This reasoning is not exactly true. The main, and I do mean MAIN reason that console games have far fewer bugs than PC games is the unified hardware configuration of consoles. When you test your program on the [insert console of choice] in your office it has the EXACT same hardware configuration as every other console of the same model in the world, so if it works on your console, it will work on all of them. This is NOT the case for PC hardware configurations.
True, but hardly an excuse for bugs. If you sell a product it's your responsibility that it works, not that of the buyer. There is no sticker on PC games that says something like "the game MAY work depending on your configuration."
I too haven't had a single problem with NWN2. Not a single crash and not a single problem updating. However, for some reason singleplayer, not multiplayer mind you, games on the Source engine (HL2 and Dark Messiah and possibly Vampire) crashes within the first 2 minutes of playing with my new memory, a memory that causes no problems in other games whatsoever and have passed several 12 hour runs of Memtest without a single error. Does this suck? Absolutely, but that is the name of the game when it comes to PC games. If you want the freedom to install whatever motherboard, CPU, GPU, RAM, storage devices, sound cards and peripherals you want in your PC then you have to accept that it is virtually impossible to cover every hardware combination the first time (and I haven't even mentioned drivers and other software running in the background). Hence the need for patches. I'm not trying to make excuses for games like Dungeon Lords but to expect a totally bugfree release is downright unfair.
I never said something about a 100% bugfree game. I have a fairly high tolerance when it comes to bugs if the game is worth playing it. I also would never complain about a bug that only concerns me, but I know very few cases where that was actually the case.
We're not talking about a game containing one or two bugs here. We're talking about the fact that many players seem to have the impression that the overall quality of pc games is slowly declining. That is also my impression. And you cannot blame all this on different system configurations, because 10 years ago, people also had different system configurations, and bugs were not such a big topic. No doubt, different system configurations play a role, but you greatly overestimate it. If the different system configurations would play a dominant role when it comes to bugs, then every game would have more or less the same amount of bugs. And that's just not true. There are games that are nearly bug free (not many... I admit that), and there are games that are full of them. Message boards are usually a very good indicator of the quality of a game.
I agree however, that programming a game that is 100% bug free, and that runs on all pcs is probably impossible. But that is certainly not what players demand...
About NWN2: I wasn't the only one who could not patch the game. I wasn't the big exception who had such an unusual system configuration that the patcher could not handle it. There were a lot of people who had the same problem. Check the boards if you like, it was a fairly common problem. It's also safe to say that quite a few people bought NWN2 because of the toolset, and not because of the OC. The bugs in connection with the toolset had absolutely nothing to do with system configuration because they concerned EVERYONE. That is shitty programming and rushed release - nothing else. It's ironic honestly. Obsidian, like so many other game companies, had message boards running looooooong before the release of the game. The developers knew exactely what the community expected from them. They knew that a lot of people were interested in the toolset and its capabilities. Still they decided to release it in a state where it could not fulfill these expectations...
And of course, this train of logic can also be put into reverse: Just because a game doesn't work for you, it doesn't mean that isn't working for everyone else.
Nice bit of logic, but erroneous. The fact that it does work for some players does not make a game a quality product. From my point of view a game should work for significant majority of all customers.
If you buy a car, and the salesman tells you, "Oh, that thing easily overheats, but it works fine in winter!," would you consider that acceptable?