You're probably being unfair there. The programmers who work on games are often very smart, very capable people who genuinely want to make a good product. A lot of so-called professional programmers could learn a thing or two from games developers about everything from writing high performance code to co-ordinating large development teams via the value of developing in-house tools to make development work more efficient.

But the games programmers are screwed by the simple fact that the market will accept games that are buggy/require insane hardware/etc. and pay for them, will usually not attempt to return them if they simply don't work but will rip them apart in on-line commentary if the game sucks, and will rip them off at the first opportunity if the game is cracked.

That means the business guys who are, quite rightly, calling the shots, are interested in basically the first few days after launch and nothing else. That in turn means there is no need to bother with things like code quality and long-term maintenance. Better to spend the money on a cinematic trailer and DRM that takes one more day to crack.

This will continue as long as people continue to accept buggy games, dubious policies like shipping incomplete games and then filling in the blanks with paid-for DLC, and so on. And right now, while there are clearly plenty of people like me who would spend a lot on good games that worked properly and didn't come with pseudo-malware attached, it seems there are plenty more people who just don't care.

You want them to write games for people like me. (Thanks! :-)) Unfortunately, most of the big games shops are going to follow the money.