What happened to the consumer's class conscience?

I don't know if anybody said that in the comments already but personally i don't care about a good launch as far as the game is good. Arkham Knight was a great example. Everyone was bitching about the launch but the game was really good. (except the 5000 destroy drones in a Batmobile sequences). The only thing that people should bitch about in NMS is the PRICE. Demanding 60$ for a game in a current state is a robbery. If the devs won't lie to us again and provide frequent updates then maybe it will reach that price. But for now it barely qualifies as a 20$ game.

I don't understand the logic of "it never existed", which a lot of people say is the case.
The reason why consumers are such morons is because of the simplicity of buying a product and the new generation of "temporary purchasers", which is just people who buy things for short term use. A lot of people who gave that option were being sarcastic for sure, but in all honesty, it wasn't there before. At least not as bad as it is today.

What irks me the most is how much people are surprised about the relatively successful launch, and how that supposedly translate in a lack of consumer's conscience.

Let's break down the games problem into the following 2 categories:

Technical issues

For starter, the vast majority of players did not have issues running the game. That's one thing that's easily forgotten by looking at all the negative comments. So, yes, as large a number of people having problems, they were still a very vocal minority.

As much as you'd like to make abstraction of that fact, the game IS developed by a small indie team and has a larger scope than many AAA titles. When you have AAA games which are a mess at launch while the developer has the financial and technical means to do extensive QA, it's very delusional to expect an indie title of this magnitude to be bug-free on launch.

Sure, part of the blame resides with the team. They seemingly expected Sony's QA team to handle the compatibility testings and that proved to be a big mistake. It's worth nothing also that a large part of the complaints are from people who do not even meet the minimum requirements to run the game. As a consumer, what I'm looking at is how the developer handles the issues as they pop up.

So far, this is what I've seen:

• They have hired a new QA team to supplement the innefective Sony team
• They released a first patch within a few hours to fix the VC++ redistributable issue
• They are providing workarounds in the forum
• They have released a beta patch within 24 hours of the initial launch
• They are getting the game to work on Phenom II CPUs even though they are clearly below the minimum requirement

As a small developer with limited resources, they should probably have gone with an open beta or something similar for a week before the actual release. This would have allowed them to find the main issues and patch them before release.

Expectations vs reality

Even though it's been said since the beginning that game wasn't an MMO and that it isn't focused on multiplayer, a lot of people came in expecting exactly what the game wasn't ever designed to be. If you're looking at the comments from the people who actually kept themselves informed about the actual game instead of jumping in the hype bandwagon, they are getting exactly the game they were expecting.

Basically, the dev remained vague about certain aspect of the game (maybe because they hoped they would be able to implement certain features but didn't knew if they would make it in the final product) and people filled in the blanks with their own expectations. So far, PC Gamer had the most interesting article on why the game got so much hyped, leading to disappointment.

The dev should have been more clear about certain aspects of the game. As a small indie team with not much marketing budget, the hype train was beneficial for pre-orders sales so they had little interest in trying to stop it, although this is working against them now since people are now angry that they're not getting the game they made up in their head.

With Steam refunds, we have come to a point were people will blindly buy anything and just refund if they don't like it instead of doing actual research on the game before purchase. You feel like there's not enough backlash, but that's just your personal opinion. Mine is that there's way too much of it, way too soon.

Instead of going with the knee-jerk reaction of "they're selling a broken game!!!1!1!", posting negative reviews and refunding the game, people should take a chill pill, report the issues they're facing and wait a few days to see if those issues gets resolved. THEN, if things are still the same, the backlash will be totally warranted.

Personally, I didn't buy the game for multiple reasons. First and foremost, space exploration/survival is not something that appeals that much to me. Then, there's the fact that I don't do pre-orders. (Two exception to this in all my years as a gamer: XCOM:EU and Tex Murphy Overseer) Finally, I'm a cheap gamer so I simply don't buy 60$ games until they have a good discount. It doesn't hurt me in any way to play the game a few months after release when the initial bugs have been mostly patched. It's a freaking video game, not sustenance. No one will perish from not playing it on release day.

As a software developer who dreams of one day making small games, the toxic attitude of the gaming community sickens me.

I have stopped pre-ordering games or buying them on launch a couple of years ago. Too many broken promises, too many bugs, too much cut content released later as DLC and so on. I am buying games once they are fully patched and all DLC's released and it's so much less stressful and also better for my wallet anyway.

I don't get poll question...

Aside from that. I'm all against feeding bs to customers.

That's why I will never again buy a preorder...

Its been like 2 years since I decided on that rule and I'm lot happier gamer.

First of all, spending $60 on a broken product doesn't mean you've lost the money. You can get a refund, problem solved. So most of your argument is hyperbole.

Another reason is that people prefer something to nothing. For many people, games are unique. They want a particular game. If a game they want is broken, they would rather hope to have it fixed than move on to another game, which just won't be the same. They also understand that if enough people buy the game, the developers will likely fix it, but if no on buys it, the developers will likely move to other things, and the industry as a whole will do less ambitious projects which are more likely to succeed.