You are of course free to have a definition of "finished" different from most people. With that attitude I just hope you don't work in an area where people's lives are at stake... "Yeah that ladder is missing a few screws, but hey, I'm finished here".

For most people "finished" means "there no more work to be done".

What I described to you is not an "opinion", or "belief" it's a common standard. I love the game game, but everybody knows the flaws and bugs and problems it had at release, some of which still persist. That includes CDPR. I highly doubt the devs themselves would have called their game "finished", perhaps not even now. Pawel was talking about them working hard on improving the game's state in his streams, and that's not meaning additional content - they're simply not done. Unfinished. No two ways about it.

Yes, I have read about the issues since a couple days after the launch. (The first two days I played about 30 hours so I had no time for news.) I agree there were huge bugs, unplayable on PS4 and even PC had a lot of trouble.

The world we live in is one where pretty much all AAA games are released with huge bugs. Just because Cyberpunk 2077 had really bad ones doesn't excuse other companies. Are you trying to say that if a game releases in better shape than Cyberpunk 2077 and Fallout 76 it's all good? The major bugs don't matter as long as there's fewer than in these games? I don't really get your point.

AC Valhalla was pretty much unplayable for me when it launched. I was lucky I could play Cyberpunk 2077 without any major issues while waiting for patches for AC Valhalla. I didn't really see anything major in Cyberpunk 2077, so I guess I was lucky.

That is completely different logic.

A game is not unfinished because it has bugs. To say that is just blatantly ridiculous. A finished product is one that works as intended. Products have flaws but that doesn't make them unfinished. Call 2077 "defective" if you want but it's most certainly not unfinished.

Then comes the patching. And once you are done with that, think you are finally finished and close the project, the client/market demands an MT. (Maintenance build.)

MTs can't always be avoided. Especially if the software has security features and some country you do business with changes their, say, privacy laws. (I'm looking at you, California SB-327 -- especially 1798.91.04 subdivision b, amirite?)

Umm... A product with bugs works as intended?

Did CP77 work as intended at release? Does it now (to what percentage?)?

What I wrote is actual logic... what you wrote... is not. Not even "different" logic.

Again - your point was that a game that has all the (declaredly) intended content is "finished", somehow no matter the state the product was in. That was exactly your point "It's not unfinished, because all the content is there". Which, for most people, and most developers, simply is not true. We call that state "feature complete". We call a product finished when it reliably works as intended in a acceptable percentage of cases (exact numbers differ - a game with a few glitches may be acceptable, a flight computer rather not).

Finished means "We can stop working on it (unless a new issue crops up)." Everything before that is "unfinished", because - how hard can it be - the work is not done yet.
Yeah support and maintenance are certainly an important part. But it's a different project in our case. The product is "finished" when the customer has signed the acceptance (based on their criteria). If we applied JF's criteria (finished when all features are present, no matter the state) we'd go out of business soon...

Estimating the actual state of completion is also important for the business. You can't call a product finished and done and then spend months to fix it - who pays for that?
For cases where we have to change things because of external factors like you described we usually have support contracts which cover the costs. It happens quite often in our business.

"Works as intended", referring to the fact that the game is as they designed it. It's a fully playable game. It merely has bugs. There's no such thing as a perfect or bug-free game so the logic that a buggy game is unfinished is just blatantly flawed.

*Yawns*

Well, since you choose to ignore any argument I wrote above and just keep repeating your non-logical claim like a broken record, I'm finished here. It's like discussing with a "trve believer"...

Oh no, I was using actual logic as well, but you were the one to ignore it. If you're a developer, good for you, but you don't seem to realize that the average consumer isn't going to view things the same way. So yeah, we're done discussing this. To reiterate: a finished game is one that can be played, front to back. That's finished. "Finished" does not mean "perfect" or "there's nothing else we could add" because there's no such thing as a perfect game and there's ALWAYS more things you can add to a video game, especially one of this sort.

So, when big DLCs?

When they're ready.

My original estimate was by the holiday season this year but I'm thinking the first expansion will probably be sometime next year. That said, I'll bet that the next gen upgrade and a free DLC pack will drop for the game's one-year anniversary. After that, I'd estimate first quarter of 2022 for the first expansion but don't quote me on that.