I want to make games that I want to play. I havent done any research to see how many people share my interest.
I want to be able to make the game that's in my head, I'm not there yet.

But image I do make something that's good enough to have a price tag.
What if it's not selling enough to make it's investment back?
Or people keep commenting with 'I'd buy it, if you change x or y'.

So lets change the game.
Lets appeal to more people.

More people like it now, that's good.

But, there is also the group that liked it and is now angry/unhappy.
They bought it and now it's what they like anymore.

Are you sure that when you change the game that the pool of people who like the new version will outweigh the people who are angry it changed?

It can certainly be worth it.
But if you touch the wrong thing you can destroy your fanbase.

I suppose the question here is how many people liked the game before you changed things?
Some of those will be unhappy and they might hold a grudge against you forever.

If you have some active players you should probably take your time and announce it in advance and offer refunds for example.
I think most people will accept an 'hey, sorry, I know you like this game but we need to pivot or we're bankrupt, sorry, if you want you can get your money back.'

If you just pull the rug out under them there can be lasting damage and reviewbombing.

In the past, this mostly happened with sequels.
For example, what Dawn of War needed was a better balance between the races and some bugfixes.
More content would have been nice as well.

What they did instead was 'hey, I know you're into RTS games, so fck you, DoW II is an RPG now.'
They could have done something like 'Dawn of War: Hero's of the Imperium' or whatever to declare 'hey, this is set in that universe but it's not a sequel, it's a different game.'
Command & Conquer did that with Renegade and that's fine.
Dawn of War instead fixed none of it's issues and tore it's fanbase apart.
DoW II still did well, but that's because it's a 40k game and there are a lot people who like RPG's.
But  it had no business pretending to be a sequel to DoW I.

Supreme Commander 2 tried to be more mainstream.
Be more like other RTS games. Shave off the things that made it unique and interesting.
Result, fans of Supreme Commander 1 didnt like the 2 and it was too bland to make anyone else care about it.
Like with DoW, they didnt fix the core issues, like the Aeon starting builders being able to hover over water, making that race overpowered on all maps with water, imbalancing the whole game.

Savage: The Battle For Newerth switched to a free to play model at some point and that nearly broke the community.
If you've never played it, it's kinda like an RTS where your units are players. Two to four commanders build and research and the other players spawn and fight.
The massive influx of new people had a massive impact on the game experience.
Less teamwork and more each person doing their own thing.
It just wasnt the same. The implicit teamwork did reappear but it didnt really reach the same peak again.