It is, of course, worth noting that devs at CDPR were already crunching to meet that previous deadline. Today’s announcement doesn’t mention crunch, but I’d be surprised if staff weren’t in for another three weeks of gruelling conditions to get this thing out the door.
God I hate the industry
Yeah, it's really fucking dumb that so many games are beholden to an arbitrary release date that gets picked strategically around the holidays or at the end of business quarters to pad out a businesses quarterly earnings.
I think the ubiquity and accessibility of patching games has a lot to do with it. Like, I remember getting games back in the day and not even knowing patches were a thing. You couldn't ship a game that was a broken piece of shit and then patch it later, because patches weren't really a thing due to internet access/game clients like steam not being as widespread. So you'd get a lot more of "We'll launch when we're ready" because you knew you had to ship a finished game and couldn't rely on fleshing it out over the months following release. (or even worse, selling the fixes/expansion of the game to consumers with DLC after the fact)
I could also be speaking out of my ass, I'm no game dev.
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Yeah, exactly. I have no issues with patches in and of themselves if they're used for their intended purpose. But the shift to "games as a service" over the past few years is really nefarious.