Well that's what Realtime Worlds did, they showed the game, it got a lot of buzz, so they pushed its release date forward (or refrained from delaying to fix the bugs), released it, but it flopped. So yes it's the Launch bit they screwed up.

At first it struck me as contrary to the 'just get your version 1.0 out there no matter how embarrassing it is' wisdom, but I suppose on reflection it's not really.