I have felt for years now that they don't want to release the 'perfect' game. Like the idea that the pharmaceutical companies don't want a cure for the ills of man, they only want to sell the treatment. If we'd waited until the 21st century to cure Polio, all we would have gotten is a pill to take daily!
But what I mean is a purely functional game would sell one copy and the HAPPY gamer would play it until the game company HAD to add such great features that they could lure the gamer to buy a new copy. Might take a couple of years or so and the companies don't want to do that. The model is better for them to cripple the games and patch one year into the next, year after year. You get a few new features and gimmicks and HOPE(key marketing tool) that the next years version will be better...but it won't live up to what the gamers want either.
I will point to the last version of College Hoops. It was released with bugs some that had been in the system for a couple of years. They released a patch early and still it had bugs and glitches. Then, the word came out that the game was cancelled and BOOM, the 2nd patch seemed to fix every single issue! It was a damn near perfect game!
Its my belief that wouldn't have happened if there was going to be a version the next year. They would have saved that 'patch' for the next title if we would have EVER had that kind of dedication to the game.
The money is there. They don't need to complete the game by the deadline, we will buy it. They don't need to fix the issues in this years game cause we have short attention spans and we will still buy next years game cause we HOPE the game will be better. There isn't money in testing or in a full dedication to fixing ALL the issues(or even the majority)...why? Cause we have proven we will still throw down our money based on nothing but HOPE.
We hope the game will be better...