I feel like having the early access label makes me more apprehensive about buying a game because of the amount of abandoned early access titles I own and being wary of it not having an ending. In the case of No Man’s Sky I feel like I would be less grateful for all the content adding updates. I might view it as just working towards a completed project rather than doing something nice for the community or doing it out of passion.
Buying a broken game does make me a lot less likely to buy new games from a developer immediately after the release.
Other examples could be Cyberpunk 2077, Fallout 76, Halo MCC, and the remastered Grand Theft Auto trilogy.
Rather than labeling lackluster unfinished releases, these studios should stop setting impossible to achieve timelines, and just release a product when it’s ready. How they do it is for them to figure out
I feel like that has to be pretty hard with how corporate pretty much every “AAA” game publisher is. So many are subsidiaries of subsidiaries and the parent company wouldn’t hesitate to push them to the curb.
They might also be worried about getting into a Duke Nukem Forever situation where they end up endlessly in development. They would end up having to fix issues while also keeping up with gaming trends.