Well, it's actually good that we're seeing gamer advocacy groups, we need to see more of this. No industry welcomes organized consumer advocacy though, and you have to expect attempts to dismiss such groups, or prevent them from being taken seriously. That kind of attitude is likely going to last until we actually see advocacy groups being actually responsible for costing game companies money, or even seeing people arrested. This is how it goes with most industries when they get big enough to see advocacy groups form.
Right now the gaming industry operates in a criminal, or borderline criminal fashion at least by US standards. It behaves like a cartel, engaging in price fixing, and doing whatever it can to prevent direct competition in order to keep prices high and costs as low as possible. You don't see companies in the industry striving to create the best possible product for the lowest possible price, since the industry as a whole sets things up to prevent the need to do that. With set prices, the relative quality of a game, and it's development cost are also irrelevent since a 2 million dollar game costs the same 60 bucks
on release as a 200 million dollar game.
Under the circumstances there is no reason for the game industry to spend the time and effort to do serious bug hunting and quality control, because nobody does it. There isn't enough direct competition where your buggy mess of a game is going to suffer because it's directly up against a product that was tested much more extensively at the same time. They set up the release schedule so big titles don't generally compete with each other, for example when "Modern Warfare 2" came out, you'll notice other companies with big titles ready around the same time pushed up their release dates.
Analyst or not, Michael Pachter is exactly the kind of arrogant guy that advocacy groups need to take down a few pegs with some victories. His attitude basically being "all games are buggy, your a crybaby" is hardly professional, and shows a rather disturbing perspective on how people like him view customers. I mean it's so horrible that we want them to actually take the time to properly test and debug their games... that's quite reasonable from where I'm sitting, and honestly if the Beta for that version of "Black Ops." was anything like any of the Betas I've been in over the last few years both the company and the testers were doubtlessly aware of the problems but chose not to fix them.
If you've been in a Beta test group recently, you'd notice that the testers are treated like cattle. They are there to at most stress test the game, all of the game's content and systems have been decided on, and even when massive bugs are discovered and known to the beta community it is increasingly rare to actually see the developers do anything to fix those bugs. As a result games, especially MMORPGs, are released in a very similar state to what they were like in Beta. The attitude of the companies being that *IF* the game sells well enough they can work on fixing the problems down the road. This is a messed up situation.
As much as I like the products of a lot of the gaming companies out there (and as much as it might hurt my future beta prospects), I have to say, if some kind of legal action based on producing shoddy goods got going against a company I tested for, and I was brought in under oath, I don't think there is one company I've done beta for in the recent past that I could defend because ALL of them have knowingly released shoddy wares, even with months to work on some of the issues that were present in the final game.