Gabe was talking about the making of Half Life, back when you shipped your disc and that was that. And the game was, apparently, crapola.
There were patch and updates back in the day. The problem was that not everybody had a good internet connection or a connection at all, during the 90’s.
Games like Daikatana and SiN were flops due to bugs that required patches to fix.
There are a lot of people in South Korea that hates the US and Japan way more than the DPRK or China. There are still a strong anti-US sentiment in Okinawa and near US bases in Japan, these led to the 1960 and 1970 Anpo protests in Japan.