-Access" business model. Neither of which I like.

I do miss the days when games had to be finished BEFORE they were put on sale...

Yeah that will still continue to happen. Patches are sooo annoying.

It's not like bugs were all that rare back then. I had tons of games crash or freeze up on me. It really wasn't that uncommon and I'm not sure why people act like it was. Luckily, games were so small back then that you could just restart and get back to where you were quickly.

Now, games are huge and complex. We're lucky we have the ability to patch.

there is a expression, going GOLD. Means a game is finished and ready for release, but today looks more like most games come out in bronze state. So the answer you're looking for is NO, and i agree. But the last comment is unnecessary, since nintendo will follow and you know it.

"Every developer"