A Moogle  🏳️‍🌈 💻 🎮 🎶 🇸🇪

100% true. In the run up to the gold-master date, the project managers make a ton of difficult calls when it comes to waiving or known-shippable-ing bugs. The closer it gets, the more likely a bug will only be fixed if it violates Lot Check (Nintendo), TRCs (Sony), or TCRs (M).https://twitter.com/KrisInVR/status/1336039615203999745 …

But let's talk about that, and how it intersects with the concept of 0-day patches that are popular to rail against. "Back in the day, games didn't have 0-day patches," folks decry, but that simply wasn't an option in the era of mask-ROM cartridges.

Nowadays, the moment a title gets approved for release, the developers tend to immediately context-switch into fixing as many of the bugs which have a high value in fixing, but which were not necessarily a direct approval failure on the publisher's end.

Where devs would typically have a couple weeks of down-time before release, there is now that much more of a rush in order to prep the release-day patch. On Guitar Hero: World Tour Wii, we had a crash bug that QA missed pertaining to the Music Studio feature leaking memory.

I ran across it since I had the time to dink around with the game, with nothing better to do until it passed Lot Check. I reported it, and the project managers pretty much said, "Well, let's prep a fix, but also hope Nintendo don't find it". Nintendo didn't, we shipped with it.

Since the Wii had no provisions for post-release game patches, it simply never got fixed. The game is a buggier experience because of that. It can certainly be argued that perhaps more time should be blocked out for bug fixes, but that's unrelalistic.