I recall the last game I preordered and played the first day of release...
Call of Duty:World at War
Top tier developer. Top tier publisher. Buggy, glitchy, unoptomized, laggy. Sound familiar? Yep. Same goes for every other PC game I've played in the last 10 years, in the early days of their releases. But what always happens? Over the period of the next few months everything starts to smooth out and eventually things are where they should be.
For the game to be "perfect" at launch you'd have to have an open Beta that is a year long, if not more. That's just not going to happen.
Now, I get it, the whole argument of "if I bought [product 'X'] and it didn't work I'd return it immediately" and that's your right as a consumer to do so. But perhaps some of you were setting your expectations a little *too* high, don't you think?
I also get the argument one guy brought up about how we shouldn't have to expect a glitch filled release and wait months for a series of patches to fix what we just bought. That we should demand more from game companies. What I say to that is go to a game developer studio one day when it's crunch time, be there in person and demand more... you're going to get thrown off the roof by a bunch of tired, strung-out, sweaty, hungry, red-eyed programmers.
Jokes aside, yes, as it's been said it's a lose-lose for the game company... a longer development means holding off on revenue and hearing from angry forum nerds that berate them for taking so long. And of course if they do release earlier than they should they get this kind of response, but at least they get the income from those big post-release sales... income that will help them pay for the salaries of the employees to fix the bugs that they didn't have time to do before hand.
All that said, I played this game tonight as soon as the first patch finished installing and I liked it. No, it's not smoothed out yet, but I see the potential for where it could end up, and I see a company behind it that does indeed have the want, will, AND ability to stay with their products and make them better for as long as they need to.... unlike Activision or EA developers who are forced to abandon games the moment something new is dropped on them. A year from now you will not see RO3, you'll see a highly refined and incrementally improved RO2.
Patience, A.D.D. / A.D.HiDef generation. Patience.