[musicale]

> in the modern day the games that exist on physical media are pretty much useless without their zero-day patches

Most single and local multiplayer Switch games are playable offline - which is to say, not useless - without any zero-day patches.

And patches to those games can often (usually?) be downloaded while you are playing the game. (Sometimes there are issues however - I seem to remember some game, maybe SMT5, changing its game save format in some way.)

But it is true that patches can improve performance or fix bugs, and it seems like there is pressure to hit a ship date and assume that bugs can be patched later. It's not entirely bad though - some games that are heavily criticized on initial release (No Man's Sky, Cyberpunk 2077) end up fixing bugs and other issues and becoming successful games.