Games were stable enough before. And the stability of an average game in the first few month definitely went down with the introduction of on-demand online updates. Not only that, it's not entirely uncommon to see half-gigabyte patches.
Is that so much when the games themselves have ballooned into the double-digits of gigabytes? A .5 gig patch isn't a whole lot when Dragon Age: Origins takes up 20gb in the first place (and thats a pretty old game)