WoW has historically worked on a daily limit to progression model for the endgame, so the 3 day early access is potentially a 3 day permanent boost for the people who buy it. I would imagine competitive raiders going for world first and “clearing hard difficulty versions of raids while they’re current content” achievements and their related rewards will be essentially mandated to buy it.

As for gamers obsessing over things at launch, I wish it were different, but I think of it like movies or TV shows. If you go and watch a movie a year after it came out, nobody is gonna be talking about it anymore. And for some people, that social buzz around a new piece of media is half the fun. Playing a game and talking about it with your friends, the sense of discovery finding things out before you can just look it up on some wiki site, etc.

For me, it’s more about how much I enjoyed the experience than a simple dollars per hour equation or something. It’s a very case by case basis for me.

I remember when Alien:Isolation came out, I told people I got my money’s worth in just the first hour from how scared shitless I was the first few times the xenomorph came out to hunt you.

On the other side, I got Starfield for $20 off in the release week, but despite how many hours you can sink into that game, I found the entire experience rather bland and dull and regret buying it.

Steam doesn’t let you actually rate a game; only recommend it or not. So, a game may be a 7/10, but if people can’t recommend it for something like its monetary practices or frequent bugs/crashes, then it can end up on that list. That low rating doesn’t necessarily mean people think it’s the worst game on Steam, but rather that only about 10% of players think it’s worth playing. Though, it’s also worth mentioning that it has something like a 1.2 rating on Metacritic. It’s generally considered a worse game than its predecessor in many aspects (including the readability of its characters, apparently. I guess they made some changes to the original characters’ models that made them less identifiable?), and the reasoning behind shutting down the first one for this new free to play model was canceled. It’s also been having issues with player attrition leading up to the Steam release, so the complaints don’t seem unwarranted, but this probably wouldn’t be happening if these players had some other outlet for their grievances.

Even if you buy a physical copy of Overwatch 1 in a store, when you pop it in your system, it’ll install Overwatch 2 instead.

In a similar vein, any game that forces your camera slightly upwards while you’re going somewhere drives me up a wall. Like, I’m sure the devs want to show off the pretty world they made, but I want to avoid tripping over the rock right in front of me!