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Comment by nine_zeros | Hacker News Reader

What is becoming more and more clear is that software of any kind that is developed by publicly listed companies is suffering from quality.

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Not sure why you’ve been downvoted when your statement is largely true. This isn’t even controversial. As with most public companies, the products WILL gradually get worse over time as the shareholders attempt to extort more profit from each customer while adding as little value as possible to their product.

Banana Software; Ripes at the customers

Games are unique that folks seem to want to purchase on release. I have friends who will wait for the 3rd point release (or service pack/ whatever) of windows to upgrade, but will buy a game as soon as it’s available and complain bitterly about the bugs. Games aren't like they were when they were pressed to cd/dvd anymore. They don't seem to see the irony of this.

Those are very different things though in terms of risk assessment .

If you upgrade to a broken OS version, that affects a massive number of things you do on your system including possibly your livelihood.

If you install a broken game, the issues are almost always completely isolated to that single game, and games are things you can live with being broken.

I think the point is that these are people well aware that a new release of any software is going to have issues, yet they still buy the games at launch.

It's because games are more like media than software from a consumption perspective.

People want to watch a movie while it's still new, which is why theaters want up front exclusivity. Songs are "hot" for a while. TV shows are better when you're watching it around the same time as a lot of other people. Sure you can watch Breaking Bad for the first time right now, enjoy it, and have some good conversation about it with a few people. But it was different when every week half of your office or classroom was talking about the latest episode.

I still don't recommend buying games on launch date most of the time because of the current state of the industry. But it makes sense to me why people do it.

If this isn't a common term, it needs to be. Bananaware?

I think anything of any kind from publicly listed companies increasingly seems to suck. Only exceptions are a handful of companies where the brand identity or a very ambitious personality at the helm (Apple, Tesla, NVidia) allow them to make the kind of bold moves that private companies do. Apple doing Apple silicon probably would’ve made shareholders very uncertain, but they just did it and it was a great call. Tesla doing Dojo, Powerwall, Optimus, etc, is only because everyone can just point to Elon and say “he’s making us.” That’s private company energy.

There seems to still be a lack of incentives to write good software. Until the fines for data breaches or bad releases become dangerous to the existence of the company, this won't change.

Well, there is a lack of incentive - many customers are not buying cities - skylines 2. It clearly undershot its targeted sales numbers.

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