Built a simple zombie swarm game as a prototype, wanted my friends opinion on how it feels. I send him the zip file.

"It doesn't run"

"It doesn't run?"

"It doesn't run"

"What do you mean it doesn't run?"

"Look it doesn't run" shares his screen. It doesn't run.

"... *sigh. * okay."

That's due to coverage. Unless you have a million testers your never going to find everything a million players can.

and find bugs and glitches in the first 10min you have been looking for months...

My boss wisely says that one error report from a play test or represents 5,000 users. You have to be hyper focused on what your testers tell you, if you have any hope of catching all the bugs. Spoiler, you’ll never catch them all…

As a QA tester of almost two decades, I am so happy you posted this (and it's the top comment). I'm constantly telling new testers that no matter how much we hammer on a project, there's no such thing as a "bug free game". Even Pong had bugs.

This is the only reason I like Steam's Early Access. Both because it's not called "Test my probably buggy ass game for a price" and because I can launch in that for a few months where I hopefully get enough variety and responses to fix everything before going full release at a higher price (technically the intended price, but I feel that if people are going to beta test my game the least I can do is given them a discount).

While this is true, I feel like everybody knows this, including the players.