STOP UPDATING GAMES
by Psychbomb / April 29, 2026
Koji Igarashi couldn't have known what he would be getting into when they made the Kickstarter page for Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night.
It's hard to believe it now, but there was once a time where people didn't know that adding stretch goals to your crowdfunded project was the worst fucking idea ever. Kickstarter was fun! It was fresh, and new, and a way to finally get around all of those nasty publishers. Game publishing was now something that could be open to the people. With enough stars in their eyes and nostalgia in the hearts of the masses, all it took were a few promises from recognizable names to bring in the big bucks. Igarashi coming back to spearhead a brand-new not-Castlevania might as well have been him hooking a money printer into the wall. It was doomed to succeed.
The Kickstarter popping off the way that it did may have been the worst thing that could have happened to Bloodstained. Beyond a certain dollar amount, money can become a burden. An initial $500,000 to get you over the hump and into publisher hands sounds sensible, but five and a half million fucking dollars means you're going to be subject to some harsher expectations. Every studio wants more seed money — usually with the reasoning of "this will allow us to make a better game", like believing two condoms offer more protection than just one — but you probably don't want so much that you start getting bogged down in all of the promises you made to get it.
Bloodstained's Kickstarter launched on May 11, 2015, anticipating a two-year development cycle. The game was delayed to the first half of 2018, and then had to be delayed again to 2019. Blame was placed squarely at the foot of the stretch goals; too many of them had been reached during the crowdfunding process, and they were taking far too long to implement within all of the previous time frames. Multiple studios needed to be brought in solely to offer support on the stretch goals, and they weren't able to speed things up much. Bloodstained pushed out the last of its Kickstarter promises on May 9, 2024. Nine years after it was announced, and five years after it released, Bloodstained was finally finished.
Nearly a full decade for a game to be feature complete is a fucking absurd amount of time, and it never should have been allowed to take that long. It's nothing new for games to be mismanaged, but we're living in a strange world where games are still being mismanaged for several years after they've already come out. This is untenable. It cannot be allowed to continue. As far as I'm concerned, there's only one solution.
Stop updating your games.
A MODEST PROPOSAL
I'm not joking. I don't want to see your game get updates.
Everyone I've posited this line of thought to has immediately gone "well, you can't mean no updates at all", and I suppose that I can't. You can have the most intensive QA process in the world, and there are still going to be some issues that manage to sneak through beyond the point of being known shippables. So, fine, you're allowed to issue bugfixes for those that affect performance. But only the ones that affect performance. I don't care if you think the backwards long jump is a glitch and therefore it shouldn't be in Super Mario 64. Leave it in.
"But what if we want to add content to the game?" You're allowed one expansion, and that's it. Put every single bit of extra stuff you ever want to add to your game into a single expansion pack. Charge ten bucks for it, give it away for free to people who own the game, do whatever you want to do with it. If you want to add anything else to the game before or after you've released the expansion, too bad. A single expansion is more than enough.
You're also exempt from these standards if you're making a live-service game, because this is an appeal to people who have decent fiscal sense and a soul.
You may think I'm being an insane person about this, and yes, I am. You should not be in lockstep with me right now. You should never be in lockstep with me, if we're being honest, but especially not here. Still, it's way more insane that every game being released today is expected to ship with an indefinite content drip. Players and publishers alike have slipped into this acute psychosis where they've become convinced that this is just the way that things are done now, and a failure to adhere to these absurd expectations is to be deserving of scorn.
What this comes down to is the push and pull between being an artist and being a businessman. Games are art, but they are also software products. As with every medium that exists in a capitalistic environment, the work needs to make money. Games are uniquely expensive and time consuming to make; some teenagers can crank out a one-hour jam session album and have it uploaded to Bandcamp before the end of the night, and all it takes to make a movie is the camera that pretty much everyone reading this carries around in their pocket. What makes it worse is that people are often happy to pay for CDs and Wakaliwood DVDs, but gamers tend to be a lot more picky about what they think deserves the dollar. Are you familiar with how people put value on things like the cost-to-playtime ratio with a straight face? How about the gigabyte-per-dollar ratio?
