I don't think they truly understand their audience. Everything before the endgame is just a tutorial in MH. Yet, they usually ship the endgame with the DLC .
I'm famously a World hater, so yes, absolutely. Until Icebourne released, I was extremely disappointed with World, even for a pre-G Rank release.
Though, all of the titles since Generations have had the problem of being released with a portion of the planned content missing. I was more forgiving of it before, though I am having a hard time pinpointing why.
I swear "review bombing" has to be an astroturfed term to delegitimize criticism when companies do shitty things.
It shifts the blame from the companies doing a shit thing (lacing their game with DRM/anti-cheat malware, making them run like shit unless you enable AI slop upscaling, shoveling AI """art""" assets, MTX, etc.) to the customers that are rightly mad about the shit thing.
They think it literally does not matter, and sales kinda reinforce this. The game was an enormous hit on release, but I think it gradually eats away at the faith of the customers as their experience falls to shit in the endgame where the rushed development is glaringly obvious. That's gotta add up and will eventually have an impact cause they sure as shit aren't learning the right lessons. Always remember the best outcome for the top deciders is the quickest biggest buck, and they will throw ANYTHING under the bus that challenges that. Especially thoughtful and rich game design which takes time and love to produce right.
I don't think it eats away the faith. Capcom fixes the performance and endgame before the next release, everyone remembers only the final product. Capcom releases a poorly optimized game with bad endgame. It's a massive hit. Eventually people start complaining. Capcom fixes the game and the cycle continues.
People could've learned from the launch of World but people remember only the final update and final update World is great.
It's Capcom, they have no intentions of "fixing it" or "turning it around" because the execs either don't care or no ones told them of the "overwhelmingly negative" reviews on steam. They'll just shut it down like they have previous games. They won't see it as people are not playing it because it's not good they'll just see it as people are not playing it so that must mean it's at it end of life so we should shut it down.