Comment by mewse
7 years ago
In my experience, we would leave the cheats in retail builds of those old games mostly because leaving them in was less risky than removing them. They had been there during all of development and testing, and we were reasonably certain of the build’s stability, but.. pull them out and your compiled code layout changes, data layout potentially changes, and who knows whether it’ll expose a new misbehaviour we’ve never seen before or know to regression test.
It’s just much much much safer to leave the debugging assistants (level skip, etc) in place. Especially back in the days when we couldn’t issue patches after release!
(Also, depending on era, you could feed a cheat code or two to magazines/websites/etc to get another article written about your game.. doubt that trick works any more, though!)
As a kid from the 90s, I can confirm that I purchased more than a couple PS1 games that I learned about by reading their cheats lists! I wouldn't have found out about the games any other way, since we didn't get reliable internet access until much later. Those game magazines were a big influence on my younger years.