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.
Wouldn’t labeling it beta/early access imply that they’re more honest about what the game is and is not at the time of its release into early access/beta? Not as much reason to lie if you already said that it will take a couple of years before it’s done. Of course, you can still overstate your plans …
They showcased a LOT of features that only existed in a demo version, stated plainly that they existed in the full game (as opposed to “this is something we WANT to add but right now it only works in the demo…”). Same in interviews: he went into great detail about features that didn’t exist.
NMS was like being advertised a brand new Lamborghini, charged for a brand new Lamborghini, then being given a 2003 Honda Civic.
That’s not something early access or beta would have fixed. Might have reduced the scale of community’s negative response simply by limiting the number of purple who would have bought it, but those who made the purchase and then realized they were scammed would have been just as upset.