Of course it has, and this effect was completely foreseeable, and indeed, was foreseen, from the very moment they decided to whore themselves out with that IPO. They took their role as custodian of the baby internet and became a pimp.
Stop calling it anything else. As a musician, I promise you, trying to promote yourself online feels like prostitution. If you’ve ever tried, then you know too. The only difference is if I were a prostitute I might actually make some money back.
politics is reality and you just want fantasy… but if you keep reading fantasy, you’ll eventually notice something horrible about it. Spoiler alert: its politics
I’m playing an Ubisoft game right now; if a game is cheap enough on Steam I don’t care who the publisher is. So I got Immortals Fenyx Rising in exchange for dirt.
It bears all the signs of a great creative team getting fucked over by exactly the sort of idiot who runs his mouth like that guy. There’s even a demo level, explicitly called such in the game, for the now-cancelled sequel, how sad is that? The control scheme isn’t completely ironed out and has some screwy behaviour in niche situations. There’s a huge wait as you load the game while it checks the server for updates which will never come, duration of nearly a minute and sometimes longer, the sort of thing that a responsible company would remove when updates are no longer forthcoming (surely it’s at most a few lines of code, and circumventable by one); and I haven’t finished the game yet but it seems right now that the main story-giving NPC who hangs out at your base is just selling fuckin macrotransaction cosmetics. Tacky, and you can taste the dev team’s resentment in being forced to include it.
You start making your microtransactions actually micro - transactions too small to do with real money, ie things that cost less than a cent - and maybe we’ll consider this, you raging fucktard. I might even pay you 2c extra so that I can have all the clothes in a game I really like - the actual value of digital “goods”.