[sillysaurus3]

Tests/CI are insufficient. For games, you'll want QA hammering on a release for days, weeks, or months with only the most conservative changes applied, in an effort to shake out any remaining weird heisenbugs. To do otherwise invites the specter of failing certification, delaying your release, or burning some pretty bad bugs to hundreds of thousands of physical disks.

Eh.. Game studios aren't generally still in the dark ages, are they? Physical disks went the way of the dodo. (Every game now basically requires updates on first use, right? So even if consumers get a disc[o ball], they won't really be affected by a bug burned to it.)

But yes, solid points.

[MaulingMonkey]

> Eh.. Game studios aren't generally still in the dark ages, are they? Physical disks went the way of the dodo.

I wish! Turns out enough of the world still has terrible enough internet for sneakernet to still have it's advantages. It's not the game studios that are in the dark ages ;)

> Every game now basically requires updates on first use, right?

Sadly. It's a pretty terrible experience. Ideally it's a small optional patch, or maybe only required for online play - but your ability to do that depends in part on how bad the bugs are without it. The ability to do day one patches doesn't translate into a rubber stamp either - it's easier to get a waiver on a few heisenbugs than a truckload. And this is in the "okay okay, we'll backpedal on requiring our console to be always online" world of console dev - I imagine mandatory day 1 patches are even worse on handhelds.

And if you don't want that day 1 patch to introduce more bugs than it fixes (souring your launch, reviews, and ultimately sales) - or a release delay messing up your marketing plans (to potentially similar effect and/or extra costs) - you still need as stable a build as you can get by some hard cutoff X, so you're back to having a release branch, freezing master, or some combination thereof.