My opinion is back then you didn't have high speed internet. So developers tried to release a game in good condition. Nowadays they can patch it later with updates.Something though has really changed in the past ten years, to where there's a decent chance that a new game, when released, simply won't be fully functional for a variety of reasons. I don't recall anything even close to this phenomena back in the eighties and nineties, I'm not sure if the work involved just got more shoddy or if laziness crept in somewhere along the line.
It was both a blessing and a curse.