RoF released in much worse of a train-wreck state with only 4 flyable aircraft and a bunch of limitations
by design plus equally frustrating hardware/optimization issues and two years on, there's people that swear by it.
Ditto for DCS A-10, whose developers were smart enough to say "you are not buying the final version, you just get access to the open beta because you pre-ordered".
In fact this is the only thing 1C should have done, call this an open beta and make it available to people who pre-order. They would still get a lot of funds because we're impatient and we'd like to try it out, we would still be flying it in it's current incomplete state and having loads of fun with the new features when it works as advertised, we'd still be submitting bug reports left and right and building a community-driven knowledge base, etc.
The only thing that would change is that the bitching would be less or even non-existent, because people would actually feel privileged to play the current buggy release if they were told that "you are not a buyer, you are a dedicated fan getting an advance preview thanks to your preorder and a beta tester that will helps us perfect this".
See, this is how gamers are, they like their status symbols enough that you could serve them almost anything and they would accept it, as long as you can make them think they are somehow in advance of the rest of pack.
