To be honest... I'm not so sure I could agree with this the way things stand right now.
"Early access" or whatever you want to call it is, ultimately, a tool. It can be used to positive effect, or, as it's unfortunate tendency to see in game industry nowadays, as a means of "leveraging" cash-flow without having to put in the effort to really make a good game.
back then there wasn't much demand for games so people had to pay players to play a broken game,
To be honest, QA has always been seen by the upper management as largely pointless "money sink." Mostly because people in those positions either have no idea what QA really adds to the product, or (rightfully or not) think it ultimately does not matter whether or not something works flawlessly and well, as long as those affected by issues are small enough of a percentage of the customer base.
Kind of like IT department in larger organizations. When they can do their work well, you don't really notice the effects of it. What you do notice is when you keep cutting down the budget until things start falling apart, and suddenly that works turns extremely critical.
Then gets outsourced to some third-party "provider" from an underdeveloped country (because wages), and things are hardly better, but that's another story.
now gaming is so popular that demand has switched places with supply and now people will pay a lot of money to play something before others get it. You witnessed the birth of an industry, and now it's flourishing
It's more that gaming became an affordable mainstream hobby, so the percentage of "I can't wait and this advert looks so awesome and who cares if it's from a publisher that keeps releasing shiny turds LOOK AT THE GRAPHICS!" customers (basically teens and easily impressionable young adults) gets refreshed so often even companies like EA, rightfully loathed by both the industry and gamers alike, still keep in business and do pretty darn toot well, to boot.
It doesn't help that the constant stream of "we'll fix it post-release" titles is constantly increasing the collective acceptance of steady decrease in quality (see above "young impressionable self-replacing audience" comment), and I won't even go into the totally awesome paradigm the industry realized in cutting out parts of originally planned content to sell it as separate DLCs and MTS.
For the record, even back before the internet companies could, and did, patch their games. There's a reason lots of gaming magazines used to come with floppies (and later CDs)
On the other hand, you also get a different level of help when you hire a professional over letting any rando doing too.
Most people really do not appreciate how technical "quality assurance" job is.
It's not "playing the game," and you do need a very specific skillset (and frankly, personality) to be really good at it.
OMG, HA, I haven't seen that in years.
Runey's such a hipster he puts in HH memes from back before memes were a thing
