Some were. They suffered the consequences. It was a simpler time.
Glitches and bugs were always present to some degree. Hell, even Jet Set Wіlly was released with a fatal bug that made it impossible to finish the game and they had to publish a way for players to patch the game on their own
What’s changed for worse is the game industry attitude towards releases. The nice thing about online game delivery is that hotfixes can be distributed much more easily, but the flip side of that is that the devs (or, rather, the producers and publishers) now think that it’s totally fine to release a bug-ridden mess and then race to fix that mess before too many players get frustrated enough to drop the game.
Fast forward to today, and it’s a practice widely accepted by devs, publishers, reviewers, and players alike. Now the reputation of a company doesn’t rely on whether their product is crap, but largely on whether they’ll screw you over with false promises, microtransactions, loot boxes, and garbage like that.
We live in the world where players will pre-order an overhyped game, have it delayed countless times, downloaded upon release only to find it’s literally unplayable because it crashes constantly, and still forgive that, because they know that the company that released it is one of the few that maintains some sort of integrity compared to others. “It could be worse,” goes the refrain. “At least they’re not like Ubisoft, Bethesda, or EA.”
Ultimately, this is why I agree with you and Ruinous. Taemien’s view is too idealistic. Persistent-world online games like this don’t get “finished”. They don’t get fixed, either. They keep going until their devs drop support for them. What Taemien wishes for is not feasible, at least not the way he imagines it. When development on Conan Exiles stops, it will still be buggy and no amount of modding will fix that. He imagines the end of development as some kind of a transition from the original devs to the “more competent” modding community (no disrespect to modders intended, they’re awesome, but they can’t fix this game). Instead, it would be a statement by Funcom that the game is not commercially viable anymore.