GTA dev says "day zero" patch mentality is bad news for everyone: "encourages poor development and management practices, and it's a worse customer experience too"

News
By published

"It started with the music's 'we'll fix it in the mix'"

GTA 5
(Image credit: Rockstar)

Nowadays, if you buy a game on the day it releases, bring it home and put it in your console, the first thing you have to do is to download a patch that's tens of gigabytes to 'fix' any bugs that were left in the game when it shipped. One GTA dev has had enough and has called out the practice on social media.

Colin Anderson is currently the managing director of Denki Games, but earlier in his career, he created music for, and worked as an audio manager on a little series called Grand Theft Auto, helping to develop the first two GTA games, in addition to many other titles. In response to a tweet about GTA San Andreas and the game releases of 20 years ago, Anderson wrote about how much he missed the way things used to work and decried one modern games industry practice.

"As a developer, I miss the discipline of knowing there was no way to "fix a game once it had been manufactured. The "Day Zero Patch" mentality today just encourages poor development and management practices, and it's a worse customer experience too." he posts.

In one reply, he likens it to a disease that has made its way into games from the music industry. "It started with the music's 'we'll fix it in the mix', then film's 'we'll fix it in post', then game's 'we'll fix it in a patch'". 

Over the past few years, many players have begun to feel that these day zero patches encourage rushed games, with studios rationalising that they can fix any mistakes when the game releases instead of releasing a finished product. This has been exacerbated by the buggy releases of several major AAA titles in the past few years, such as CD Projekt Red's Cyberpunk 2077, which, though it has redeemed itself since then, was widely criticised on launch for its bugs and performance issues.

Unfortunately, the day zero patch doesn't look like it's going anywhere anytime soon. So if you want to play the biggest games on the day they are released, you had better have some fast internet, because you've got some downloading to do.

If you're excited for more GTA, check out everything we know about GTA 6 so far.

Alex Raisbeck
Alex Raisbeck
Contributor

Alex has written all sorts of things for websites including VideoGamer, PCGamer, PCGamesN and more. He'll play anything from Tekken to Team Fortress 2, but you'll typically find him failing to churn through his backlog because he's too busy playing whatever weird and wonderful indie games have just come out.