You don't have any rights beyond those of any other customer. A healthy creator-fan relationship is beneficial to all involved, but there's no additional moral obligation there, and to claim one is to claim an entirely unjustified, narcissistic ownership of both the franchise, and the labour of the creators.
I don't know... this is a long series. Unlike most games, with an audience mainly of teens and 20somethings, I would be willing to bet Civilization has a lot more 30somethings and 40somethings who go waaayyy back than most.
By the time it's all said and done, I bet a lot of us have sent more than a grand Civ's way (recognizing Microprose isn't Firaxis isn't yada yada), when you add up all the expansions, special editions, etc. I know I have - I did the math just last night. Hell, I even bought Civ3 Play the World even though I've never played MP and had and have zero desire to do so.
That doesn't entitle me to Sid's first born.... but yeah, I do feel a bit more 'upset' about a Civ game that disappoints me than some random title that I felt was a waste of money.
For nearly 20 years -- a lot of us have plunked down our cash for every single iteration and combination under the sun. A lot of us have been the best advertising Civilization ever had -- it was we who introduced frat brothers and dorm friends to this really awesome and addictive game back when that was virtually the only way a game COULD go mainstream. It was we who, whenever a pretender came out - laughed it out of existence.
Over the course of 5 iterations and dozens of expansions (6, if you count Alpha Centauri) - it's probably safe to say we've all had our complaints. We've all had our releases that didn't immediately sit well.
However, this one really does -- to a lot of us -- feel like we've been left behind.
I'm not going to toss about inflammatory rhetoric - maybe it's not "dumbed down"... but games are definitely shorter. Maybe it's not console-ized - but it feels like there's a most definite influence... and who doesn't play this and see it how it could be popped into an xbox or PS3 in short order? Maybe it's not "lacking features - but There's definitely less to "do" on each turn. It's been streamlined -- overly streamlined moreso than other title in the series, I think.
For a lot of us, it really does feel like we just got dumped... Like after 20 years of loyal fandom and snapping up everything they could put on the shelf, the gameplay has fundamentally shifted to something quicker, sleeker, and more 'streamlined'.
I've got most of my old iterations of Civ -- excepting only I (II doesn't work very well in Vista, but you can hammer it into place). I took a walk down memory lane last night... started up games in each to try to get a real sense of the progression.
Things most certainly changed between iterations. LOTS of things changed (I almost forgot about the awesomeness of building an ironclad, then simply running up and down the coast killing every AI spearman!). Lots of concepts evolved or morphed - sometimes to the point of being entirely new concepts.
But - IV to V is the first time it feels like the game was gutted... I get it - some people thought IV was too bloated with things that were useless... but a lot of us didn't and a lot of us are suddenly wondering what just happened -- we've had 4 iterations and 20 years of constant feature ad, never/rarely feature removal. It's a shock when after all that time, we're suddenly dropped into a new world where things we used to take as givens -- keeping an individual city happy, however it was accomplished and whatever it meant to fail at that -- are just gone.