When running a brand new game most savvy gamers don't expect 120fps 4K HDR native on an 3+ year-old hardware. But they might reasonably expect 60fps at 2K native. So, apparently, the CEO - or the PMs that report to him - decided to ship with a performance level which surprised their customers negatively. The most obvious mistake here is if they weren't very clear and upfront with the fact it would require an unusually high spec system and/or synthetic pixel/frame gen to reach resolutions and frame rates customers might expect based on prior experience.

Performance optimization in AAA games is hard and time-consuming. Some game developers believe chasing ever higher visual fidelity will increase sales due to the 'curb-appeal' of the game play trailer. Maybe they're right but it's a double-edged sword because management loves the killer visuals but then will reduce the minimum required frame rate over slipping the schedule to permit performance optimization. Yet marketing will still insist on a game play trailer showing Ultra settings, so it ends up being made with lots of synthetic pixels and frames being inserted because they know YouTube streaming compression will hide much of the degradation. As someone who cares about visual fidelity and frame rate, I've learned to not trust YouTube streams of game play anymore and wait for a technical analysis by someone like Digital Foundry.

It's pretty clear how this keeps happening. The dumb thing is a CEO going on social media trying to argue their customers shouldn't want what they want. The right way to respond is pointing to where they made the higher system specs and requirement to use synthetic pixel & frame modes super clear in the specs, demo videos and other marketing. Synthetic generation can be useful in the right context but companies need to stop acting like it's something they don't need to fully disclose. Being either "artfully vague" or misleading in their marketing is unethical. Much like how in streaming video 'resolution' is meaningless if you don't know the bit rate, in AAA games on modern GPUs resolution and frame rate are now meaningless if synthetic generation tricks are being used.