So we find ourselves at the same point that all software is currently at, where we have to do the Silicon Valley "move fast and break things" shit. Every project is being managed like absolute garbage because of market forces and poor practice, and patches let you get away with running your company badly. I guarantee you could slash budgets in half and mostly eliminate crunch if there was anyone competent in charge who could reign in the ambition. It would benefit everyone to have project managers who were more willing and able to start slapping knuckles with rulers the second someone tries to float the idea of adding a multiplayer mode, or perhaps a skin shop with premium currencies. You get killed if you mention Claude Code.
Constant updates are therefore a business move, but they don’t make good business sense. They don't now, and they never have. They're a form of damage control. Of all the companies you'd expect to try and tackle the problem, Microsoft were the ones who once seemed the most interested in fixing it; of course, this being Microsoft, they couldn't help but to fuck it up. Pretty much all the way up until the Xbone released, they used to allow studios to push a single update for free, and every subsequent patch needed to go through a re-certification process that cost developers $40,000. As with any flat-fee penalty, the companies with the big bucks could pay their way straight through it, and those that couldn't often left their games in broken states. I still don't know if Phil Fish ever fixed that Fez save data corruption thing that plagued the 360 port.
Anyway, the PEAK developers came out recently to announce that they were gearing up to release the final update for their game, much to the chagrin of a very vocal portion of their playerbase. I don't see how they or anyone else could have done it any other way, frankly. The current, common post-launch model doesn't make sense. You can't buy in for seven bucks and expect infinite free updates forever. Neither can you see players buy in for seven bucks and think that it's sensible to give them free updates forever. That's ridiculous.
But this is business talk, and business talk is for the suits. For the rest of you who care about the art, these constant updates are bad for that, too.
A SHORT COLLECTION OF HORROR STORIES
I bought a game called Seek a few months ago. I don't think it's particularly good, but it does have an odd charm to it. It was very clearly made by someone who has spent a lot of time learning how to draw, and not so much time figuring out how to design a survival horror game beyond transplanting a ton of elements out from SIGNALIS (itself a very derivative game, but that's a discussion for another time).
Anyway, when I first bought Seek, it looked like this:
On December 18, 2025, Seek entered version 1.2.0. Rather than the bugfixes that had comprised the majority of the previous patches, this one was a major content update and general overhaul: the developer went back and added some new guns, filled in some extra plot details to try and flesh the story out a bit more, and added new clear rewards for players who beat the game on the hardest difficulty settings. This all probably sounds like the standard "Game of the Year" or "Definitive Edition" fare, where there's one last hurrah of an update before everyone moves on to the next project.
Tucked away in the middle of the patch notes was a single bullet point that could have easily slipped by if you weren't paying attention.
"All original game CGs and character portraits have been redrawn using AI."
Seek now looked like this:
This change was universally reviled. I don't think there was a single positive response to it. Everyone demanded that the old pixel art CGs be restored, but the developer didn't think this was the correct solution; the reason they had decided to get AI to re-do everything for them was that they were certain that their own work was so amateurish that it needed to be replaced, and weren't confident enough to replace it themselves. In the wake of the player revolt, they knuckled down, and spent about three straight days redrawing everything from scratch to try and get an emergency fix out before word had a chance to spread any further than it already had.
And today Seek looks like this:
It all just makes me want to grab the developer by the shoulders and shake them around. You did fine the first time! Every subsequent attempt you make at this is making it worse in new and different ways! Leave the game alone!
There's this pressure to constantly be fiddling with your work, even if it's not worth it. It's kind of like the YouTube UI problem, where it already works fine, but the people developing it don’t get to keep their jobs if they can't demonstrate that they're making changes. Still, I look at these games getting a constant stream of updates, and I don't think "wow, what a deal". I see tremendous inefficiency. I see a lack of vision. More than anything, I see this misconception that the most important thing a work of art can be is content-rich. Really, what is the value of two new guns and a hat beyond having more things to advertise on the store page?
