One of my most anticipated game releases last year was the Halo: Master Chief Collection. Having all four campaigns on one disc, two of which had been remastered with new textures and soundtracks, sounded cool, but it wasn’t the main draw for me. Instead, I was thrilled to hear about the multiplayer component: all hundred-something maps from all (numbered) Halo games, all accessible from the same menu and the same matchmaking screen. The game promised the dream of being able to jump freely from game to game, map to map, running a marathon multiplayer session with unparalleled gameplay variety.

Unfortunately, this promise has yet to be realized. At launch, the Master Chief collection was completely broken. Games were near-impossible to get into at all, even if you waited hours for matchmaking to put something together. Even single player content was broken: more than half of the time, if you resumed a game in Halo 2, you were greeted with a black screen. Save games simply disappeared at times, the HUD would not always appear onscreen, and achievements frequently failed to unlock.

Single Player still seems to exhibit most of these bugs, but game sites are often reporting that the multiplayer component has been “fixed.” It has not. While things have improved from their initial, completely non-working state, matches still take at least 5 minutes to find, and usually include uneven teams. This is far worse than you could expect of matchmaking on the original Xbox release of Halo 2 back in 2004, when console-based online multiplayer was still brand new. If somebody drops during your matchmaking session, everything stalls, to the point where you have to restart the game altogether. Playlists are still lacking (only a single gametype, Big Team Battle, actually covers all four games), and because the act of simply playing the game is such a hassle, the only players online are as hardcore as they come. The broken game has led to a broken community.

Sadly, in 2015, this is just a particularly bad example of an extremely common policy: releasing broken games with the intent of patching down the line. Assassin’s Creed: Unity launched with bugs that caused people’s faces to disappear, leaving grotesque floating eyeballs and teeth, and frequent framerate drops below 15 fps. Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare would often crash when accessing its multiplayer component (at least for a couple of days). Driveclub, Sony’s new racing IP, launched with completely broken multiplayer and social features. Just a few weeks ago another new racing IP, Ubisoft’s The Club, launched with broken (and apparently still unresolved) multiplayer.

So, why were there so many failed launches in the last few months? Well, take a look at the list of game releases on the “2014 in video gaming” Wikipedia page here. If you look over the data, there’s a pretty obvious correlation between the number of games released and the time of the year. In case you don’t want to count the individual game releases in each quarter (and trust me, you don’t), I already did it for you: 113 games launched in January-March, 148 in April-June, 171 in July-September, and a whopping 205 in October-December.

The reason for this isn’t rocket science: game publishers want to release their biggest games towards the end of the year, so that they’re hot and available in time for Christmas shopping. Looking at what, exactly, released in early months makes this even more obvious: the first quarter of the year is chock full of ports, expansions, digital releases, and, very rarely, games that were delayed out of their planned holiday release periods.

So, when a game publisher announces that a game will launch in the last quarter of the year, and the game isn’t ready in time, what do they do? Well, they used to delay it. Take, for instance Resident Evil 4. Originally scheduled for a holiday 2004 release, Capcom decided at the last minute to delay a couple months into January 2005. They probably missed some Christmas sales, but narrowly avoided a problematic launch and ended up releasing one of the greatest games of all time.

It’s still not completely unprecedented for a developer to delay a game out of the holiday period. Last year Ubisoft, the same publisher/developer that released Assassin’s Creed: Unity prematurely, bit the bullet and delayed Watch Dogs (which is decidedly NOT one of the greatest games of all time) out of its launch window by a whole 6 months. This year, though, the year-old PS4 and Xbox One were both offering lots of discounts and bundles, so publishers wanted to make sure to have their games available for new console owners to snatch up. It was just too much to pass up.

The other problem is that game players have been trained for decades to pre-purchase games, usually with no adverse consequences. Back when video games were a niche market, this made sense: if you wanted the new game you’d been anticipating, making sure that a copy would be waiting for you at retail was a smart move. However, publishers began using pre-order numbers as a metric for success, and despite game shortages being virtually non-existent these days, they still push pre-orders. Now nearly every game has some kind of “pre-order bonus,” or (*shudders*) “retailer exclusive” that tries to get our money on the promise of a great game, in exchange for some dumb exclusive costume or power-up.

Again, this is all excusable, provided that the games actually deliver on what they promise. But now publishers are abusing this trust in order to push games into the release windows that are most profitable for them. If the game’s not ready, then what the hell, might as well use their most loyal customers as QA testers and deal with it later.

In the case of the Master Chief Collection, the developers claimed that their matchmaking did not exhibit problems in their “internal testing environment,” suggesting that they never tested the system meant to connect people over the internet, on the internet. Ubisoft initially scoffed at the face-melted horrors from Unity being posted on the internet, stating that that glitch only happens if the player hasn’t installed the Day 1 update. So if you expected your single-player game to work properly without connecting to the internet and downloading an update first, then bollocks to you.

The one positive from this year’s trainwreck of a holiday season is that maybe, just maybe, publishers are starting to realize that this strategy is going to backfire on them. In the case of Assassin’s Creed Unity, Ubisoft has done a lot to make things right. Anybody who purchased the game is getting the first DLC release for free, and anybody who purchased the season pass (which included the initial DLC) got to choose a Ubisoft title from a list of games to receive for free. This list included Far Cry 4, a brand-new holiday release, which goes a long way toward making things right. The Halo: Master Chief Collection owners are receiving an HD version of Halo: ODST for free, which isn’t quite the same as having a working version of the product they purchased, but it’s something.

The lesson we should be learning is that we should not be pre-ordering games, especially from publishers who have dropped the ball in a major way. There’s no way to know any more whether a game will work at launch, or whether major problems will be resolved in two days (like Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare) or left to permanently linger (like Halo: The Master Chief Collection and Battlefield 4). We can only vote with our dollar, so make sure that your vote counts.