Terraria's devs have been trying to stop developing Terraria for years

From the article:

> "After twelve years the game still sells like hot cakes," Spinks tweeted. "There is so much demand it makes it hard to move on."

I don't think your observation applies here.

Software economics can be a bit weird. I believe I've bought 3 licenses for "No Man's Sky" across 2 systems for around $40 total because I seem to have caught it at the right time. It's rather famous for under-delivering at launch but it seems that they sold so many copies and have a small team and have just kept iterating over the years to deliver on the initial promise and then some. So I think I got a great value and I bet that Hello Games still made lots of money.

I'd say that Minecraft is probably the most amazing value in that I paid $30ish for it in 2011 and it has been developed and added to ad nauseum ever since. I'm sure it helps that it became a cultural phenomenon of its own with all kinds of merchandise.

I suppose people latch onto those and get some unrealistic expectations (I currently make my living from SaaS, so I certainly understand the work that goes into a hosted product).

I mostly still prefer the old way of gaming though - give me a finished executable that I run locally and maybe a couple bugfixes here and there, but basically just leave it alone. You don't buy a painting from an artist and then expect them to keep changing it once it's done.

Perhaps those comments are from younger gamers that have grown up with "live service" and free-to-play games that constantly get new content (like fortnite, destiny 2, League of legends)? Someone that grew up on those would not realize that is not typical video game economics.

> 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.

Those comments probably come from people used to early access and not really finished 1.0 releases. With those, checking for updates is a good way of measuring chance of a finished release just like checking recent commits in a git repo.

In the other hand there's people disappointed with devs moving on from finished projects in a healthy way. For example lots of people are in the Noita community. It's not bad to wish for more content of something you like.

That being said there's probably a crazy guy making death threats if there are no more Noita updates but those do not represent the community at large, just as the comments you link don't probably represent those communities.

Yet many of these same people complain about adding things that would sustain long term development of said game. Paid DLCs and purely cosmetic micro transactions are met with derision, despite them being completely unnecessary to enjoy the base game while providing the developers a continued source of income that is necessary to continue development.