Day Zero patches are what brings consumers (gamers) unfinished products that, sometimes, are unplayable. We’ve seen that many times in the last few years, with game developers launching an unfinished game that has tons of bugs and glitches.
If you’re a 90s kid, then you’ll most probably remember how games were distributed back then. We were buying CDs and DVDs, and games shipped in perfectly clean disks that you could simply insert on your PC, install the game, and start playing. Back then, updates weren’t a thing, meaning that once a game was shipped, that was it.
The first game to receive a downloadable patch was Unreal Championship on the original Xbox, which featured a small software update patch that was issued to address performance issues with the game. That little patch changed the history of game updates and marked a significant milestone.
Day Zero patches are essentially all those little updates that you constantly get and mostly include bug fixes and small improvements. Nowadays, game developers are resting on those patches, knowing that even if a game is buggy, has glitches, displays errors, and so on, they’ll simply release a new day zero patch and fix whatever’s wrong.
Unfortunately, that results in a bad customer experience, with gamers asking for refunds once they see an unfinished game that’s unplayable or gets you frustrated. Instead, game developers should invest more time in completing their products before releasing them, ensuring that they’ll give the best possible experience they can. Then continue fixing any new issues that gamers report and invest all the other time at creating even more content.
But why do I refer to day zero patches all of a sudden? Well, a post on X (formerly Twitter) from Colin Anderson triggered my inner frustration of paying for a game that performs like sh.t.
If you haven’t heard his name, Anderson has worked on more than 100 game releases across various platforms, from the Game Boy and Super Nintendo to Xbox One and PlayStation 5. He has also worked on franchises like Crackdown, Lemmings, and Grand Theft Auto, as well as innovative BAFTA-winning indie games like Autonauts and Denki Blocks.
“The “Day Zero Patch” mentality today just encourages poor development and management practices, and it’s a worse customer experience too,” couldn’t agree more with that sentence. Take for example the release of Dying Light 2: Stay Human, which was such a buggy and glitchy experience that I almost ended up asking for a refund.
There are many great examples of games getting released without actually being finished, and some titles include Cyberpunk 2077, No Man’s Sky, Assassin’s Creed Unity, Battlefield 2042, Halo: The Master Chief Collection, among many others.
With all that in mind, maybe it’s time more players should start asking for refunds, making game developers and companies re-think before releasing an unfinished product thinking that they can fix any issue after a while. And don’t get me started with some companies not fixing the same bugs for years and years after the release, and the king of them is NCSoft (Aion for example still has the same bugs it had years ago).
It’s crazy how easily a simple tweet can remind you how much the technology has been improved over the years, and yet how wrong we’re using it. Instead of using all the tools and time that they have, they instead chose to release an unfinished title, and potentially lose their most loyal customers – you know, those nerds gamers who spend all their life (and their parent’s money) buying in-game items? Those ones!
Have you ever bought a game that was full of bugs and glitches? And if so, which one was it? Let me know in the comments section down below.
