[johnnyanmac]

large companies don't have much incentive to use EA. The usual incentive for EA is to make a game cheaper for early users and to get important playtesting done.a big game with a big ad budget, QA testing studio, and internal playteting doesn't need to worry about that.

[solardev]

Well, in this case, they were a 30 dev company that knew the performance was going to be so bad, they had to release a warning a week before the game came out. Seems like Early Access may have been appropriate, and maybe saves the review score too.

[johnnyanmac]

I thought it would go without saying, but devs don't control the release schedule. The best best solution is to simply optimize before release but they clearly weren't given that choice.

Publishers care a lot less about review scores, and never cared strongly about user reviews. They were so polarized to begin with that Steam changed it from numeric actors to up/down (or meh). It's a long running game and scores can improve.