[tremon]

> ... software is not considered complete when it's first released.

I don't know where this assumption comes from.

My anecdata, doing IT support for about 1,000 small-business sites: it's customary to only adopt new Microsoft releases after SP1 has been released. Our customers sometimes even explicitly instruct us so.

[xigency]

While this is changing, in game development the finished product ships on read-only media and without patches or online support, that is all the customer is going to get.

Now there's a prevalence of day one patches but it's pretty lame to see developers waiting till the weeks between pressing the disc and it appearing on shelves to fix standing issues.

In the case of M$ software that's a security or support issue not the absence of core features.

[azernik]

Already in 2013 92% of PC game sales involved no physical media [http://gamerant.com/pc-digital-physical-sales-comparison-201...]. This enables the day-1-habit, of course, but it also mitigates the problems - there aren't any shelves on which unpatched versions of the game keep sitting after launch.

[acveilleux]

Console is lagging behind for this.

[yuhong]

In fact, the reason Server 2003 got an extra year of support is that they waited until after Vista SP1 to do Server 2008.