I just don't feel vulnerable in that regard. I'm almost never surprised when a game comes out broken. Usually I had a flag in my head that said this is high risk, avoid until patches, unless release shows it actually isn't broken. Most Ubisoft games fall into this category for me because I know their past behaviors. Doesn't mean all their teams are technically incompetent, just that they have a tendency as a publisher to push things out half-baked and handle technical problems badly post-launch, and they don't prioritize the stability of PC versions. Other games might have no flag, pretty confident this will work okay, reasonably safe buy on launch. Obviously there's always the occasional surprise, and there are always things one can't divine through knowledge of developer/publisher or development period, but not enough for me to worry about it. I don't put credence into what I read either because I rarely feel the need to read anything (beyond maybe a headline or two, if any happen to come up). I seem to have developed a sixth sense for most of this.
Like my read on Civ 6 prior to launch was: good developer, good track record, high profile, but a huge and complex game that's going to experiment with changing systems, and a series with a history of semi-wonky launches. Unlikely to be totally broken, also not likely to be particularly well-balanced, and low but still statistically significant chance of smallish technical problems. Likely to have solid baseline international language support, likely to have a mostly positive response from users and critics, but a few people will probably flame it to death because it's a step backward from the last version. This was about right, give or take, and I read exactly nothing on Civ 6 prior to launch. In fact, I read exactly nothing on Civ 5. I haven't cared about the series in years (I love it, I just don't feel each iteration adds enough for me to get excited about blowing more money on it, so I tend to skip several iterations ... loved 1, loved 3, feeling the itch now to play 6). But I still felt entirely on safe ground making every assumption about Civ 6 that I made just based on probabilities. I don't think your average game player can do that confidently, which is why so many reactions to broken games are shock and dismay. I hope it doesn't sound like I'm bragging or something, I just feel like the industry is pretty readable to me at this point without needing a firsthand report on everything. It can often be safely predicted within a reasonable margin of error, I think, and that makes me feel fairly safe if I decide to take a risk on a launch product.
