Anthony Davis
Blizzard Entertainment
You are both right.
As a customer, you should not have to care about the quality of the product or the problems creating the product.
As a member of the gamer culture, understanding how things work will help you appreciate your culture more... at least in my opinion.
I understand all that you are saying but ultimately, your position is sort of like this: You want to make and sell donuts. So you talk to various suppliers to get the necessary supplies to make and sell donuts. Later on, a customer walks up to you and says "my donuts taste like shit". You check out your supplies and find out that one or more of your suppliers gave you bad eggs or bad flour. Or maybe your owen malfunctioned and didn't bake them properly. Then you tell the customer "hey, you are right but it wasn't my fault, see, the supplier gave me bad flour/my owen is malfunctioning. And this is a money business so it's okay that I sold you shitty donuts. You should try to see it from my perspective".
The difference in the case of the donut seller is that health inspectors would turn up at your door the next day and you would be in deep trouble.
I agree with the poster saying that your stance is very American. Game industry is one of the most underdeveloped and undervalued industries where neither customer rights or value of labour is properly recognized. I see the wisdom in seeing how the industry works from within and adjusting to make the best of it as a developer in the system, but applying the same rationale to the customer's end is borderline criminal. If the game industry were half as developed as any consumer goods based industry, we wouldn't be getting half the downright lying PR bullshit that we often get or con-man products like Aliens: Colonial Marines that literally practice conning.
Of course, that is not exclusive to games industry, that's basically how the world runs but the games industry have the distinction of lacking a codified consensus on industry standards, regulations and customer rights.
Rereading that, I did not word that correctly. Let me clarify:
As a customer you should expect to receive a quality product. Customers don't care about supply chain problems or production problems, and they shouldn't have to.
Worrying about why a product might not be quality is not the concern of a customer.