It is different because the items purchased are fundamentally different. Real property isn't personal property and completely different regulatory and legal rules dictate the sale of real and personal property. You can make analogies between the two, but such comparisons will ever only be analogies as best. The two types of purchases are different per se.
But all you're telling me is that they are different. You're not telling me why these differences render "yes, a flat" an invalid answer to this question: "would you accept any other good that had to be fixed after your purchase?" When you buy a property it's 99% caveat emptor; that's why you pay £1,000 in legal fees and £500 in survey fees to get a professional to check it out. The regulations on selling a property really don't apply to things like whether the neighbours are noisy or whether the doors are sticky, so I'm not sure why "a flat" is not a valid answer to your question.
And in any case, a lot of the things I complained about I could have bought after I bought the property. The fridge's annoying humming, the sofa's cushions, the coffee table's silly proportions... And the TV, amongst other things, I did buy myself. It's too big for the living room really, it doesn't need to be that big, but I still bought it knowing that there was the possibility that it would be annoyingly big. That I'd have to swivel it around whenever I open the windows in the living room.
You're assuming that some video game buyers are rational consumer weighing out the good and bad of a purchase.
I'm really not assuming that all consumers are perfectly rational. I am not assuming anything at all about consumers -- I'm not even assuming that they are rational
at all. They could all be monkeys or children, or buying things based on the roll of a dice for all I care. All I'm assuming is that the pricing mechanism in a free market is functioning: the pricing mechanism mops up things like lack of perfect information, risk associated with newly released products, "irrational" demand for certain products (e.g. based on brand, fancy packaging, etc), and all the other stuff that demand might hypothetically be based on (even the toss of a coin - who hasn't made a decision on a coin toss?). All I'm assuming is that the price of a product is the point at which supply meets demand. What that demand is based on is really quite irrelevant: that people want things is a fact; that other people supply things is a fact; the point where they meet
ought to be the price, in a functioning market.
In order to justify intervention in a market, there has to be an identifiable market failure, so that the price is
not the point where they meet. We know that risk can be "priced in": this is not a market failure, this is people responding to risk by reducing demand (due to what is actually an irrational cognitive bias called risk aversion...). What is the market failure here? Publishers explicitly do not advertise games to be bug free, so the market failure cannot be false advertising. So what is it? And why is it pertinent to computer games, and not to the myriad of other purchasing decisions we make based on (a) limited information, (b) possibility of flaws, (c) possibility that the product is disappointing, etc...
This is a matter of economics though; it's quite tangential to the original question, which is whether people buy things knowing that they might contain non-critical flaws in them. I sure do.
While no doubt this is true to some extent, I would argue that it is probably not the general rule. Instead, most video game purchases are likely made based upon impulse with little consideration or as gifts with possibly no consideration from a party informed of the merits and flaws of a particular game. This contrasts with a piece of real estate that is nearly always purchased after a deliberate and rational consideration of the acquisition.
How is this different from any exchange in a free market? Yes, some people put more thought into purchasing decisions than others. So what? Bully for them I say. When I buy something, I know that there is a possibility that it isn't quite what I expect, even if it is as advertised, in terms of quality, functionality, or enjoyment. I think it's unrealistic to expect every purchase I make to be absolutely exactly what I wanted and not in any way disappointing.
So far, whenever someone has answered the question "would you accept any other good that had to be fixed after your purchase?" with some reasonable answer, all you've done is say "no, that's different to a computer game". Well, first of all, yes, it is different to a computer game, but not in a way that makes the answer invalid or irrelevant. Secondly, we're just answering your question! You're asking us our opinion on buying computer games with bugs in them, then saying, "no, my opinion is different". Thirdly, for us (or for me, anyway), buying a fridge or a flat with flaws in it
really is no different to buying a computer game with flaws in it. It doesn't matter to me whether there are legal regulations around property purchases that aren't present in computer game purchases -- for me, both things are the same. When I buy a fridge, I buy it in the knowledge that it might have annoying flaws, like loud humming. When I buy a computer game, I buy it in the knowledge that it might have annoying flaws, like bugs. There is no difference to me.
