chuckdee
Explorer
I work in video games development. He said that they were the final decision makers but never intended for anything that happened to happen. They either tested their game at least once in the last few months themselves and saw that it was unplayable for older consoles, or they didn't. In both situations, making the decision to release the game was inevitably lead to a huge mess. Nobody will convince me that it wasn't an economically motivated decision.
I worked in the video game industry, and yeah... we had one project with performance issues all the way up until the end. They delayed once, then 'couldn't delay again because of release windows'. We were continually improving, but there just wasn't enough time.
I don't believe the didn't know that there were problems, but I do believe that they deluded themselves into thinking that they could get them done by the day zero patch. It's madness. We were able to do it in my case, but it was a very close thing, and the patch was laughably large because we had to rewrite some low-level code. Even with that, we advised not to release it at that time, because we hadn't had the time to put it through the paces. But they released it anyway. Thankfully, there were only a few problems in the new optimizations, but it could have gone a lot worse.
This seems like a case where the Dev/QA were not able to pull off the last minute miracle that they were counting on. It should be a cautionary tale, but from experience, it won't be.