I feel like having the early access label makes me more apprehensive about buying a game because of the amount of abandoned early access titles I own and being wary of it not having an ending. In the case of No Man’s Sky I feel like I would be less grateful for all the content adding updates. I might view it as just working towards a completed project rather than doing something nice for the community or doing it out of passion.
Buying a broken game does make me a lot less likely to buy new games from a developer immediately after the release.
Other examples could be Cyberpunk 2077, Fallout 76, Halo MCC, and the remastered Grand Theft Auto trilogy.
Well, the issue with those games is that they’re already played-out by the time they hit 1.0, at least that’s how it works for me with 7 Days To Die. Maybe there’s some new stuff I haven’t seen yet, but I already saw most of what the game has to offer in terms of gameplay and I don’t feel like picking it up again. Might be a general issue with games that spend a lot of time in early access.
With No Man’s Sky the difference might be that there barely was anything to do after release, so many people probably dropped it after maybe 10 hours.