Because of the limitations inherent to the platforms back then (like how most games were single player games or were required to have some single play ability) it was harder to make these skinner box style games you see everywhere today. But exploitative practices have always existed, whether it's dishonest advertising or expensive DLC (see Oblivion's Xbox 360 horse armor DLC). Although there was more incentive to make your game bug free and complete right at release, since you couldn't always count on your player base to have a way to download updates (if such a thing was even possible for your system)