Yeah. That's a great idea.
I wasn't entirely surprised by the state of the launch. They did a good job of hiding it with things like restricting the influencers to the early stages of the game, but I'd picked up on the performance issues from what wasn't being shown, plus some of that was exposed right before launch. There also were hints that it was unfinished in the tone of some of the final hour influencer takes. Further dampening my expectations, while I'd hoped that being Colossal Order instead of one of the more in-house Paradox teams would protect us, "incredibly broken" is pretty much every Paradox launch, not just the recent duds. It's just that most of their games are these huge, complex, ambitious strategy games and masochistic strategy gamers like me can still bask in the scope of what they do and enjoy it and ignore the fact that the wheels fall off after your first one or two dozen hours of play. Some eventually get better, many don't, but even a bad Paradox game is probably getting at least 40 hours of play out of me. Cities: Skylines is a different kind of beast than something like CK, EU, HoI, etc, though, and with a different community built around it.
Still, it was worse than I expected. What has especially surprised and disappointed me is how incredibly slow and stumbling their progress in patching it has been, and the way the flow of fixes shut off for the holidays- so shortly after a massively broken launch!- and remains basically stopped almost half a year later. How far all of the planned additions are getting pushed back is surprising, too. Their communication also isn't hot, and I'm getting really sick of the "the community is sooooooooo toxic" whines from developers who release broken games- I think I've seen four in the past twelve months. Yes, the community is toxic and it sucks, but you're always going to find that for anything big on the internet. As they say, don't read the comments. The reason the community toxicity in your case so prevalent and highly visible, OTOH, was directly caused by your decision to rush out broken crap to meet financial objectives. Less finger wagging for something you're also partially responsible for, more patches, please.
In the rear view mirror, the big PR they pushed before launch feels super dishonest. Calling it early access would have been a way better way to spin it, manage community expectations, and be more honest about the state of the thing they're releasing.
