Let’s face it: many gamers love looking backwards with rose-tinted glasses. As a retro-minded gamer myself, I’ll be the first to admit that. For as much as I adore many of the titles I played in my younger years, it’s impossible to deny that games are leaps and bounds ahead of where they used to be. Gameplay remains king -- and many of the games of yore are out-and-out master classes of gameplay -- but the spectrum of gaming has grown enormously, along with the ambition behind what we play. From a bird’s-eye perspective, video games have never been better.

But there’s a darker side to gaming that most of us have become all-too-familiar with. With technological advancement comes the ability for game developers to tell new stories, pioneer new modes of gameplay, and give players unique ways to interact not only with the game itself, but with other people around the world. On paper, it’s a marvelous time to be a gamer. Yet, these sorts of advancements have come with an undesirable, ugly truth: some high-profile games simply aren’t working the way they were designed to work. Hell, some just don’t work at all. And that’s simply inexcusable.

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“ Some high-profile games simply aren’t working the way they were designed to work.

I think that gamers often taken the past for granted. The blood, sweat, and tears that go into crafting a game was always there, and it’s still there in spades. But the toil that went into a game on, say, the original PlayStation is a different kind of toil than the toil that goes into development today. When a game launched in 1998, the team behind it was no doubt nervous about its reception, but there was little doubt the game was QA’d and would work as described. The team’s game went gold, and they were done, off to vacation, off to spend some time marinating on what was next.

Now, a team works well after going gold, and long into the post-release environment, and not necessarily on DLC. I mean, let’s be frank. Who here honestly thinks that 2015’s biggest launches won’t come hand-in-hand with meaty day-one patches, patches that -- in previous years -- would have been baked-in?

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“ These games captured as much as a $60 entry fee from millions of eager gamers worldwide who were then left with nothing but frustration.

This collective situation begs a series of basic questions, among them how and why publishers and developers could let this happen, and, in turn, why gamers should trust that it won’t happen again. There’s no excuse to release a broken game, whether or not we live in the age of on-the-fly patch deployments and ever-iterating experiences that change from one day to the next.

Common excuses like heavy or unexpected server load don’t fly when some games from identical genres doing identical things work just fine on day one, and others don’t. Players, regardless of platform allegiance or genre preference, shouldn’t necessarily expect that every game will be worth their time, or expect every game to be good. They should be assured, however, that the game will at least work. If this past autumn has proven anything, it’s that they can no longer safely hold that assumption. Why would they?

“ You’ve earned the right to not believe a publisher or developer when they tell you that their game will work day one.

Keep a mental note of the publishers and developers who have sold you a game that didn’t work, and remember that next time you’re at the register with another one of their products in hand. Sure, a publisher or developer who already released a broken game is likely to learn lessons moving forward to ensure that the same mistakes won’t be made. But how can you know for sure?

Publishers and developers, like any business, can’t be expected to change until their financial situations force them to change. If you keep giving them money for Game Z when Game A was broken for weeks, you’re sending them the wrong message. Wait for verification that a game works, then buy it, if you want. Speak loudly and proudly with your wallet. In my estimation, the time for blind faith has long since passed. We’ve all been burned, and we’ve earned the right to be upset at the new status quo. Because this shouldn’t be the status quo.

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“ Quality and profit are best friends.

Just don’t be surprised when, next fall, you’re hit with another inundation of broken servers, glitchy campaigns, and half-hearted fixes from the same people that already sold you a shoddy bill of goods. Only this time, you’ll know what to do. Send a loud and clear message -- an unmistakable salvo -- that you expect better. And better you shall get.

Colin Moriarty was formerly IGN’s Senior Editor, and is now co-host at Kinda Funny. You can follow him on Twitter @notaxation.