Quality is the Game: A New Perspective on Consumer Trust

In the spring of 2024, Sonos, a multibillion-dollar audio-equipment company with two decades of experience, lost around 600 million dollars in sales and valuation from an app update. The update was intended to bring customers into a new decade with an updated user experience, along with better connection and audio quality.

However, when the update launched, it was anything but a better experience. Customer complaints skyrocketed overnight, as people could no longer use their high-end audio equipment for music and video streaming. It was an unmitigated disaster, and by the time the dust had settled, Sonos estimated it had lost over $100 million in revenue and $600 million in the company’s valuation.

Worse than anything, though, was that the reputation it had built over 20 years was nearly erased in the blink of an eye; it had lost its customers’ trust.

Consumer trust is a delicate thing in business, and no company—big or small—can simply fix it with a software patch. And it’s not just Sonos; the incidents involving CrowdStrike and Southwest indicate that this pattern is not isolated. Believe it or not, it’s not new either. Similar debacles have plagued the gaming industry throughout the past decade.

What the Gaming Industry Can Teach Us About QA Neglect

For the past 10 to 12 years, the AAA gaming industry has been in a strange state: the technology and architecture powering games have evolved more rapidly than ever before; that said, game innovation itself has stagnated into a mindless, profit-driven echo chamber built upon a foundation of regurgitated mediocrity.

To clarify, over the past decade or so, game design has reached a point of stagnation in its evolution, and it’s being done in order to squeeze out more profit for the top. As a studio goes on like this, it begins looking for more and more ways to—not increase sales or player base (market share)—but to increase margins for its shareholders.

Eventually, QA ends up on the chopping block—and it makes sense—that is, if you’re Gordon Gekko, the financially malfeasant antagonist from the 1987 film Wall Street. Why would a studio need an extensive QA program for a game with architecture that hasn’t fundamentally changed in over a decade? A justifiable question, especially if your responsibility is to the shareholders and not the customer. But it’s exactly that mentality that has spelled ruin for a number of game studios, and now the same might be said for Sonos as well.

The Rise of Consolidation—and the Fall of QA

Over the past decade, as previously mentioned, the gaming industry has undergone a paradigm shift—one that can be summed up in a single word: consolidation.

Even with a record number of independently developed (indie) games being published and released, the sheer amount of money being spent and earned has never been so concentrated in the hands of so few. Companies once thought of as giants are now being swallowed by even bigger fish. ZeniMax, Blizzard, and Activision are currently under Microsoft’s umbrella, while Sony is scrambling to secure any studio that hasn’t already sold a controlling stake to Tencent.

The consequence has been games designed to fit a business model, rather than a business built around making and selling games. As a result, development priorities have shifted toward maximizing profits by reducing costs and overhead—one of the most frequently impacted areas being QA. And with that, the seed for a Sonos-level disaster is planted. It may sound alarmist, but the pattern has repeated itself often enough to speak volumes.

Cyberpunk 2077: A QA Disaster in the Spotlight

Five years ago, in 2020, the most anticipated game of the year—by far—was Cyberpunk 2077, developed by CD Projekt RED. Everything about the game made sense on paper: an experienced studio with a stellar reputation, a fully traversable open-world environment, a genuinely compelling story, next-generation graphical fidelity, and both a substantial budget and adequate development time. Not to mention, it had one of the best marketing campaigns I have ever seen. Nothing about this game’s release should have gone wrong.

But on December 10th, 2020, Cyberpunk launched to widespread criticism for its nearly unplayable, bug-ridden experience and a litany of undelivered features. Plagued by negative reviews, mass refund requests, and a flood of memes at their expense, CDPR’s reputation instantly tanked—dropping to approval levels lower than at any point in the company’s history.

Now, five years later—and after more than three years spent fixing the game’s most glaring issues—the company still hasn’t fully regained the trust of its once-loyal fanbase. At this point, Cyberpunk is arguably one of the finest games of the decade, delivering nearly everything it originally promised, along with a substantial DLC story expansion. But the damage has been done; CDPR missed the hype wave.

