As a long time customer of Star dock I was expecting bad in the beginning
You're not the first person to say this or something very similar. Buying a game that you expect to be bad just encourages developers to release bad games.
These days it's almost a given that a game will be nearly unplayable and underdeveloped on the day of release.
If no one bought those unplayable and underdeveloped games then game companies would be forced to produce better ones. Elemental had a beta period, and there were lots of people testing it. If everyone in the beta had been warning people that Elemental was not yet worth buying, then the publisher might have rethought their plan to release it before it was ready.
It's unfortunate really that games aren't sold for higher prices. I would have happily bought Civ 4 with it's Beyond The Sword expansion for a $150 without a second thought. A game you play for years at even that price is the cheapest form of entertainment a person could ever possibly hope for.
It's easy to look at a game you've enjoyed for many hours and agree that it would have been worth more than you paid for it. It's much more difficult to look at a game you've never played sitting on a store rack with a $150 price tag and conclude that you're willing to gamble that much on the hope that the game will turn out to be good. Of course people with larger entertainment budgets won't be put off by a high price as much as those with smaller ones - but generally speaking the most a company will sell to any one person is one copy of the game, no matter how large that person's entertainment budget may be. They have to price their games low enough so that the "little guys" are willing to buy it too, otherwise they won't have enough sales to cover their costs. My point is that it's not just a matter of jacking up the price to make more money, because a higher price can actually earn the company less money due to lost sales.
But I'm sick of paying $40-65 for a over hyped game I play for about a week and get tired of, never coming back to it again.
Imagine how sick you'd be if you'd paid $150 for that game. It's hard to tell before you play a game whether you will really enjoy it for months or years to come, so there's no way to eliminate this problem entirely. Not buying games based on hype is a good start, though. I've bought some bad games, and some games I've just not gotten into. That money was wasted, but also is made up for by the games that I've played for years. Honestly, I think MoO2 has cost me less than 1¢/hr, which is a very low price for quality entertainment (as you mentioned). I think we can afford to buy an occasional dud to get to the gems, as long as we don't get so complacent that we will buy anything.
It's time to very significantly raise the price we pay for games.
That we can finally, once again hold game companies to a real standard of quality.
Instead of having to give an "A" for effort.
Simply throwing more money at game companies will never force them to make better games.
Paying more money for something doesn't necessarily mean that the product will be better. Profit is the ultimate goal, and someone selling a product will gladly increase the price they charge without a corresponding increase in the quality of that product. That vendor will only increase the quality of their product when the market forces that increase. The way to force vendors to provide higher-quality products is to refuse to buy, at any price, products that are of inadequate quality. Then, in order to stay in business, those vendors will have to provide products that are of sufficient quality.
If bad games didn't sell then game companies would be forced to make good ones. Of course, the cost of doing so would be higher, and likely we would have to pay more for our games - but this would be a consequence of a change in the market, not the impetus for that change.
The most important step you can take to encourage game companies to make better games is to not pre-order them. Buying anything sight-unseen is almost never a good idea, and it sends game companies the message that we will buy anything. Instead, wait for the game to come out, check out the reviews, try a demo, read the forums, and then buy the game if its quality meets your approval.