I keep coming across it with new titles these days and it's not a hardware problem as douchebags will inevitably claim. How many times have you guys found a title you think "Okay, maybe I'll give that a chance" you install it and after awhile of playing there's an instant CTD.
Or as is often the case because big game studios insist vomiting high polygon count everywhere the FPS is atrocious even on high end machines because they don't understand that the majority of people don't have 4090 gtx cards and 8k monitors. There's all kinds of basic stability shit going on that makes me feel like I'm looking through someone's alpha project they've barely started debugging yet and it pisses me off. It's no surprise that 2D games are regularly hitting the charts because I wonder if it's people getting sick of all this and defaulting to 2D games because they can't trust a 3D game to run properly.
My standards are so fucking low in a game now the first thing I have to ask is, will it run? And will it crash? If the answer is yes to either of those things then you just immediately move on. Game devs seriously need to learn to stop the fucking polygon vomit. I mean Cities Skylines 2 is a great example of this and it's interesting how pissed off gamers are getting with these titles nowadays.
Edit: Oh yeah I can't forget game breaking bugs in the pathfinding AI etc. that quite a few devs are guilty of. You often have to dig through forum posts to find out about those.
This is more because of consoles. Optimising for PC takes actual work and expertise, which is something devs don't have any more.
This can't be stressed enough. "Game programmers" today are really engine scriptwriters. They didn't make the game - they licensed a framework for a game from somebody else and then write scripts and textures and models to populate it. Optimization happens in the backend, the engine, and the modern game programmer doesn't work with the guts of that at all.
Triple-a's have the resources for in-house engines or deep modifications to licensed middleware. Their problem is that biz-dev departments (I.e. disconnected from consuming or developing the product) have an even larger share of production effecting decisions than they did versus the mid 00s. Current industry's scope and scheduling philosphy is incongruous with making works of art, thus they're not committing the right resources to robust architecture and other foundations.
I think Bethesda wrote the engine. Supposedly things like managing a ton of items got better in Starfield, though that's not something I really get into.