It's more of a problem with the publishers and greedy executives not the actual developers they just do what they are told to do and have to make a game with unreasonable deadlines which often leads to cutting corners and buggy releases.

So that people will be convinced they can make good games and thus become more likely to be a recurring customer?

You think that marketing can compensate for weak development?

No Man's Sky.

Reputation matters.

While there are certainly some people who will mindlessly buy Game X+1 from a developer, there are others who get burned by developers and don't give them the same trust. On a large enough scale, this can shift a game's sales enough to effect overall profits.

To use your exact example of Battlefield 2042, EA investors and upper management were NOT happy about the sales figures. Management declined to comment on the sales figures in an investor call, and given how much money EA spent marketing the game they might very well have lost money, even with the relatively large sales numbers.

Depends on the past buisness of the developer. If they are independent they need to be perfect as possible. If tgey are a Triple A company, they can get away with it and apologize in post.

Because there is no such thing as "enough money".

Longevity is the reason. You can grab cash by pumping out bad games and relying on notoriety/marketing to net you sales, but it only works a few times before people (customers) start remembering how they got burned before and stop buying. Once that happens, even producing an absolute banger of a game sometimes isn't enough to bring you back from the brink of shutdown.

Mobile games are a very different story.

Battlefields issue was not a lack of effort but a misplacement of energy. They convinced themselves that bigger is better and focused on the shit nobody actually likes/cares about.

Yes, but it’s a long time horizon thing that investors and corporate leaders sometimes ignore.

Sure you can sell this turd with a huge marketing budget, but consumers won’t be fooled repeatedly by the same franchise.

Look at a recently perennially bad franchise like Need for Speed. Steaming pile after steaming pile selling on the nostalgia of Most Wanted and finally sales collapsed. The IP is badly tarnished and now even a hypothetical good NFS game has a low sales ceiling because nobody trusts EA to deliver.

Nah selling base game is like a tip now. Microtransactions are the main course. Or not i am not expert on anything