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.
I almost jumped on the Cyberpunk bandwagon just because it was CD Projekt Red. Kept telling myself they wouldn’t stoop to Hello Games’s level. …and they didn’t stoop quite that low, but for CD Projekt Red to put out something as shitty as Cyberpunk was a shock.
Fortunately I kept reminding myself about NMS and never did try Cyberpunk without first seeing reviews from real players… and holy fuck. Sounds like they’ve fixed a lot and the price has dropped, so I might dive in some day, but I definitely dodged a bullet with that one.
Just goes to show that NO company is worthy of your loyalty, regardless of their history.
Didn’t CD Projekt Red have a couple other bad releases?
I’ve read Witcher 3 had some pretty nasty bugs on release for example but it did seem like Cyberpunk 2077 was order of magnitude worse.
I thought there was another game released by CD Projekt Red that had some major issues on release but I don’t have the time to dig for articles about it.
Buggy is forgivable to an extent. Hell it’s part of the charm in some games (looking at you, Bethesda).
It comes down to whether or not the game that was delivered actually lives up to the game that was sold, especially regarding gameplay footage and features/concepts promised in things like interviews.
Back to NMS - the game they advertised and the game they delivered were barely even comparable: it what dishonest, and that’s ultimately what pissed the gaming community.
Witcher III… buggy mess, but it still looked and felt like the game they promised, so we say whining about bugs, but that was kinda it.
Cyberpunk… kinda in between. No where near NMS levels of false advertising, but also failed to live up to gameplay demonstrations; so the community’s reaction was predictably more angry than what we saw with Witcher III’s bugs, but without the torch-and-pitchfork response that NMS got.
Amen to that