The lack of demand for quality and consumer behavior is the biggest problem. This drives game developing.
It partially drives AAA development on a business level, maybe. Even on high profile projects, the devs themselves aren't in it to take away people's money. Besides it's still arguable if there's any problem with many enjoying their yearly Call Of Duty - there's no proof people are just buying it because they don't know better or whatever other argument is thrown around so often - and developers providing accordingly. In and of itself that's valid. If you don't like it, just ignore it, there's plenty of other games out there. Or if you're convinced there's a problem, campaign against it: educate (casual) gamers to have them make more informed choices or whatever you feel needs doing.
But that has very little to do with why there often are big technical deficits in game code. It's not like any dev sits there thinking "fuck it, people will swallow it, anyway". Trust me, devs are the people who are most passionate about making it the best they can - they're often pouring several years of their lives into it, after all. It's a struggle of tight schedules, tight budgets and complex problems that need solving that lead to hasty implementations and lack of testing. These are issues that need solving - and I know too little about it to judge if that means R&D to give devs better tools to accomplish more and higher quality in shorter time, reducing business overhead, budget reallocation (away from shiny graphics towards more important stuff) or making high production value games more expensive to cover higher development costs (don't forget that game prices have been largely stabely for decades while development costs skyrocketed). Probably some of all of the above.
We're slowly getting towards more cost-efficient development with ready-made engines, data-driven development and such, already. Smaller projects cut down graphics costs to make a better, if less shiny, game. New distribution channels and the rise of indies show that you can make do with less business overhead - but you're unlikely to sell millions of copies or even get any visibility for your game at all; for every Minecraft there's probably a hundred obscure, but excellent indie titles.
And f**k Universities.
If you really like games and making games, you don't need to go to University where you will be distracted learning bunch of nonsense.
You're pointing out severe mistakes in how current game devs often code, but would deny that education might help?
It's true, that if you're thorough and approach the issue very professionally, you can teach yourself a lot. But it's also very easy to put together games that are running, but suffer such severe mistakes. If you're self-taught and approach it with a "it's working, so it's fine" attitude, you'll make exactly these kinds of mistakes you pointed out.
Even if you're not enrolling in a university course, a look at their curriculum gives you valuable hints on what to study and in what order; which books are any good and what other resources you have at your disposal to learn stuff. You get a solid foundation of theory that is often ignored when self-teaching, but is important to understand stuff instead of replicating it and in order to be able to adapt to new concepts quickly. Plus, you have a schedule, are forced to learn the stuff that seems boring or useless, but comes in handy at some point, as well; your learning is supervised to some degree and you can easily figure out where you're lacking. If the course is any good, you'll have plenty of projects that give you hands-on experience, both working on games, and especially working on games in a team with a schedule. Plus, you'll have the chance to attend some events, make first industry contacts, etc, etc.
You can learn on your own, and if you're thorough and approach it professionally, something good will come of it. But you can also accept university as a tool to help you achieve that. So, no. Don't f**k Universities.
And if you enter game developing just to make money, then your game will suck. It will become just one more product. Your ability to express yourself artistically will be lost - you don't need it actually. You will be like robot who creates some products for masses.
Right, because game developers love to live off of thin air and love. Just because you're passionate about it, doesn't mean you like to be screwed over by getting paid maybe half of what computer scientists get in other industries, for longer hours and often tougher challenges. Appropriate wages and no crunch time will most certainly not diminish your work's quality or even kill off any artistical expression. Besides, we're talking primarily about programmers here - who don't have much to do with artistical expression; not in a classic sense, anyway.
