They knew what they were doing. They most certainly reached a point where they realized they wouldn't deliver on the hype and speculation they were generating, so they had the option to either tell people before launch it to dial back expectations, or to double down to sell more and assume people will get over it. They even went as far as not send out review copies before launch so their fans had no warning to cancel their preorders.

This is not the first or will it be the last game to fail to deliver on promises, but the game was practically designed to sell around broken promises. The backlash was understandable, and simply more than they expected. My surprise is that the article doesn't read of regret for making poor decisions but more of victimhood like they didn't deserve the backlash.

The biggest thing they didn't consider about is the fact that there's a large subset of gamers that have tons of time but not a lot of money, so the money is incredibly important to them and when they're duped into buying something like that which drastically didn't deliver, they have a lot of time to spend to make other peoples lives miserable. Just imagine how angry these people got.