Illfonic doing contest?

Why are they doing contest and trying to get more publicity with the game before they even patch it so it’s consistently playable for everyone?

It is consistently playable for everyone. Yes there’s matchmaking issues at times and bugs but it’s really not that bad.

Because at the end of the day Illfonic and Sony are businesses, and businesses need revenue to survive.
They have investors that funded the production of this game and they will want their money back for their investment, and to do that, they have to sell their product, and to do that they have to promote it.
There would also be contracts in place which Illfonic have to honor to do a certain amount of promotion to get the maximum amount of profit they can. They obviously have staff working on bug fixes right now but it doesn’t happen magically overnight.