Yawn.
Lol, what? Do you know how many employees Ubisoft has? 9000. That's just as many as EA, and EA's working on over a dozen games right now. Also, I love, just love, that removing God Rays from a game qualifies the company for "Worst Company in America." Or releasing a (playable--let me, one of the few people it seems who's actually played it, attest) bugged game.
Gamers are pathetic. I'm not trying to be aggressive towards you in particular but this kind of logic--well, isn't logic at all.
They aren't stretched too thin, they're simply making mistakes like anyone does.
Imagine being a game developer in the 90's and publishing your product on a ROM. The software that needs to be published on this rom needs to be extremely stable, because it is expensive. No patches to update your code because it is living as firmware which is static at this point and even cannot be changed at times. The games that came out on the super Nintendo lived by this mantra, but now any jim can develop a game by download unity. Unity even allows them to compile to multiple platforms.
Back in the day, the tools needed for developing games were very scarce and very expensive. In fact if you look at the prices of some of the development kits(more recent PS2 development kit was 12,000), one would have to be prepared to make such an investment to develop for it. Not to mention, you are also purchasing the hardware(developing embedded systems is not as fluid or dynamic because you are still restricted by that hardware). Creating such an investment means you should be prepared to develop a stable product or you would loose a lot of money in the process. Also in this time, magazines were the biggest method of getting your product out. This whole ecosystem needed a company or a large sum of money to even make a dent on the market when it came to console gaming.
Note : Supernitendo was no dev kit, it was basically someone programming low level assembly on a 65c816 core CPU
If you compare that with today, it is rainbows and sunshine. Developers have more flexibility and a lone programmer can publish a whole product.
It is probably the most accessible time to get into gaming(I would argue that the text gaming era was also quite accessible but that is a text for another time). Technology has also improved, most games are backed by a service this time(reason why we have shitty Uplay DRMS but anyway). This means it is easier to deploy games and patches of the same sort.
What do these models tell us? In one model the company could not afford to publish an unstable game and on the other hand, they are able to ship it with bugs and fix it later. "Ship with bugs and fix it later" is a very common statement in software development.In fact, at one time windows was using this model to fix their bugs(only for the free software).
One should also question Ubisofts iterative development cycle. An iterative development cycle only works if you are improving from a product you have already completed. Which can be seen from ubisoft reusing their animations and mechanics from one game to the other. Software development is all about re usability and models this is nothing new. However, this is a new generation. New generation means the company may have to deal with a whole set of problems. Have you ever had a game work on one platform but absolutely not work on the other? That is the thing developers today have to take into account the multiple environments. Developers today are working with far much more different environments than the developers back then. Dragon age inquisition had to deploy on last generation and current generations consoles. That is very heavy . The way the game works in one game loop might be slightly different with the way the game works in another game loop. This is understandable, however developers now also have all of this new technology to help them build games. People do not have to build opengl code for their personal engine from the ground up, all they can do is fire up unity. The technology is more advanced but the tools are more readily available.
So wait, this generation has better technology and has more accessible methods to Game Development it is supposed to be better at releasing stable products right? I mean if we are looking at it in hindsight.
Sadly not, software has always had this problem. No matter how much the quality of the tech increased, software planning because the biggest issue here. Getting a software product out on budget,timeline and stable is a dawning task. The idea that the software can be fixed later does creates an environment where it is okay if they ship with bugs(in our current generation).
I would also argue that a programmer in the snes era would more knowledgeable about how hardware works. If is programmer was smart he would use that knowledge to create more efficient code. Programming is another can of worms that I do not want to open up but basically they are good ways to write it and bad ways. If you want to maintain you code for such large code bases, you need to implement the most effective methodologies for your code.
This becomes amazingly complex when you have to coordinate with your team and apply all of this in your development cycle, which for ubisoft is iterative. Not to mention the stipulations that they might have had on the software published.
TL;DR Software bugs are very complex issue to get rid of and pinpoint(at times they are easy but take time)
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