[quanticle]

The Linux kernel is an easy example, sure, but it's not the only one. You can say the same thing about proprietary operating systems and software as well. It's been a long time since I've had misbehaving applications blue-screen Windows. That's something that used to happen daily when I ran Windows 98. Or if you prefer MacOS, I remember MacOS Lion being incredibly unstable, with beach-balls and crashes galore. That's all been fixed.

Applications have gotten better too. Browsers have gotten significantly more robust against misbehaving pages. Microsoft Office doesn't eat my work (even if I forget to hit ctrl-s).

In fact, I would go so far as to say that the only software which has gotten worse is video games. Used to be you could put in a disc, install the game, and be reasonably assured that you were getting a playable final product. Today, you put in the disc, install the game, and then have to download multiple gigabytes of patches... and the game is still often buggy (Bethesda, I'm looking at you!).

>99.99999% of software in big corporations will not have even 5% of the quality of the Linux kernel.

That is true. But it was equally true when Linus Torvalds dropped the first version of the Linux kernel all the way back in '91. It's not clear to me that things have gotten worse since then.

[bee_rider]

Regarding games, I wonder if it is just an issue of expectations.

For the longest time, AAA studios mostly released simple first person shooters with straightforward enemy AI and simple physics. And Bethesda and Obsidian released gloriously buggy RPGs. Nowadays, every game includes open world elements, RPG elements, and more complicated NPC interactions... and it turns out that they are all full of bugs. Complex games have complex problems that don't reveal themselves until players do weird things.

Not to mention all these RPG systems add a whole additional layer to mess up -- character stats might not be 'buggy' exactly, but they might be very poorly 'balanced.' It is really easy to not explore every skill interaction and sometimes multipliers end up exploding. I mean, we saw Blizzard fail to balance Diablo II for like a decade or so, Wizards of the Coast tries to balance D&D but that takes all the fun out of character building -- RPGs of any significant complexity are I think just fundamentally prone to exploding numbers.

[quanticle]

Not to mention all these RPG systems add a whole additional layer to mess up -- character stats might not be 'buggy' exactly, but they might be very poorly 'balanced.'

I'm not talking about balance issues. I'm specifically talking about issues where the game is clearly and obviously not working as designed. Clipping errors. Objects flying off into the sky because of problems with collision detection. Textures not loading. NPCs walking facefirst into walls because of buggy pathing code.

I think what's happened is that game development studios' reach has exceeded their grasp. They want to make these huge open worlds with numerous storylines, quests, etc, all with rich graphics and physics, but they just don't have the time or budget to get it right. So they rush out what they have, knowing full well that it has massive numbers of untested corner cases and hope that the PR blowback from the bugs isn't so bad that it ruins their reputation.

[bee_rider]

I 100% agree -- the balance issues just popped into my head as a tangent. Another example of how engines and rendering improve over time but there are lots of sort of 'other problems' that really don't scale with technology advancements.

[daniel-cussen]

> Complex games have complex problems that don't reveal themselves until players do weird things.

If you don't think them through they will. Just write it right.

[mbrodersen]

If it was that simple don’t you think game developers would have done just that? I have worked both in and outside the games industry and it is clear to me that AAA games are magnitudes more complex than your everyday biz app.

[bee_rider]

I mean, I don't work in games, this is just an observation as a player who's bumped into his fair share of bugs. But if I bump into Bethesda I'll mention that advice to them.