I am truly heartily sick and tired of endless patches to the engine being the norm in the gaming industry.
According to the Games developers themselves, the design and coding of the engine occurs early in a project, typically under a very small team lead by a guru.
All the rest of the time is content development with a much larger team working on it.
And, just maybe, the occasional engine tweak to support something the content designers can argue loudly enough for.
What typically happens is that the programmer finishes (pretty much) the engine very early in the piece, then goes off to invent the next generation engine, while the artists and level designers create the content.
Then the game is finally released, only to be found to need maybe a series of 20 bug-fix releases.
Wouldn't the programmer be better off being stuck with the one project until it's finished, then they might spend time getting the code right instead of leaving a mess while they go have fun elsewhere.
Sometimes they get a test group to do beta testing, a thinly disguised way of shirking the responsibility for setting up a proper in-house test environment.
And it shows, they still ship faulty produce because they haven't paid for or used professional methodologies or testers (or anybody at all) who will be held accountable for letting bugs through.
I'm looking forward to great advances in software quality if/when the class action against selling faulty software eventuates against M$, as this will affect ALL developers.
About time they got serious about verifiably correct code, and took the theory into practice!
(I code for a bank by day, embedded Telecoms and freight industry by night and weekends, if I turned out code like so-called guru-programmers ID and Epic, I wouldn't have enough hours in the day to fix it!)