I wonder if they even know what they did. You know who. That anonymous lower-level business advisory manager who worked at EA between 2017 and 2018. Watched what happened with No Man's Sky and Battlefront 2. Crunched the numbers, surveyed the right people, did the appropriate market research, and found out that most disturbing of truths our artform will likely never fully recover from. They figured out it's financially optimal to release a game before completion. Sure, some equations needed to be done to figure out the appropriate balance between the release date and pre-orders and on release performance and how long the game has been in development and how much marketing expenditure has gone into the release cycle and the estimated time before it's in a state considered 'good' by the populous, but the conclusion is there, and will never go away. Cyberpunk proved it even further. You can have two different 'release' hype cycles around your game, and still leave people with a good taste in their mouths, excited for more, even if you rush it out the door. It's just good business. I wonder if this person knew the damage they'd be dealing. Did it trouble them at all? Did they toss and turn a little before deciding to tell their higher-ups? Or did they not even think twice? We'll never know.

This is far from an egregious example of such. Shoddy and inconsistent frame rates and pop-in are the norm for many of our lazier AAA games, it's telling the completely stock-standard 21st Century Capcom in-app purchases are getting more of the press. People are numb to it, I am usually! In the truest essence of the human experience, I'm only so upset this time because it happened to me. I genuinely really want to play this game, it looks excellent, a truly distinct and singularly innovative piece of art. One of those rare things that can be described as 'next-gen' in a complimentary sense. So what do I even do? Do I simply purchase an unfinished product and support the active malpractice occurring here? I can't do that. Do I fall for the obvious 'second release' model and buy it when they finish it? I feel like I'm supporting the continuation of this practice if I do. Do I never buy the game? This is ethically the right call, but am I supposed to forever deprive myself of engaging with the work of artists I love because the system they work within is so awful? I don't know. The only easy answer is piracy, which in 2024 is both actively illegal and the only moral way to engage with a large proportion of all video games ever released. It's so depressing to genuinely adore the whizbang technical exploration of mega-budget pop art when 90% of current examples of such are visually miserable superhero movies and legitimately unfinished open world junk. This should be neither of those things, yet the circumstances of its release make me feel just as deflated. It's a cruel world out there sometimes.