there are a couple issues:
1. The more they show, the more there is for people to crit and complain about. So youre damned no matter what you show off other than a logo as an announcement.
It might suit them better to TELL and not SHOW these days, which is typically the reverse of what everyone knows. By telling they can still feed the mongrel gamers information without worry of viral complaints. By showing they are just inviting unneeded and uninformed scrutiny.
Of course the saying bad press is better than no press, but you still need to weigh the costs... No press and no hivemind bandwagon feedback keeps the game on schedule and within budget or negative press and spend $$$ remaking parts of your game to appease the masses for nitpicking, while extending deadlines, outsourcing, overworking, PRing to cover up the "bleamishes", etc.
2. If youre not ready to show off your game...then dont show it off. A global game convention is not the place to debut an aspirational exemplary faux snippet of what you HOPE and strive towards for your end product to be. If you have some finished product, fine show it off, because ya know, its finished. It wont be changed no matter how much people bitch about it. Of course, that not what the pubs and suits want now is it? Because......
3. This all comes down to business and money. The suits are forcing devs to show shit off. the suits THINK they have a handle on correct time frames for the perfect hype window with the trending genre and subject matter to be able to maximize sales and interest. Its ALL bullshit (side note: in fact as I mature through adulthood i've learned this is applicable to most companies and other aspects in life). And it impacts all aspects of the production of a game.
4. Why this is such an issue today, is largely in part to the fact that games ship undercooked. With the advent of patches, immediate feedback, and instant communication devs can now work up until the last minute, and more commonly even AFTER the last minute, which allows ( and in turn makes it even more acceptable in the future) for the public to scrutinize and complain to get their way and changes into the game by the time they buy it.
I swear it feels like the public hivemind is an employee of every development team these days. The way they act with pretentious critiques and emotional demands. Expecting to be heard and their cries for change implemented for fear of their threats (lack of purchasing, review bombing, not streaming, petitions, etc.)
Everyone is a god damn armchair game dev and expert critic. Everyone is goldilocks, but instead of being satisfied with a nice medium, they are unsatisfied because its not an exact 54.832 degrees with organic hand-picked berries
Its fucking bullshit is what it is. Its breaking the backs of the industry. And youre going to see them have to take the reigns a bit and figure it out cause the future landscape of this mentality and development process is unhealthy.
Bonus: And just one extra tangential point, its pretty funny/disgusting if you step back and take a look at the whole picture. There are companies who are more likely to change their games and give in to public opinion and others who dont give af and stay their course. to me this is very telling of their business practices and who they are as a company. and the games they put out reflects it.
The companies that don't pay attention to the hivemind complainers typically have a vision and know what they are making ( and want to make, haters be damned) where as the studios who bend of backwards for the masses and push even more hardships of deadlines and changes onto the devs are the ones who are trying to nail down a formulaic production. they only sign off on what they think is or will be trending vs. making a vision. thats how you can tell if a studio is run by true industry artists/figureheads or business focused scum.
I guess you can compare it to directors who are making a film out of passion and freedom vs. a production company hiring a director to stay the course to make mindless cashgrab.