Video games have become a mainstream form of entertainment. Although more people than ever are playing video games, many of them are unaware of what goes on in the video game industry.

One of the biggest problems of recent years is the release of broken games to the general public. Ubisoft is a prime example of this. In 2014, Ubisoft released several games to the market that contained bugs and glitches in some form, including Watch Dogs, Assassin’s Creed Unity, Far Cry 4, and Tetris Ultimate. It’s rather pathetic that Ubisoft couldn’t even release Tetris, a game that runs perfectly on a TI 84 calculator, on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One without making it borderline unplayable.

In an attempt to hide the state of Assassin’s Creed Unity, Ubisoft placed an embargo on reviews of the game that didn’t lift until 12 hours after the game had been released. By doing this, Ubisoft was able to make money on day one sales before people found out how broken the game was.

One of the worst parts of these situations is when a publisher is aware of the broken state of their game and still releases it anyway. Batman: Arkham Knight, published by Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment, was released in June 2015. While it ran perfectly fine on consoles, the PC version was a complete mess. Warner Brothers was aware of the game’s state but chose to release it anyway. In an interview with popular news outlet Kotaku, a quality assurance tester stated, “I will say that it’s pretty rich for [Warner Brothers] to act like they had no idea the game was in such a horrible state. It’s been like this for months and all the problems we see now were the exact same, unchanged, almost a year ago.” Warner Brothers received so much criticism that the game was pulled from store shelves. The game was eventually re-released in October. While the game ran much more smoothly than it originally did, there were still problems with the game.

It appears that game publishers aren’t always willing to delay a game in order to finish it completely. Many publishers will ship a game in whatever state it is in and then release a downloadable patch to fix whatever problems were in the shipped game. While this isn’t nearly as bad of an issue as releasing downright broken games, it is still a problem as it has given developers the mindset that they only need to finish the core game by the time the game is ready for publication and that they can just make a patch to iron out any issues in the game during that time. While it may not seem like an issue right now, in thirty years it is unlikely that the online servers for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 games will still be up, making it impossible for game collectors and retro gamers of the future to download the necessary patches for these games. Nintendo has already shut down the online servers for Nintendo DS and Wii games, so Sony and Microsoft are likely not that far behind.

It is important that consumers do some research on a game before purchasing it. Supporting bad business practices will only encourage publishers to continue those practices. When publishers’ bug-filled games don’t sell well, they will ensure that all of their games are free of bugs and glitches before shipping them to retailers. The power to stop these business practices rests in the consumer; it is up to them use it.