Surprised you mention Cyberpunk as a train wreck since it was massively successful and profitable for projekt red even after refunds from low-end platform users. They've sold over 20 million copies at $60/copy. Edgerunners also super successful for them.
The reason I mentioned Cyberpunk is because it demonstrates a massive change in brand awareness, same for 2042.
5-10 years ago publishers would just ignore outrage and fix the bare minimum quietly and then leave it alone. Think of all the major bugs just left in games in the 00s and 10s, Fallout New Vegas in particular comes to mind. That might be the single game with the worst long term support ive ever seen. They released it in even worse shape, then made it barely functional, released mod tools and never touched it again because the Obsidian & Bethesda relationship fell apart.
Today both BF2042 and Cyberpunk are going out of their way to improve their games from launch state and make a marketing effort on behalf of it to recover their brand. Gigantic difference.
