I remember reading a blog post about a game developer who forget to include a sound file for his game update and that caused the game to close down at certain time. This caused havoc because no one could play the game anymore and had to release an emergency update to fix the problem

Well, we are all human and make mistakes, but there's is a simple solution that can mitigate this issue. Normally, a sound is not a critical resource for a game. For instance, it could be just be audio feedback for an action, so closing down the entire game is not the appropriate way to handle a missing file error. What I do is instead of throwing an error I play a null sound when the sound resource can be found. The code is something like this:

Sound* SoundManager::GetSound(const string& name)
{
	fmap<string, Sound*>::const_iterator iter;
	iter = m_mapSound.find(name);
	if (iter == m_mapSound.end())
	{
		racAssert(false);
		return m_pNullSound;
	}
	return iter->second;
}
 

The null sound, is just 100ms silent sound, so the game never closes down even if it's released with missing resources.