Nah the modern trend on QA is that it is a waste of money as it is categorized as necessary but non-value added activities. It is incredibly hard to have career on QA, no matter the product the corporation is making, including program/games.
The biggest productivity some companies do is minimizing amount of QA personnel and QA activities within acceptable quality on end-product.
With software devs it is even worse due to easy to improve after launch nature of the product.
That's nonsense. I've had a 14 year career in QA now, earn very similar money to developers with same amount of experience.
Several points:
1. Most end users are not as tolerant to poor quality products straight out of the gate as you're making them out to be. They take a look at the software, see shoddy quality and go to the competitor instead. By the time the devs fix most of the issues - majority of the customers have already left and they've got no reason to give the software in question a second chance.
2. Some products have very little tolerance for failure - think medical equipment, airplane parts, etc. You get something wrong there - people die, company gets sued, goes out of business.
3. You take out QA - you're forced to make developers to check their own/each other's code. Very few developers are good at that. Majority want to sit around and create, not find holes in what's already created. QA just takes a different mindset like Prime Junta was saying.
4. Ultimately - productivity is increased when people specialize: you let people do what they know how to do best, what they love to do: so let developers develop, and QA specialists do the QA. You take two people - one that's is very good at developing but so-so at testing and one that very good at testing and so-so at developing: the most efficient combination is to let the one that great at developing spend 100% of his time on that, and the one that really good at testing spend 100% of his time on that.
In the end, different companies try differing strategies in order to make a buck - some do try to skip on QA I guess - but every company I've worked for were hiring more QA, not less. The only stories of skipping on QA I've personally heard of were cases where the company was crashing and burning anyway.