I mean, I think it just demonstrates that the problem is not on a development level, but rather on a project management and (particularly) an executive level.

Crunch and unreasonable deadlines in the gaming industry are the norm, and there's too much pressure from higher up to deliver a product as soon as possible, even if it isn't 100% ready.

Unfortunately, there's no real good answer for this as a consumer... If the game does well, the execs who set the deadlines pocket the profits. If it does poorly, the developers who worked on it bear the brunt of it by either getting insufficient raises, an even higher level of pressure on the next game, or at worst, get laid off.

The real answer would be widespread industry unionization. Efforts to do this are ever-so-slowly being made, but it's not even remotely close to being a reality. I'd say that if the game appeals to you and you don't mind performance issues at launch, buy it, but if not, then don't.

It’s possible some machines power through it. Just don’t preorder it and wait until you know it will work for you.

Should I buy the game because they were honest? Or should I not buy it, because, well, they were honest? I’m confused.

Wait for the release and reviews. Then decide if you want to buy the game or not.

the game will be optimized eventually. if you want to wait until then, do so. me, I just want to play this. I don't care I've been waiting a long time for this game, and I have a very powerful desktop PC so I don't really care.

I am upset they do not have a native Linux build this time around, however. And I don't care that proton has gotten good, a game like this needs to run natively to get the full experience. The first one did and Unity makes it trivially simple to export builds to other operating systems.

It sucks, on one hand I'd prefer a delay so they can release what they're happy with - but on the other this is a developer that I know and trust to continue working to make things better for a long time. For many other games this would leave a bitter taste, but for this one it's a bit of a shrug for me.

And has 3 DLCs

Yes but the expansions for basic features will still total several hundred.

Have you watched any of the feature highlights and accompanying dev talks? Visually speaking, the game looks worse in a lot of really bizarre ways, but the actual city simulation gameplay looks like it’s been much improved. There really wasn’t anything groundbreaking, but they added a lot of the depth that’s been seen in older Sim City titles, as well as what looks like an actually currency based economic model, as opposed to the shallow approximation of an economy that existed in Cities Skylines. They also added the frankly crucial changes to traffic AI that was added to CS1 via mods, into the base game. It looks like as far as the city simulation goes, CS2 will be a solid improvement and there have been a couple well known CS1 YouTubers that seem to confirm that.

That being said, I fully expect this game to look rough and maybe perform even rougher at release, but it does at least look like I definitely wouldn’t recommend anyone buy this at launch unless they pull some big improvements out of their asses which judging by this statement, they don’t plan to, but it is also releasing on gamepass…

Sry, release date sales are already on the book

Why not?