The perfect “Hot Coffee” analogy

Eureka! I’ve found an analogy that conveys to those (often non-programmers?) who don’t get why I don’t hold Rockstar North/Take-Two responsible.

If I downloaded and applied a patch to San Andreas that caused the game to crash and never work until I uninstalled and re-installed the entire game, does that mean Rockstar/Take-Two put out a shoddy product? Do they owe me a refund? Because I can write such a patch in a heartbeat. Hell, I can do that for any game. If I did, would it be the job of Rockstar North/Take-Two to make sure that such code changes didn’t affect the game? If not, why not? It’s the exact same thing that Patrick Wildenborg did to make the ‘Hot Coffee’ missions playable? If RN/TT is responsible in his case, why not mine?

And if you think that they are responsible for my changing the code to introduce a crashing bug… Wow.