Disco Elysium has not been elevated by whatever's left of ZA/UM deciding to patch in a "collage mode". If anything, it's worsened; these characters with their stories and their ideas and their actions can all be flattened down into little conflict-free paper dollies, to be posed however you please so that you can recreate all of your favorite internet memes. Who wants to see two copies of Harry DuBois doing the Spider-Man point at each other? I know I sure do!
There's a quote that's been attributed to a variety of artists throughout the years — da Vinci, Picasso, usually anyone a layman might recognize to be important to the western canon — that "art is never finished, only abandoned". It's a funny coincidence, because "abandoned" is one of the favorite pejoratives for gamers to toss around today. People complain that Team Fortress 2 is abandoned because it hasn't gotten a major content update since 2017's Jungle Inferno. Let the fucking game be finished! It's nearly twenty years old! How much more do you need out of Team Fortress, a game that has only gotten worse in balance and performance and aesthetics with every single new thing that's been added to it?
I don't even want content patches if everyone agrees that it's making improvements to the original release. Supergiant recently felt compelled to make edits to Hades 2, since the original ending of that game was panned by everyone for coming out of nowhere and stripping all the agency away from the lead character. As such, they pushed out a content update just after launch to try and address the complaints; they added a bunch of incidental dialog in the hopes that it would lead into the ending twist a bit smoother, and then shifted some pieces of the ending around to make it so that Melinoe had more of an impact on the outcome of the story than she did before. The ending is still pretty bad, mind, but it now makes a little more sense. Oh, well. Thank goodness it makes sense.
They also deployed it weird, so players who hadn't yet beaten the game but had gotten through most of it were shunted onto the new story path without any of the new build-up. I recall Pat Boivin getting upset about the ending being changed on him while he was in the endgame, and people were calling him crazy for being mad about it. I think he was completely in the right. What's the point in saying your game is on version 1.0 when you aren't yet finished making major changes that affect the entire work?
I've seen a running theory that it was actually Nintendo who forced their hand and forced Supergiant to release the game before it was done, but I fail to see how that's a good excuse. Why should anyone buy what are being sold as finished games when they can be completely reworked into something that overrides and replaces the originals after the fact? Most of the time, the newest patch is the only thing available for download. For a lot of games being released today, you can go and get yourself fucked if you want to play an older version.
People say that this is preferable to a game having a bad ending forever, but I don't agree. I don’t like the precedent. Should this be applied to everything that isn't considered to be the single greatest work of all time by a sufficient plurality of people? After all, we can now fix everything in post, forever. Post-post-post-post-production. So post-production that it's post-release! Endless Star Wars Special Editions! We can live in a world where movies never have to leave the theater, and instead get an extra ten minutes of footage spliced into the middle of them every month. Doesn't that sound wonderful?
A LIMITLESS ACCUMULATION OF THE IMPERFECT
I realize now that, having gotten this far down into the article, I've only presented you with negative examples. The what-not-to-do's. There's gotta be a little carrot somewhere to make getting beaten with the stick worth it, so I've also come up with a handful of games that I think have gotten it mostly right.
I'll confess that I had the same kneejerk reaction to the announcement of Slay the Spire 2 as a lot of people did, which was mostly just wondering why they bothered when there were already a trillion community mods for the original Slay the Spire. That's the wrong way to think about it, though; Mega Crit is going back and saying "well, what if we made it today?", rather than keeping themselves bound to a framework they came up with a decade ago. It's a new game with new characters and new cards on a new engine with new enemies and new visuals. It's iterative, as all art should be. It's good to learn from what you did before! If all you want is more of the same, then the original still exists for less money and with more community support. If you'd rather see a team a dedicated professionals putting ten years of theory into practice, that's what the sequel is for.
