I've been reflecting on the games I've purchased in the past.
I'm rarely impulsive in my purchases of games, but I've been burned
more than a few times.
A handful have been well worth the money I paid.
One or two have been worth MUCH more than I paid.
And then, there are the bad ones. Buggy. Bad interface. Boring. Frustrating.
Lousy manual, or no manual at all.
The majority of games I've purchased were failures. Poorly designed, to say the least.
"Cold Fear" comes to mind immediately.
When you factor in the cost of all the bad games I have literally thrown away
in the trash, the price of the too-few good ones goes up to about $200 each.
That's way too much.
My point? Why do we tolerate this? If there were any sort of product that
were as consistently unreliable as computer software, people would be rioting
in the streets, demanding government regulation and oversight.
Instead, the industry actually exploits the stupidity of the gaming community.
They know that moron fanboys will continue to buy games, even if they are
released with bugs. They've even figured out a way to avoid a big dropoff in
sales once the word gets out that their latest dud is no good: PRE-selling a game!
Would you buy a car without even having an opportunity to test drive it? No, that's insane.
GOG at least offers a good chance to research a game before buying it. The reviews
are out there. You can look up the specs on Wikipedia. You can often even download
brief demos, to check out gameplay......this fact prevented me from making at least one mistake here on GOG.
But, I'm drifting from my point, which is NEW games. I'd like to see some laws put
into effect to govern the sale of new games. Heck, of ALL software:
1. No game to be released until it has passed rigorous screening for bugs.
If a game has bugs, you are NOT allowed to sell it. Period. If a bug IS found,
company must have funds on hand to redeem every copy of the game for CASH, from every consumer that they cheated.
2. Every game to be also screened and rated by an independent panel of playtesters
for objective criteria of playability. Not entertainment value, but for factors that make it
possible (or IMPOSSIBLE) to understand and play the game. No more bad interfaces (the game Black and White comes to mind here). The game will prominently be labeled with this "functionality" rating.
3. No more unreadable manuals. Game manuals are consistently over-decorated, to say the least. A heavy grey watermark style background on every single page, tiny letters in 10 point type fonts, heavy unnecessary decorative doodads and borders crowding every page, no alphabetical index, confusing wording, overstating the obvious while failing to
intuitively and proactively answer common-sense question.......game manuals are HORRIBLE.
All software manuals are horrible. I lived with a woman who edited them for a living, and she explained that computer people are very close to completely illiterate. All their brainpower is in math and computer science. They cannot compose a coherent sentence, let alone spell. So, DUH! Every computer software company MUST farm out it's manual writing to a WRITING EXPERTS, communication experts! LAW.
Next, the manuals have to be posted online in multiple formats, for free download.
No exceptions. This way, the consumer can adjust the font, etc..........no more tiny white
letters on black pages......that's crappy design, and the jerkoffs who make decisions like that belong in hell. Are you reading this, GOG? Your tiny white letters on a grey background is a choice that STINKS.
No more lying on the game specificatons! Every game box that claimed "minimum specifications to run" that I ever purchased was LYING. The "reccomended" specs were the actual bare minimum to make the game function AT ALL....I['m not talking about
quality of graphics here, I'm talking about functioning at all, ever.
So, first, a "truth in performance" law, with independent testing and rating.
Next: Retroactively, every game
(Empire Earth and EE2 comes to mind) designer that ever publishesd "lowball" specs
is to be rounded up and put in a concentration camp for life.

Where to begin ...
1. Well, if no games with bugs are allowed to be sold, then that's so long and thanks for all the fish for the game industry. All software has bugs in it. It is unrealistic to ever really find and plug all of them. Of course, sometimes games are released that are unplayable because of the bugs - that's a ripoff, but can be avoided by simply doing research on the game beforehand. Just like you would research when you're buying a new car to find out whether the wheels are likely to fall off after a few right turns.
2. Every game already is. Ever heard of IGN? Gamespot? PC Gamer? RandomDudesReviews?
3. Who reads the manuals?
4. Yes, game specifications are mostly complete baba-booboo, but lying is what marketing does. It's not just games. Consumers must properly research everything they buy these days because of the sheer volume of complete crap out there.
5. You should probably hold off on the concentration camp analogies. That or see a pshyciatrist.

I may agree on some points, like the non existent hud on Black and White (that was their choice and didn't stopped me to play the game) but I find you a bit extremist in your words.
Of course we can't tolerate game with loads of bugs in it. But there are patches for that. Not always but most of the time. Agreed if too much bugs are there when the games come out, a refund should be granted, like stardock did with demigod.
Concerning manuals, OK they are shit. But 90% of people don't read them because they don't care, or there are ingame tutorials. It explains why they don't bother making them good.
Specs where lies back them, but I find that more often they tend to get better now. When I got Deus Ex I could not run it at all because of that.
Most if not all of your points are valid. But, you are far too brutal in your words. Not all developpers make those mistakes. Don't turn a few games into generalization.

Bring back the several-dozen-pages-thick pocket-book like manuals of the past, please! I do NOT like having to read several pages of text on a screen, however I quite like having the book in my hands.

tl;dr

This is retarded. I agree that publishing companies have mastered the art of ripping off their customers, but hey, whose fault is that, exactly? If people are willing to pay for crap, the gaming companies are entirely within their rights to sell it to them. That's how business works, and not just the computer business either. Or are you forgetting the deluge of cheap, 'made in China' products that we all buy fully expecting them to break sooner rather than later? 90% of everything is crap, but mandating quality has never worked in the past and I see no reason why it should work with software.

And who exactly is going to PAY for all of that, bearcat?

I was going to read your post, but the length threw me, so I just started humming the Beatles song.
"You say you want a revolution, we-eel, you kno-ooo..."

Okay, maybe I'm just godlike, but I personally liked Black & White's interface. It seemed pretty intuitive to me...
Also, as Crassmaster pointed out, the changes you propose would cost a lot of money, and because the game companies would no longer be able to profit from games...
A: The price would go up, or...
B: No more games!

Well, that's a pretty good way of... killing the entire industry.
I would address each point, but it's all too childish and naive that it's not worth it.

1. No game to be released until it has passed rigorous screening for bugs.
If a game has bugs, you are NOT allowed to sell it. Period. If a bug IS found,
company must have funds on hand to redeem every copy of the game for CASH, from every consumer that they cheated.
Have you ever written a complex piece of software? It's impossible to have something completely bug free. And it even depends on how you define a bug. It can be a bug if somebody thinks something should be done differently.
For example, Person A might want space bar to be the Jump key, while Person B wants Left Shift to be Jump. That's a bug, whether or not it's addressed is up to the developer.

Holding back a game until it's 100% bug free would be insane. A game company could hurl millions at professional testers to test the game for 6 months after it was "ready", and they still wouldn't find half the bugs that the gamers would in three weeks. There are no excuses for games that are fundamentally broken, of course. Don't forget that it's not always the developers at fault though. Sometimes there are big greedy publishers cracking whips.
The same goes for gameplay balancing (especially for RPGs and strategy games). There's also no way they could balance it perfectly without the input of gamers who will play it to death. Gamers can be a crafty lot, finding ways to exploit various game mechanics or discovering new tactics the developers could never have dreamed of.
Then there's aspects of game hacking (depending on the platform). Making a game hack free, particularly on the PC, isn't easy. Defeat one cheat and new ones crop up.