[hannahstrawbrry]

I think it's odd to say that pressing to disk was more permissive of bad code. Releases like Cyberpunk suggest the opposite- that development teams selling games that can be updated take that into account as they plan and release, and the quality suffers upon launch for it.

[jordand]

Yeah I understand what you mean. For bad code in that sense, I'm mainly thinking back to games work colleagues have worked on (in the era when patching wasn't possible) where horrible one-time hacks and weird workarounds get quickly thrown into a codebase under deadlines and crunch just to get things fixed, platform certified, and shipped. Games in the past were more often using in-house/proprietary engines too where this would happen too under pressure. With patching ubiquitous, QA still have a really difficult job especially with nearly every release being multi-platform.