Well, Bethesda screwed up. And they are not idiots, so they knew that they were going to screw up, and yet they shipped a raw-ass product, and now people customers are pissed.

Let me preface this by saying that I love Bethesda. I still play Skyrim modded to high heaven, and I've put more hours into games by Bethesda than into games by any other company. I know they can do their jobs well, so it's not like they published this unplayable junk because they couldn't do better–they decided to release an untested mess.

I think there can be two reasons that can motivate someone to publish a product that is obviously not ready for public consumption. The main one is an urgent need for money, as in they were facing lay-offs because of a poorly implemented business model. Bethesda isn't like EA: they don't publish a thousand separately-priced DLCs and packages to create a constant stream of money. So when they publish, say, Skyrim, they need to be confident that the money from it will tide them over until they publish another game. It's risky, and we as players need to give companies that use Bethesda's model some leeway, because sometimes they will be overly optimistic and get starved for cash, and there is very little that can be done about that.

The other possible reason for what happened is that it's all just a giant managerial fiasco, and all the quality-assurance was somehow skipped. I don't think that's probable with an experienced company, but it's possible.

Don't get me wrong, even if Bethesda needed money, they still had no excuse to ship this poor excuse of a game and have the gall to put microtransactions into it. What the management should have done was own their overoptimism and raise additional money, because in video-game business taking such a hit to reputation is unacceptable. Yes, I'm not an insider, and finding someone willing to give you a hundred million dollars is easier said than done, but the simple fact in this high-speed communication age is that if you want to survive, you don't betray your customers. It's what kills great companies very quickly. Also, raising money after a reputation loss is much harder than before it.

And Bethesda aren't Facebook. There are other companies and other games.