Definition: Given a real-life anecdote of a complex ethical situation, generate a suitable title that describes the main event/root cause of the situation. Imagine that the given text is a social media post, and you have to write the title of the post, so the users can decide to read the main text or not.
Input: For the record, this happened about 7 months ago, but from what I'm seeing nobody else in the game's community has ever criticized the developer for this, nor has the developer ever acknowledged this.

So a while back (about 7 months ago, like I said), an indie fighting game I enjoy playing released and update with two new DLC characters for purchase. One was relatively well-polished, perhaps a bit too strong, but it was clear that the developers had tested him rather thoroughly and that he was in a state ready for release. The other... about as polished as 12-grit sandpaper.

It's hard to go into detail without explicitly revealing the game or the developer, but take my word for it when I say the character was a buggy, unbalanced mess. She had a move that could easily be abused in a way that could kill almost anyone from 0 damage after landing it just once, making it completely overpowered. At the same time, almost every other move she had was incredibly underpowered, making it so that players had no choice but to use the overpowered move if they didn't want to be completely crushed. (Note that this isn't just my opinion; just about everyone, including the people I was arguing against, agree that this character was a complete mess on release day.)

These were on top of numerous bugs, and even crashes related to the patch as a whole, one in particular making so that one of the most popular adapters for one of the most popular controllers used by the community just *outright stopped working*.

Shortly before the update, the lead developer had started a week-long trip to Hawaii with his family. He gave the very small group of beta testers for the game only ONE day to test the second character before she released, whereas the first had been available to them for a few months by that point. This being an indie game, *he* was the one who decided to organize things this way; not any publisher, not some board of directors, just this one guy. Some tired to argue that the developer worked hard and deserved a break, excusing the vacation's timing. While I agree that him taking a vacation is not an issue in of itself, he had total freedom to delay his product as long as he needed in order to finish it, but he chose to shove it out the door right before he'd be gone for a full week. This caused a some significant problems for the other dev team members, as they were unable to start working on a new patch without the lead developer, leaving the players with a buggy mess of a game for over a week.

Now to his credit, the lead developer did get to work on fixing things as soon as he got home from Hawaii, but he was completely silent about the situation. Going through his posts on Twitter, Reddit, and the game's official Discord server, you'd think that the whole thing never happened. The community seemed to just forget the issue as well as soon as the new patch came out a few days later. I'll admit I didn't even think much about it at the time, but now I really wish I had.

After taking a break from the game for a few months, I came back and realized the lead developer seemed to have mostly gotten away with this without any real consequences I could see. The character he released was in a much, much better place, and the controller issues had long since been fixed, but I couldn't help but feel that the fact that the developer didn't seem to have anything to say over his decisions didn't seem right to me. The game is not an early access/beta title, but it is still being actively developed, and has a bonus/deluxe edition and Nintendo Switch port coming out sometime next year. In my eyes, because the lead developer sold us unfinished content once and never seemed to show any sort of regret over it it, the community should be skeptical of those future releases and and any other games he makes further down the line, because he can get away with doing it again if people will pay for it anyway.  Now when I tried and tell people in the game's community all this, they defended him and claimed I was being unreasonable.

Paraphrased, the arguments they used against me included:

* Because it's been 7 months now, it's no longer relevant to bring up.
* The issues with the character have been fixed, so it doesn't matter if they were released in a bad state or not.
* The lead developer has learned his lesson, and the proof is that he has since released another DLC character that was actually finished and much more polished than the previous one.
* If the lead developer addressed it now, it'd just create a lot unnecessary drama, which will distract him from further improving the game.
* I'm focusing far too much on the negative and should be grateful for the good things the developer has done.
* The DLC was only $5, so it's not worth getting worked up over.

And my respective counter arguments are:

* The topic is still relevant to the game's continued development and upcoming re-releases. What happened 7 months ago with that highly anticipated character can happen again with the new editions/ports if we let the developers get away with it, and it'll be our money on the line.
* We were still sold an incomplete character. Even if they're much more polished now, we didn't pay for a polished character six months from release. We paid for a complete character the day it was released.
* Just because the lead developer released *one* good character after selling us a blatantly unfinished one doesn't mean he learned anything, especially since that particular character is licensed from a third party, so there was more reason to make them not complete garbage at launch in order to stay friendly with the original owners. Unless the developer himself explicitly says he won't do it again, we won't know whether or not he will.
* If people react badly to what he did, he probably deserves it. It's not right to knowingly sell people a product that isn't finished while pretending that it is finished. And as far as distracting him, I'll bet money that any real conflict caused by an apology would go away after about two weeks at the longest. Honestly, by the end of it he even might get praise for admitting to a poor decision.
* I focus on the negative because this wasn't just some simple mistake, but a very deliberate decision on the part of the lead developer. It's true that the developer has far more good on his track record than bad, but it was him who decided it was a good idea to release that character as they were and charge his fans for them. If he was willing to do that to people who are so incredibly loyal to him and his game, that gives plenty of reason to be skeptical of his business practices in the future.
* It's not very expensive, sure, but $5 is still $5. Besides, there's still the moral issue of misleading your customers even if the cost is low. The character was presented as finished in the trailer they made for them, despite that not at all being the case. Regardless of the price, if you take someone's money and don't provide what you said you would, it's not right.

In the end the debate went nowhere and I was told to just drop it, but I can't but feel baffled by how much these people are defending this developer. I'm pretty sure a more well known studio would get roasted alive over something like this, but people just don't seem to care, or get genuinely upset by the idea of being critical of this developer. Are my arguments valid? Am I the asshole for thinking that we should criticize and be skeptical of the developer?

calling out an indie game developer for going on vacation while releasing and charging money for unfinished/unpolished content