Since August 2007 I bought 6 games for my Xbox 360: Bioshock, Skate, Halo 3, The Orange Box, Call of Duty 4 and Mass Effect ( I know, too many shooters, but at least these are quality titles). Of these, 3 are limited editions (Bio, H3 and ME). Since games are sold 70$ for a regular and 80$ for a LE in Canada, which is to say that I spent around 450$ on games in the last 4 months, which a pretty good amount of money.

Since this shopping spree began, I had my fair share of bad luck. It all began with the Big Daddy broken drill, then the much publicised H3 LE scratch discs problem. Then, a few days after I bought The Orange Box, my Xbox 360 disc drive just died on me. Msoft replaced it in only a few days (4 days from the moment I shipped the my console till the day I received the new one). the problem is they sent me one of the really, really old ones, manufactured back in November 2005. This means that it has a lot of problem, often not being able to read perfectly clean and unscratched discs, so I might have to replace it again.

Then I bought COD4, and the disc was scratched so bad that it would load the next mission, halfway through the game, and this doesn't take into account the online problems with which Infinity Ward shipped the game. Note that this is also the case with Team Fortress 2 which is far from being stable and is ridden with lag issues.

Now I had pre-ordered the LE of Mass Effect (I know, I never learn) and it was supposed to be delivered by Wednesday morning. Turns out that Canada Post has misplaced the package and that I must wait around a week to a week and a half until the "investigation" is complete and before they send me a new copy.

Now, I know that there are worst problems than these in life, but since I work for this industry I'm kind of worried about the quality standards that we keep for these products. Shipping unfinished games that need patching on release, scratched discs for a product that you buy for 70$ (How come I never hear of widespread problems or scratched discs in the movie industry?), very, very badly manufactured consoles (I'm on my third 360 and among me and 3 of my colleagues, we had more than 20, yes 20 Xbox 360 because of RROD, dead dvd drives and such), and so on an so forth. That and shady business practice of "we only sell our LE on the web"... why? Well because Gamestop offered Bioware a fairly good amount of money of course, but it doesn't make it any better for the consumers.

Also note that all these problems are related to products made by huge companies, who all make millions or profit every years. Microsoft, EA, Take-Two, Activison, Valve, etc. All these companies have more than enough money to insure good reliable products, in perfect condition, right out of the box, and sadly it is really not what is happening. The fact is that as a group of consumers, we got accustomed to such poor degrees of quality and we're not complaining enough and not to the right people. It doesn't help either that the biggest retailer puts every effort into it's marketing and doesn't consider customer service as being a part of it.

I often read that our industry hasn't reached its full maturity and that this explains a lot of problems like the poor management in many studios, the unstable, to say the least, financial situation of some developers and publishers and the so called "lack of innovation" and the "game is not art yet" debate and whatnot's. But I'm not sure that this is so much a question of "maturity" as a question of orientation and directions. I know enough about high management and public companies to know that the higher ups don't really care about quality standards much, they only care about ROI's and margins and financial results.

I certainly don't know the solutions to these problems, but I certainly fear that at some point, if we don't take our industry into our own hands, people will stop caring for unfinished and broken products and will just find something better to do.