Oh, I barely buy games nowadays. I aim for games that are finished.
It’s just that a lot of problems with the gaming industry at large could be fixed if release dates weren’t announced until the game is actually release ready. It bugs me that even CS stumbles on this.
Why? "Requires high-end hardware" is not the same as "unstable trash". If they publish realistic hardware requirements, I see no deceiving of the customer base. They made an announcement ahead of release. They could have just quietly updated the system requirements or even lie but they didn't.
If the games runs solid otherwise, so no major instabilities, I see no problem with that.
To me it reads like they're not happy with where the game is right now, that they'd prefer to tweak it more. I don't expect that it'll be as disastrous as say Cyberpunk, but I'm dead tired of developers releasing games they don't view as finished because the publishers went live with a release date prematurely.
I work in software dev; if we don't finish the software on time, we don't go live with it. We might take a hit on our revenue, or we might need to ask our customer for more funding, but we don't go live with broken software.
CO is Finnish, and I think they don't crunch their employees, but lots of gaming companies do, and they use ridiculous release targets as an excuse. Crunch doesn't even work. So in the end you burn the workers and you give a worse product to the customers.
Not OP but I have 0 faith in companies to not pull the plug when they decide something isn't making them enough money. Just look at all the old games online games that have been rendered near useless thanks to the company that made it deciding that it's not profitable to support anymore. Sure, the same could happen to steam workshop too, but I have more faith that the steam workshop will be around in a decade than whatever proprietary knockoff paradox is using for CS II
So its essentially modders are only uploading their mods to the steam workshop and the versions of the game without workshop support are up shit creek without a paddle.
I admit I'm kind of guilty of this with the mods that I create and publish for stellaris. I pretty much only publish them to steam although Im given the option to upload to the paradox launcher. Personally I'd prefer to only publish through the workshop since Im used to the system, and its an easy way to get feedback on my creatons, however I can see the benefits to the ecosystem as a whole by allowing anyone who has the game to get the same mods in a bespoke mod store.
Good thing I upgraded my setup not too long ago. But I'm gonna hold off on the purchase, for a few months anyway. Wait out the first few patches and mods that will truly push the game to the next level. I like the things I've seen and trust in their long term commitment to the game but experience tells me it's not going to be all it could be straight away.