Wi-Fi used to be a pretty common thing to not work out of the box or to break in updates. I kept a usb Wi-Fi dongle in a bag as a backup just because of this.
In Dawkins’ sense of the word, memes are ‘units of cultural inheritance’. So melodic movements in bird song, that birds teach each other, could be considered memes. Any other place you might find cultural inheritance, you could describe it in terms of memes. Memes were simply meant to be a cultural analogy to genes.
I suppose that’s true. Maybe the common factor is just it being a very highly anticipated game. But I don’t think that not being AAA constitutes an excuse for making false promises to people who already bought a game.
If this follows the cycle of No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk, it’s a matter of time before we see the first YouTube videos titled ‘Starfield is good now??’
It almost seems like releasing unfinished games is the way AAA developers crowdfund. Sure, the people who preorder get burned, but then there’s a second wave of sales waiting when the game ‘gets good’.
Drop the price of the original, but let it coincide with the release of an ‘expansion’ to offset the difference and you can sell the game again to the people who held out.
Meanwhile YouTubers rake in views, first on the wave of rage and later on that redemption arc, because people do want games to be good after all.