> developers “abandoning” games I think it's valid to complain, or at least hold the developers accountable, in at least two cases. You mention one of them but

> developers “abandoning” games I think it's valid to complain, or at least hold the developers accountable, in at least two cases. You mention one of them but I'll throw my 2c in anyway. Case 1. Releasing an early-access game, promising a bunch of new things, not able to deliver on those promises, take the game out of early access and release 1.0 as-is (often with no explanation). Later the game will go on sale heavily discounted as the developer attempts to extract as much as they can from it. There is an inherent buyers risk with early-access as the developer has no obligation to fix the issues with early-access or indeed ever release a full game. The solution here is often stop buying games in early-access, as this problem is very often not limited to a few devs but much like startups, many early-access games have lofty goals and very few of them tend to meet those goals. Case 2. Game is released and has a huge amount of game-breaking bugs. Particularly infuriating bugs for players will be things like crash-to-desktop and lose all your progress kind of bugs, or inexplicable performance bugs. I think graphical glitches (eg. Bethesda-style immersion breaking animation bugs) are far less of an issue vs. these kind of "you just lost an hour of your life because of this crash" or better yet, "save file is corrupt" kind of bugs which riddle some titles. In these cases I absolutely think it is fair to call it out when the developer has not been able to publish a working product. In general I don't think that people feel entitled to an update, I read these kind of statements more as a warning to other potential buyers. Steam is a marketplace after all. It can be read as both "well what you see is what you get, because updates are few and far between for this title" or "steer clear entirely from this bug-ridden mess, spend your pennies elsewhere". In some rare cases you will see games that the developer has managed to turn around and I'm not sure if they would've been motivated to do so if it weren't for wanting to clear their names in the negative feedback. Edit: I forgot to work in this additional point so I'll add it here. The complaints can also serve as warnings about particular devs who tend to do the same thing over and over again. Seeing it happen for one title is one thing. Seeing it happen multiple times over from the same dev and you start to notice a pattern of over-promise and under-deliver, you can make a more informed decision.