You've Got Red On You

When Animations hit then It'll be all over for other games, I swear this has been waiting to topple all others.
 
Zomboid at its current standing is so close, I refuse to play it and have done for the past year or so now on the basis of not wanting to spoil the experience before the anims hit,  Screw the NPC's they can wait. Animations and cars! Goddamn please be this year :'(

When Animations hit then It'll be all over for other games, I swear this has been waiting to topple all others.
 
Zomboid at its current standing is so close, I refuse to play it and have done for the past year or so now on the basis of not wanting to spoil the experience before the anims hit,  Screw the NPC's they can wait. Animations and cars! Goddamn please be this year :'(

At no point anywhere in any of the store page do we suggest that there are NPCs present in the game. While we apologize that development of them has been delayed long further than we expected and understand the frustration of those waiting for it, you can't hold us to task for a feature you assumed to be in the game that is not, when we not only never once claim is in the game, in fact explicitly state is not, on our store page. The whole point of the store page and Early Access blurb is for us to inform potential customers to the features and state of development of the game. It's hard to know what further we could have done to prevent getting this complaint post beyond development of the game having gone differently and the focuses and requirements of the game's development to have been different, and unlike all the early purchasers who bought the game with the understanding of NPCs down the road, you had nothing to stop you waiting or voting with your wallet except your own lack of investigation into the game's state of development. 
 
If it's useful for you to blow off steam and get your frustrations at not investigating what was in the game before purchasing out of your system then fair enough, but otherwise this post has no other useful purpose and there is nothing we can do beyond recommend you put the game aside and return to it once the features you want are present, or request a refund if you are still within the window. If we'd have focused on NPCs at the expense of the other areas of the game, there is a very good chance that the game would have died and ceased development by now. We've taken the path we've needed to to ensure the game reaches completion and features are added in an order that doesn't cause severe development issues down the road. That's the fact of the situation and one we make great pains to express clearly on our store page. If you think that the estimated sales numbers you quoted are either an accurate representation of the revenue we've earnt, or enough to mean we can just throw as much money and bodies at the development as we'd like, then unfortunately you've underestimated how expensive running a business and a development team over years can be.
 
The dark side of Early Access, or alpha-funding as it was when we started, is you have to lay out the big picture of development, get people excited about planned features and so on, long before you have the knowledge of what obstacles you will face, what the pressures of development will drive your focus on, what skillset you will have in the team down the road or what other priorities will emerge to keep the game afloat and keep people purchasing to continue to fund it. All of these factor have a huge impact on development, and it's just a sucky thing about Early Access that it forces developers to make promises they can't possibly have all the information without hindsight. The developers 5+ years ago who made the promises they did were much greener, and much naiver to the challenges they would face and would have been wiser never to mention NPCs in the first place. With vehicles going in, we've delivered on every single other promise we made, but are always instead held to account over the one we have not yet. The irony being, since most of our negative reviews are about features like NPCs not being present yet - if we never promised them in the first place our review scores would be higher, not lower, and we'd have probably at this point called it 1.0 and would, ironically, be ourselves used as an example of developers who 'did it right' and finished their game in a reasonable time, perhaps even by yourself when complaining to someone other developer about their Early Access game missing a feature, despite our game's content being identical in that scenario to how it is now minus the expectation of promised NPCs.
 
The developers you are chastising now are not those same people that made those promises at the start, we've grown, changed, as a long time has passed, and can only do what they can do to try and finish development of them as soon as we can. Yet still where many other developers would think 'we've worked on this enough' and stick a 1.0 sticker on it, all these years later we're still working toward that goal and sticking to our principles of delivering the missing features. Yet that same dedication, despite the fact many of us might enjoy working on something new, is then turned into something to attack us with. Our game is not one of the longest Early Access developments on Steam because we're the slowest (tho I won't deny we're slower than a fair few), it's one of the longest Early Access developments on Steam because we're principled in finishing what we promised. Many others have delivered far less in far less time, then hung up their spurs and moved onto pastures new, and then later down the line when the planned features they abandoned or couldn't do are forgotten, they are used as examples of developers that did a better job than us, and to be honest I'm tired of us having to apologise for not doing the same.