Nothing fraud about releasing a demo before the final product.
If I might suggest... here's some gaming topics which are much closer to (if not actually) fraud which your anger would be better suited towards:
(In no particular order)
- Paid Alphas/Betas/Kickstarters which never get released.
- Gambling with tokens/gems/etc bought with real money.
- Especially when it's aimed at children or gambling addicts.
- Forced online connectivity for single player games.
- Games with Bitcoin/Cryptocurrency.
- Games with Gen AI.
- Kickstarters which have a reward to "let you help develop the game"
- Games which you own, but can't play because the publisher/devs pulled support.
- Games which you'd like to own, but can't legally buy because the company which holds the copyright for the next 75+ years won't sell you a copy.
- Games with Day-1 DLC or patches.
- Especially games with Pre-Day-1 DLC.
- Game reviews/reviewers which:
- Do not disclose that they got a game for free.
- or, Do not disclose that they received other compensation related to the review (ex: All expense paid trips, catering, special early access, in person meeting with the devs, etc)
- Game Companies which put devs through crunch.
- Game Companies which fire entire teams after record sales.
- or, after just buying the teams.
- Game Companies when they sell you stripped content as DLC.
- Game Companies which sell you an old game for substantially more than the original cost.
- Games that you pay full price for, but you only get a ~License~* to play.
- etc etc...
- I've got to stop here, or I could be at this all day.
* There's ALWAYS "fun" asterisks and restrictions with ~Licenses~, like when and where you can download the game, what device you can play it on, etc etc.