Best I can tell, they didn't take preorders or Kickstarter funds. Just did a release. Seems like their old plans didn't pan out and their old marketing doesn't align with what they did release after they scaled back due to almost cancelling the whole thing at some point. From watching Sacriel play a bit yesterday, it's definitely not an amazing game, has typical issues with the genre (e.g. not enough AI, extract camping) in addition to other typical poor game issues (e.g. poor ui, tooltips, latency).

Seems like a lot of the backlash is due to failing to meet its own hype, plus people continuing to buy games without consulting release version reviews and feeling burned, and added to the general cultural frustration of things being released before they're actually ready.