And this is where Steam can help or hurt us: Firaxis (or rather their masters at 2K) know exactly how many people are playing Civ V. If those numbers nose-dive after the first few patches, they will have little reason to invest more money, and will just leave the game as it is. Scary thought.
Then I'm glad this decision it's not up to you, cos you clearly have no idea of how to run a successful business, if you think this way.
To leave a game broken and unpatched, specially a game with a massive fan base as Civ series, is to declare suicide. PC game players aren't the dumbest people in the world, you see? We remember, and we remember well.
Besides, if a company starts to fu** up their fan base, the ones who buy the game even with its faults, expecting that they will be corrected, you can no doubt see the piracy rate of future releases improving, for no one will be willing to pay for high-probability broken games.
Again: company suicide.
And in the gaming world it's not enough that the developers dissolve and join other ranks. Today almost every decent review site keep track of who's who, where's everybody and what are they doing. So there's no releasing a crappy game for Fireaxis, be a major failure and just move on to another company to release another game.
Wait. who said civ3 was a disaster?? I spent nearly 600 hours over the previous 8 months on it and wasn't dissapointed at all. (I used to play the vanilla version too 8 years ago but i don't remember much)
It is the game release that was classified as a disaster. When Civ 3 was released it suffered with bugs that cuted out the pleasure of gameplay the same way we are seeing Civ 5 doing. After patches, it became a good game that I also enjoyed.
