has anyone noticed a trend where videogame companies' messaging says things like "after listening to user feedback, we're going to add [x] in an upcoming patch" where [x] is a feature they had clearly planned (sometimes even advertised) before release and had to cut because it wasn't finished in time for launch
There's a period between when a game goes "gold" (is sent to the printers for publication) and when the game becomes available of about six weeks. During this period, developers still squash bugs, and those fixes go into a "day one" patch. But crucially, the first day a reasonably popular AAA title becomes available, players have already spent more time with the game than QA has done during the entire development cycle. That's thousands upon thousands of players scraping against every rough edge in the game versus a handful of dedicated QA people over a period of months or even years.
This means that if you ship a bug that occurs 0.1% of the time, and you have 1 million players (dead game, etc.) then you will have exactly 1000 angry posts on the Steam forums about "the buggiest game of all time." And they can't believe the devs didn't fix these issues in the day one patch either!
But that's not even considering balancing tweaks! Any modern AAA game worth their money will have a firehose of data from all their players being analyzed by game designers and shivers business analysts.
To bring this back a bit, indeed, most of the time game features announced as "listening to consumer feedback" are planned months in advance. But sometimes, those notes mean that the graphs are all in the red, and we have to DO SOMETHING RIGHT NOW