Also, by the time the game has been released for 1 hour, the players have already racked up more playtime than the full QA team could reasonably achieve throughout several years of development (and for most of that time QA were playing an older version…). So, if your game has a lot of player choice, randomization, simulation, complex systems, chances are the players are seeing things that QA never did. And then the players wonder how QA could miss such an obvious bug.

That’s why bugs can be labeled “in shipped version.”

They know. It’s just they balanced it against everything else and it wasn’t worth spending time on or delaying the game for.

I won’t say that it’s purely a AAA problem, but it’s harder to excuse there.