Mike Klubnika might well be the poster boy for releasing a game and immediately moving on to the next one. I know I can't seem to go more than a few minutes without dropping to my knees and polishing the guy off, but his work really is great. He's something of a game jam demon, putting out at least twenty-two games over the course of the last four and a half years. They're not all phenomenal, obviously — you can't keep up a pace this quick without making some compromises — but every single one of them is interesting, and that's what matters most.
2023's Buckshot Roulette was a massive breakout hit, and it didn't get much beyond one major update that added a multiplayer mode. There were multiple patches fiddling with balance and adding things like lobby searching that break my one expansion rule, but this is a fair compromise on my admittedly unfair standards. A lesser developer would still be milking the game dry to this day, but Klubnika has pushed off of it and used that momentum to keep cranking out new slammers. Hell, his most recent game was literally about cranking. He's nothing if not consistent.
Yunashi no Yume was a game that started life as a different title by the name of HYPERxFANTASY. I don't know a ton about HYPERxFANTASY besides the fact that it was enough of a flop that the developer felt compelled to take it down. There are a couple ways to go about this on Steam; the most common methods are to delist the game or purge the store page such that nobody can buy it, and then hope that everyone forgets about it from there. My least favorite method is the bob's game strategy, where you replace all of your store assets with garbage and force an update that replaces all of the game files with an empty folder. If there was a Hague for software, doing this gets you sent there. Instant hanging, no appeal.
HYPERxFANTASY kind of split the difference, purging all of its game files but replacing itself with Yunashi no Yume. The new game almost explicitly revolves around its metanarrative of existing within a destroyed and abandoned world, built atop the ashes of something now forgotten. The developer seems to be hard committing to the kayfabe, with a florid thousand-word-or-so Steam page description that doesn't accomplish much in the way of describing what the game is or how it works. All you can glean if you don't already know the story behind this is that whatever it once was, it is no longer.
This would be one for my "bad updates" bucket if not for the fact that HYPERxFANTASY remains playable as a beta branch of Yunashi no Yume. It isn't really gone, it just appears that way. I think it's clever! I dig the idea of putting the focus on the act of changing and replacing something extant in our world where updates are often treated as strict upgrades. It would also be really annoying if every game started doing this, so maybe just take it as a pointer about how this was a cool way to deploy an update, and not the way to deploy every update. Remember, the goal here is to stop updating games entirely.
Anyway, if there's anything to take away from Yunashi no Yume, it's that every creator needs to learn how to move on. Your work will never be flawless no matter how much time you spend with it, and that's okay. Part of the process is not being satisfied with every single aspect of what you've made. Everything I've ever released has had parts to it that I would do differently were I to go back over them again today. But, like, whatever? Who cares? If you spend your whole life mired in what you used to do, where do you expect to find the time to do what you're going to do next? A creative that shackles themselves to old work is like a beautiful bird refusing to leave an unlocked cage. Go! Be free! There's so much more out there beyond this tiny little space that you're limiting yourself to!
"But I think the thing I made was bad!" Good. Great! If you can recognize now that something you were satisfied enough with to consider complete actually sucks ass, then that means you're growing as a creator! Why do you want to go back and retroactively paper over your work, hiding from the world the fact that you've improved? Are you trying to pretend like you got it perfect on your first try? Why? Nobody gives a shit! People like seeing someone get better at what they do. van Gogh's juvenilia sucked fucking ass. Would he be a more beloved artist today if Man With Saw never existed?
If you've made it this far into my rambling, then you're probably not the kind of big budget studio representative who's capable of making all of these calls, anyway. My appeal to you, then, is to please please just be okay with calling your work done and moving on. Ideas have a way of spoiling in the brain if you leave them in there for too long. You risk calcifying when you refuse to do something new, and that's why life seems to speed along as you age, and you stop discovering novelties and making memories. Be proud of what you've done, and remain ambitious enough to be certain that your next work will manage to do at least one thing better.
Until then, stop updating your games.