The ‘hype wave’ is a term used to describe the momentum of excited customers eagerly awaiting the release of a new game. Millions of dollars are spent to generate excitement, making gamers more eager than ever for the next big title. If you catch that wave just right, without too many mistakes, you can flip the gaming industry upside down.

The most well-known example of this would likely be Rockstar Games’ 2013 behemoth, Grand Theft Auto V. The only significant shortcoming of GTA V was its moderately delayed yet revolutionary online multiplayer mode—something players could easily forgive, as Rockstar still delivered one of the greatest single-player games in modern gaming on day one.

As a result, Rockstar was able to catch the wave, and nearly 12 years later, GTA V still has a robust player base. Rockstar Games is collectively seen by the community as the heavyweight champion of the gaming world.

From Setback to Survival: CDPR’s Road to Redemption

Cyberpunk was poised to catch that same wave—to become the next GTA. But CD Projekt RED botched the launch and had to struggle just to keep its head above water. Now, the studio is treading water until its next release, which has recently been revealed as The Witcher 4.

To regain the peak reputation and notoriety it once held, CDPR will need to stick the landing—and every subsequent one. Alternatively, if CDPR fumbles its next release the way it did Cyberpunk, it could mark the end of the studio entirely.

Recently, many game studios have been shuttered for far less. As part of the industry’s ongoing consolidation, mid-sized—A-rated—studios whose profits fall below a certain threshold are increasingly being phased out. A growing criticism from the gaming community is that new AAA games are losing variety, prompting many once-avid players to skip most modern releases.

We’re already seeing a pattern emerge: cost-cutting and profit-seeking are strongly correlated with a significant decline in consumer faith—not just in individual titles, but in the gaming market as a whole.

Sonos and Cyberpunk: A Shared QA Lesson

Let’s now jump back to Sonos and apply what we’ve come to understand about the gaming industry on a broader scale. What happened with Sonos is directly comparable to the situation with CDPR and Cyberpunk. Without sufficient investment in the QA of their new flagship product, the decision-makers behind both companies were blinded by hubris, asking themselves, “What could possibly go wrong?”

The key difference is that CDPR willfully ignored the shortcomings of their product, whereas Sonos was caught completely off guard. They had no idea their app update would leave their products in such a fundamentally broken state—suggesting that only the bare minimum of QA testing was done. The clear goal was to maximize profit for shareholders, but the result was catastrophic. Not only did they lose the profit they had hoped to gain—and then some—they also lost the trust of their entire customer base. And this doesn’t appear to be an isolated incident. There are growing signs that this behavior is being adopted across many large companies—and the economic implications could be dire.

When Recovery Works: The No Man’s Sky Example

So, what can be done to reverse course? Is it even possible to recover after such public humiliation? Yes. As surprising as it may seem, there are ways to amend these situations and regain the trust of the player community. Redemption is possible—if the creators are genuinely committed to rebuilding that trust. I’ve seen this happen with another game: No Man’s Sky, developed by Hello Games. Leading up to the release of their first full title, Hello Games went on a hype-building crusade, making appearances at every major convention and even booking late-night interviews for the company’s head, Sean Murray. And Sean made it very clear—he wasn’t just promising the world, he was promising a galaxy. A fully traversable galaxy filled with millions of worlds populated by exotic and unique plant and animal life, various civilizations, customizable starships, and more. There was very little they didn’t promise.

But when No Man’s Sky launched, it was hard to find a promise that hadn’t been broken. Most planets were devoid of flora and fauna, the story was vague and difficult to follow, and interactions with NPCs (non-playable characters) were sparse. The galaxy didn’t feel vast—it felt empty. Players began calling it “No Man’s Lie,” and many requested refunds. Yet, not everyone left. Some players—including me—stuck around because we saw potential and wanted to give the fledgling studio a chance to make things right. Little did anyone know—because Hello Games went completely silent—that the team was working tirelessly behind the scenes to fix the game and deliver on their original promises.

