I know from a study that the "trust" we give someone can be compartmentalized into four sub-categories:
1. (Perceived) Competence: CDPR's perceived competence was great, just look at The Witcher 3 (and the two others, at least in my opinion).
2. Consistence: They consistently delivered great games and they kept getting better. Their promises (no paid dlc, only "real" expansions) were true... (until CP 2077)
3. Showing true interest in the thing you're doing: Well, they obviously always throw those people into marketing interviews, who really care, like Miles Tost or Pawel Sasko. Al these people genuinely seemed excited.
4. Transparent and Well-Coordinated Actions: The Keanu Reeves-reveals-release-date-moment was the high-point of this: It all seemed to come together perfectly. Only after the long silence and then postponing the release more than one time: At the latest then we could have started to lose trust.
But we didn't because the other three were too strong.
Now they've lost a lot of that trust. I'm sorry for that, I love their games and CP 2077 is a good game. But its marketing was just too deceitful... They should have been more open about what they can't do and release it as Early Access. But they wanted to be a big player and big players don't do Early Access.
Completely agree. It was a mix of those factors and I'll also add that the timing was really right as companies like Activision-Blizzard who were seen as pillars of the gaming industry were already losing more and more faith from the customers because of their greedy practices and out of touch and cold corporate messages, CDPR came in with messages like "It'll come out when it's ready" or "We leave greed to others", heavily playing on the lack of trust in companies and presenting themselves as the big pillar of honesty(\transparency), quality and customer-oriented business practices.
While major AAA companies were allowing games to go out in the span of 2-3 years with game-breaking bugs and day 1 patches, CDPR seemed like the company that would wait even more than a decade to make sure the game came out and was for the most part a smooth and complete experience with no "cash shops" in the game or no intention to put microtransactions in them which also greatly gave them the favour and attention of other gamers.
Then the entire thing that happened with No Man's Sky repeated itself. The more time went on the more people started to speculate what kind of monumental game experience they were gonna deliver. Talks about the branching Life Paths and how they would affect players experiences adding a lot to replayability were going on. Players were talking about how gangs were going to be handled and how cool vehicles and customization shown was. They were speculating about how deep the RPG aspects would go from the player model changing to owning houses or having a side-management component like V getting passive money by managing side-activities and so on.
The more time passed the more expectations started getting higher and higher.
So, in CDPR's defence they could've never met those expectations BUT they also grossly oversold what they were doing. Starting with how barren Life Paths are and how shallowly they affect the experience (I remember a post saying that 2% of the decisions are affected meaningfully by them while the rest is just either a sentence that does nothing or straight up has nothing to do with Life Paths).
Same goes with how badly the "It'll come out when it's ready" statement aged and how badly "We leave greed to others" also aged because of all the shady antics going on before the launch starting with reviewers being able to use only pre-released footage for their reviews and the egregious "It works surprisingly well" statement about how the game ran on PS4 and Xbox one.
So yeah, a lot of trust was put on CDPR, too much trust and a lot of is the fault of gamers becoming over-excited and hyped about how the product would turn out (setting themselves up for disappointment, in a way) BUT part of the blame goes also on the marketing and interviews done by CDPR.
Then again, it's very possible they had contractual obligations that forbade them from speaking ill of the game or, more possible, from saying anything that could hurt the sales (a practice I really dislike) along with deadlines that they could negotiate to have extended only to a certain extent since investors want their quick returns (for which we also have the news that CDPR lied to investors so even them are not entirely to blame).
TL;DR - In the end, customers (gamers in this case) are just regular people and while being intelligent (possibly) they're prone to put faith towards somebody or something (in this case a company) that proved time and time again to not only deliver good products but care about them.
In doing so, though, the more the product seemed incredible the more they hyped themselves up and set up for disappointment but the blame for this is not entirely on them.
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