Online sentiment has drastically changed about how bad those broken promises were - a near-complete turnaround, similar to what happened with No Man's Sky. Basically from when the DLC was released, most people started feeling that they fulfilled the essence of everything that was promised.
IMO Cyberpunk is fundamentally not the game their marketing promissed. They marketed it as actually non-linear RPG and beyond very beginning of the game they just could't deliver on it.
After tons of patches and DLCs its just became a very very good game. Just not what was promissed.
Yet those niche nolife hardcore fans is exactly what makes or breaks games. If 10,000 unhappy hardcore fans will go around pouring shit on your game and company then you likely never get 1,000,000 players who could've potentially liked it.
Nolife hardcore fans will also be the the first to buy your game, review it and tell everyone if they did not liked it.
CDPR got huge amount of trust after Witcher 3 and they mostly had to start over after CP2077 release.
EA can survive if 4/10 of their games flops completely, but company like CDPR will likely just end there.
Pre orders are _for that game_ so they count as success for that game, and also may people were still buying it bugs and all. I reckon without Witcher 3 cash flow they’d have survived still anyway, it may not have even been as big a factor as you think.
