Stupid gamers, expecting games to work!

Deputy CEO at Paradox recently lamented that modern players these days
have too "high expectations" and are weirdly less trusting that
developers will fix problems in their games. This from the company
that released "Cities Skylines 2" onto the market in very rough shape
(and, a year later, still hasn't been completely fixed). He uses this
as an excuse why "Prison Architect 2" is being delayed indefinitely.

Yeah, it's the players who are to blame here. How dare we buy a game
and then gripe when its full of bugs and missing features?
High-expectations? That a product function as promised? Excuse me,
that's _ordinary_ expectations.

And I don't think that attitude is new to gamers. This has been an
issue with games since day one; I think the big difference now is that
gamers now have more of an option to be vocal about it, and we have a
lot more evidence of how common the problem it is, and how little
publishers care. More so, gamers now have more options; there's such a
glut of games that if one is a buggy mess, you can more easily move to
the next (especially since, with the plethora of free options, the
price of moving to the next title is often incredibly low).

"But we need to release the games early in order to get player
feedback and balancing just right" is a common counter-argument... and
it would hold water if gamer's weren't paying for the privilege of
being beta testers. Once money changes hands, there's a completely
reasonable expectation that the product will work.

To be fair, Paradox is apparently trying to take these lessons to
heart, and -as the recent delay of Prison Architect 2 shows - aren't
depending on fan's devotion to make up for shoddy releases. But that
attitude that fans are somehow in the wrong for decrying a buggy and
incomplete product just shows how broken the industry is. For decades
publishers have foisted bad products on gamers, and expected them to
just take it. Only now that players have an option to say 'no, I don't
think so', they're crying foul.