Sure, there are a few lucky hardcore gamers out there with cable modems, but the rest of us have no chance of downloading the latest Mechwarrior4 demo. As a budget game developer, I have 2 games selling shareware right now. Badly acted stereotypes don't strike me as having much entertainment value outside of parody. The problem is these stereotypes extend to the game world too. Duke Nukem looked bad enough, but with modern games hours of sound files he can sound cliched too.
Nothing spoils the sense of immersion more than a bug.
When enemy soldiers walk through each other, or your character gets his arm stuck in a wall, it's like a powerful arm yanking you back into the real world. Imagine how annoyed people would be if they were told you could fix this by pulling out the pages and sticking them back in. Crash bugs and visible artifacts are one type of bug, but lazy coding that results in hideously long load or startup times is sometimes just as bad. Worse still is the omission of obvious features. Pressing ESC should always get you out of the current screen.