Patches

On the PC side of the house, it has become almost inevitable that a game gets patched after its release. Contrary to opinions expressed on Internet message boards , this is not necessarily because the developer has rushed a poorly tested product out the door. In a world where literally thousands of hardware combinations exist, it is just as literally impossible to test all of them. When a customer finds that his particular combination of BIOS, graphics card, sound card, monitor, CPU, operating system, keyboard, mouse, and joystick causes problems in the game, most developers will work with him to figure out the source of the problem. If the problem is pervasive enough, the developer issues a patch.

Patches can also be applied to games running on consoles that have hard disk drives and Internet connections, such as the Xbox. At the present time, these patches focus on repairs to online/multiplayer-specific issues and updating content such as maps and levels.