> Not that they wouldn't mess up all the time...

Sounds like being required to ship a "complete working game" didn't matter much. Weird.

> And paid expansions were often the size of a whole game by themselves.

And many were not. Plus, if we ignore shovelware -both past and present- most games these days are way larger than they were back in the day.

Have you ever gone back and played those old games you fuzzily remember through a haze of nostalgia? Many of them [0] would be derided as low-effort asset flips [1] these days. Many of the NMS updates (and tragically many updates to other games) definitely would qualify as "expansion pack"-sized. Some updates are big enough to be whole-ass overhauls. It's _nuts_ how much work some industrious indie game devs put into their games.

It's fine to be angry at how the circumstances of NMS's launch, and be sore that Hello Games is getting any praise after all that. But it's dishonest to refuse to recognize both that a very vocal subset of gamers expects that games will come with months and years of substantial post-release changes provided free-of-charge and that many devs -for better or worse- provide what these folks are demanding.

[0] ...but definitely not all of them...

[1] Granted, all sorts of things get called "asset flips", so the "low-effort" part is the important bit here.

Always having some instance of someone messing up is still substantially different from more instances than not being messed up. So it did actually matter quite a lot.

Now, as someone who is an avid retro gamer, I play plenty of those old games you're talking about. In the very old days, games were definitely shorter, but by the 5th and 6th gen, the gap isn't quite as big. If anything, they're often too large now, but that's neither here nor there. Budgets are bigger, teams are bigger, and most importantly, the consumer base is bigger. So size of games and expansions needs to be looked at relatively.

Regardless, for non-early access (of which NMS is an example of in all but name) and non-live service games, there mostly isn't an expectation that content will be added, only that updates will be made that improve and fix what's there. The exceptions are mostly when there's a pattern of content uodates happening before, or when something is clearly incomplete compared to what's usual for a series. See the Monster Hunter series as an example for both the latter ones.

Overall, it's natural for customers to want things that are at least as good or better than before when technology improves. It's the opposite that should not be happening.