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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lonely Tylenol" data-source="post: 3319347" data-attributes="member: 18549">There's a trend in video games these days to release poorly edited games and use the initial surge of purchasers as an unwitting beta testing squad.  They complain about bugs and errors on the company message boards, and the game gets patched.  More errors show up, and more patches are released.  However, this cycle has become shorter and shorter.  Essentially, many games never get out of beta because they stop selling before all the errors are discovered and the patches are written.  Atari is a major culprit, as many gamers who have played recent D&D-licensed games can attest, but other companies like EA are also gaining poor reputations for using this business model.The thing is, the life cycle of a game supplement is--I've been led to believe--about 90 days.  After 90 days, sales drop off and the book goes into a kind of senescence where it's still available but the publisher isn't really making much money on it.  There's no reason to provide "value-added" like errata for something after that date.  But if buyers are willing to buy the book without that "value-added" for those 90 days, there's no reason to provide it before that date.  The only reason why the publisher would want to bother with errata is to provide the customer with a sense of confidence in the company: "purchases will be supported, so I should continue to make purchases".  But if this is demonstrated to have a minimal impact on future sales, there's no reason to worry about it.  I think most people do not buy books with the assumption that there are errors in them and that those errors will be provided with official fixes.  They buy books because they were successfully sold on the books.  So the provision of errata is probably not a big priority.</blockquote>

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