Don’t let any company which chose to get involved in this blatant scam get exonerated just because they dumped it later. They still tried to pull the scam in the first place, and they only dropped it because they didn’t make any money on it, not because it was a scam.

Always remember this.

You are making the mistake of conflating game quality with profit. He did not lessen the profitability of the games, on the contrary, and that is what the board cares about, not the quality of games.

They have a very dedicated flock of whales (the industry term for microtransaction addicts). They know they have them hooked, and they are obviously intent on bleeding those whales dry for everything they own.

I don’t care how much I liked a game, if any publisher acted in this way I would never consider touching any of their games. This is absolutely criminal behaviour.

“The game isn’t boring for the reasons that you think, it is boring for these completely secret reasons.”

Ok.

The “but the game is good now” people are the ones who showed him he can do exactly the same thing again without any serious repercussions.

Yes, those poor scammers, won’t somebody think of them?

But they always intended to make it better and gradually did, because they are an actual gaming company with actual devs. The “devs” of The Day Before never did.

They are not “down”. They have run away with the money, they are scammers who have done this before and they don’t deserve any pity.

It is of course marketing aimed at Star Wars fans who have never played a strategy game before and who may be reluctant to buy it because it is a strategy game.

It doesn’t bode well for the strategy aspect of the game. Or maybe it is just PR bs, who knows.

I’m getting strong “free games you got when you buy cereal” vibes off of this. Or at least games whose sole purpose for existing is to promote something else.

Why does a game becoming streamlined to fleecing idiots make your experience better?

It is not a grim end, it is a fitting end for the live service.

Billionaires can afford to not get paid. Billionaires expecting normal people to get paid less is the pinnacle of arrogance.

Even if you know nothing about the past of this guy, the fact that he made a blockchain-based business sim should tell you all you need in order to form an opinion.

It is a free pay-to-win shooter. It is designed to get certain types of people addicted to it, to most other people it is boring as hell.

GTAO whales.

“Constantly updated games” is a ridiculously disingenous description of live service games.

It isn’t even an actual apology. “We apologise for you being too stupid to understand our runtime fee policy” is a terrible way to word an apology, especially since noone was confused about it.

the game will be huge but also insanely empty

Most likely, especially since this is ubisoft after all, but I don’t see why this naturally follows having a hand crafted world in your line of arguments. On the contrary procedurally created worlds are usually the ones which are most prone to be huge but empty (or bloated with similar copy pasted content).

I played through more than half of Red Dead Redemption 2 before I accidentally discovered there was a thing called dead eye for shooting. For some reason the game just assumes that you know the concept exist, since it isn’t featured in the early tutorial missions.