Furthermore, if you’re playing a game and you come across some kind of bug in it, chances are the developers know.  Many, if not most games will ship with some kind of bug.  It might be a simple art bug where a door is slightly offset from the wall.  It might be a collision issue where you get blocked from walking for no actual reason, or, alternately, where you can walk straight through a wall that shouldn’t allow passage.  It might be possible to get permanently stuck in the scenery, or have the audio skip disjointedly, or have the player just straight-up fall out of the world.  The thing is, the developers probably know damn well the game is shipping with bugs.  You really don’t need to tell them that.

Why do games ship with bugs, then?  Well, sometimes schedules get drastically cut, and there just isn’t time.  Sometimes schedules were poorly planned to begin with, and there just isn’t time.  Sometimes the very nature of the game you’re working on gets dramatically changed, requiring a lot of re-working, and there just isn’t time.  Sometimes half the people at a studio get laid off, and there just aren’t enough people to complete the game in time.  (Have you noticed a pattern yet?)  Sometimes a minor bug is known about and it just doesn’t get fixed because it’s not important enough to risk breaking the level for.  Toward the end of development, a game is like a house of cards.  If you have framerate, memory, gameplay and story all working together reasonably well, you do not risk breaking that balance for something as small as a trash plane sticking through a wall or a chair floating slightly above the floor.

My boss often says there are two kinds of games:  Game that are perfect, and games that ship.  It’s much better to work on games that ship.