Using the initial profits from launch, Hello Games reinvested in itself, doubling its development team and prioritizing bug fixes and user experience improvements. After just a few months, they released a major update that significantly enhanced both performance and content. Then came another update, and another, and another. Nine years later, No Man’s Sky has seen nearly 40 major updates, and the difference between the current version and its launch state is staggering. As a result, customer trust within the NMS community is now extraordinarily high. While the community may be small by comparison, its members are vocal in their support for No Man’s Sky and Hello Games.

Excuses vs. Effort

So, what are the real differences here, between a product like Cyberpunk 2077 and No Man’s Sky? Let’s take a look at some of the most significant differences:

This results in an underdog perception of Hello Games by their player base, who are willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, whereas CDPR is seen as a giant with no excuse for the underperformance of a product announced more than seven years earlier. This gave Hello Games a certain advantage in player perception compared to CDPR, but the real difference was the effort. Hello Games put in 120% effort throughout the development process, both before and after the launch of their product.

In contrast, CDPR thought they could cut corners in some areas of development until it became clear what a mistake that had been, and they only reprioritized as a form of damage control. The end result is two finely polished games, and both are very good, but only one of them is truly respected.

Prioritize QA or Pay the Price

So, what does all of this mean? It means that the neglect of major publishers is becoming increasingly apparent to consumers—and it has reached a tipping point where customers can no longer ignore it. As this kind of behavior becomes more widespread, more customers are becoming inherently disengaged from products released by large manufacturers.

I personally know people who say they won’t return to Sonos after their speakers were affected by the update. A cynical attitude toward large companies is beginning to dominate the customer mindset, and consumers are increasingly inclined to support smaller product developers. The smaller the company, the more it has at stake—and that evokes a sense of mutual trust with the customer.

I don’t believe this mindset is going away anytime soon—not until large companies reprioritize their investment in the product development process. Specifically, in QA. Quality assurance is the common thread across all of these stories. CD Projekt RED tarnished its reputation by deprioritizing QA. Hello Games used QA to rebuild its reputation for commitment and reliability after one of the worst game launches on record. And Rockstar Games rose to unprecedented heights because it understood the value of never sacrificing quality for budget when releasing a flagship product.

From this observation, a novel solution presents itself: rather than treating quality assurance as a mere checkbox reserved for the end of the development cycle—where only the bare minimum is required—QA should be embraced as an integral part of the process, one that scales proportionally with the development budget itself. Otherwise, if nothing changes and profit-driven business models continue to dominate, I can only foresee more disastrous launches and rollouts—à la Sonos.

Just imagine that for a moment: What if a company like Intel were to release a series of CPUs without adequately stress-testing the new architecture? Well, that’s not a hypothetical—because it happened. Many Intel-powered devices built within the last few years—including the one I’m currently using—are afflicted with the computer equivalent of terminal brain cancer. There is no viable fix, and Intel is already facing severe consequences as a result of this nightmare scenario. Once news of the defect broke and gradually spread over the following year, their valuation began to decline.

I also suspect—and it stands to reason—that Intel lost significant revenue from canceled contracts during that period. Think about it: Intel dominated the tech world for 30 years, and now it’s the biggest elephant in the room.

An Investment Worth Making

The point I’ve been trying to make is that this trend of quality oversights in the name of cutting costs isn’t confined to a microcosm like the video game industry. It’s spreading—and if the market doesn’t correct course, we’ll see incidents like Sonos and Intel far more frequently. The same patterns we’ve observed in gaming are now emerging across the broader consumer market, with manufacturers becoming increasingly negligent when it comes to quality assurance. If this continues, the consequences could be catastrophic for major manufacturers that simply follow the herd.

By contrast, companies that resist this trend and invest meaningfully in QA will thrive as champions in a sea of mediocrity. These are the companies that will lead by example—and it’s their long-term vision, not a short-term obsession with upward-trending graphs, that will propel the 21st century forward.