Lol what about that Star Citizen game? Can you even play it right now? I heard people were throwing down shit ton of money down on ships.

The actual question is why so many games in beta are released as a finished product.

The short truth here is that making games is actually extremely time consuming. If you go out of beta, that basically means that your game is 100% feature complete as of your initial draft. Many games in early access have quite a lot of features that still need to be implemented while the core game might actually work just fine.
Beta is nowadays a completely arbitrary label for a work in progress. At least when it's communicated to the consumer. Among the programmers it might mean something completely different depending on their definition.

In the time of online games there is no clear distinction between beta and a finished product anymore. Take Rocket League as an example. It released 2 years ago as a finished product. It was absolutely functional. Over time it gained so many new features that it's basically unrecognizable from when it released. The core gameplay stayed absolutely the same but it gained so much features and content around it. We're now almost 2.5 years in and it's still even missing the biggest and most requested feature since release, cross platform parties. Technically you could say RL has been in beta for over 3 years now if you include the fully functional public alpha and beta. The only difference to a game in beta is that the publisher said it's finished, despite obviously being not at all.

tl;dr The term "beta" or "early access" or "finished game" mean absolutely nothing today. You should always take a game in the state it is currently in and decide if the price tag is worth it. Just think of it this way; as soon as there is a price tag it should be considered a finished product that the producer deems worthy to sell and it should be judged on that merit.

That was the game...

Everything else was just extra.  XD

Star Citizen is in development for 5 - 6 years so far... not unusual for a game of that scale.

Other big games can hide their long development time with a late announcement. That secret development doesn't work when the game is financed by crowd funding.

for me it's just a handy excuse for any problem the game might have. just throw out the beta excuse card.

Yea except a few classic cases like Duke Nukem Forever.  Most big games can hide for a few years while they get it going.  However, I saw on Star Citizen wiki that there is still no release date so looks like 2019 at the soonest.

I wonder if gamers like games being in perpetual beta. I mean once a game releases, you don't know how the game will be supported after that point. While it's in beta, you can constantly be expecting new updates.

Heck, look at Rim World. I swear that is on like patch 18.something. If it was released as a full product on day one, would the finished game have gotten 18 patches? or would it have just been left for mods to do things players wanted?

By being in beta, developers aren't to blame if a game-breaking bug occurs. It's more of a safety net for them, and it gives them the opportunity to stir up hype once more the moment they remove the "beta" label.

That's my opinion on the matter, anyways.

Two reasons, I'd say:

• It's possible.
• Feature creep and in general wanting to improve the game further and further. There's finally a monetization model where this is possible!

It ranges from a myriad of things, like:

• Poor long term planning.
• Road-map not covering what they were supposed to tackle first and then tackle last.
• Not having a proper road-map at all (All devs should have one, but some out there can end up cobbling one together upon release).
• Dev team not having good enough experience for what they are working on.
• Dev team not coordinating together properly.
• Feature creep, that seeps into their other goals, thus extending the time to draft and program.
• Increasing stretch goals, in order to build upon existing ones. 
• Spending the majority of the money made from being in Beta.