I love waiting for a new NHL game every year. I read every preview, blog, tweet and Facebook update. I rummage through various forums to try and find information on the upcoming game. Any piece of information will do; every detail discovered feels like another step towards the game's release.

And every year, roughly two weeks after release, I feel disappointed. Minor improvements, major bugs and paying customers being used as beta testers. And I have nothing against EA for doing this because if you have to push out a game every 12 months this is what will happen.

But imagine a band releasing an album that is not done yet. For a few weeks you would have to listen to it without vocals because they were mixed so badly that they got muted behind guitar tracks. Or imagine a badly edited movie that loses track of characters between scenes and might or might not have an ending.

For some reason delivering an unfinished product has become the norm in video games. And although it has become easy to deliver patches and updates to broken games, it does not change the overarching point that games should not be broken from the outset.

Another thing that bothers me about yearly releases is the constant need to start game modes from scratch just as you feel like you have achieved something. Once you have achieved Legend status in the EASHL or built your perfect team in HUT, the next game hits the shelves and you are back to square one again.

And if you are an offline gamer, are you seriously going to have time to reach even a third year in a franchise mode before it is that time of the year again?

In a recent poll here at OS, roughly 50 percent of people said they spent money on downloadable content this year. With DLC packs being available for most games these days, and people buying them as well, having a year off should not mean the end of the world for these game companies.

Even releasing things like Ultimate Team or EASHL on a yearly basis, but only having a biennial release of the full game could work as a compromise. Online modes could be updated with patches as the game's engine is being developed, thus bringing us something new during the gap year. Personally I would not mind paying an annual fee to play in the EASHL -- bypassing a need to buy the game each year -- but that's another story.

With a biennial cycle developers would have more time to release roster updates, and more time to perfect game modes that have not received much love during the yearly cycle. And since big developers are not likely to disappear, they could alternate games so each year would have at least one big sports game on the release schedule. That way they could save some money on development costs as well by cycling coders between games -- the main focus being on the next game to be released.

I believe that both the developers and gamers would benefit from a biennial release schedule. Even if the total revenue from the game itself decreased, lower development costs and added DLC would balance the loss of income. And a good game every two years instead of a buggy beta version each year would surely sell more copies. A happy gamer is the best marketing tool there is out there.