“Deconstructing Day Zero: How Patch Culture Hurts Game Development and Player Experience”

At this moment, when you purchase a game on its launch day, take it home, and insert it into your console, the first thing you must deal with is downloading a patch that’s several gigabytes to ‘correct’ any issues that were present in the game upon release. One developer from GTA has had enough and has spoken out against this trend on social media.

Colin Anderson, the current managing director at Denki Games, previously composed music for and worked as an audio director on a small franchise called Grand Theft Auto, contributing to the development of the first two GTA titles, along with several other games. In response to a tweet regarding GTA San Andreas and the game releases from two decades ago, Anderson remarked on how much he longs for the days when he worked without the ability to patch games post-launch and criticized the current practice of game updates.

“As a developer, I yearn for the time when there was no option to ‘fix’ a game post-production. The ‘Day Zero Patch’ mentality today simply fosters inadequate development and management practices, along with a poorer customer experience,” he stated.

In one of his responses, he compares it to an epidemic that has infiltrated the gaming industry from the music sector. “It began with music’s ‘we’ll fix it in post-production,’ then films’ ‘we’ll fix it in editing,’ and now gaming’s ‘we’ll fix it with a patch.'”

In recent years, many gamers have begun to genuinely feel that these day zero patches promote hasty releases, with studios justifying releasing incomplete games because they can address deficiencies afterward. This situation has worsened due to the buggy launches of several major AAA titles in the last few years, such as CD Projekt Red‘s Cyberpunk 2077, which, although it has improved since its launch, faced significant issues initially.