...there were a lot of video games that never had open betas, and ... there were at least a few successful titles.
just keep in mind that they were simpler times as well Back in those days what you've written was basically what you've got. It was much easier to test. Less people involved and less things were going on the background at the same time. Another good thing: HW was more unified.
Today you build your house on three more layers you cannot affect (or to limited degree) - OS with all the multithreaded things interacting with each other, video drivers + graphic library used, engine/framework. And all these things are pretty complex, communicate just through interfaces, and pretty great deal of unpredictable things emerge only during certain combinations.
As developing tools improve, making the job easier and more convenient the complexity of solutions grows the same speed. And today, when everything is asynchronous the bugs are more and more "magical" then what they were on single core single process code written with single predictable main loop.
And the worst thing.. people (surprise ). Before internet you had smaller audience capable of solving problems on their own. There was no big button "play". You could get refund for not working game but you needed to go to store again so you've rather spent a weekend trying to run the damn thing Now when people refund the game after 5minutes AND write bad review like "game's trash, won't run, 'not enough disk space' then nothing, uninstalled" you rather be slightly more careful