They’re not listening to consumers. Consumers are not complaining to the corporations, they’re complaining to the government. They’re only doing anything because the writing is clearly on the wall and passing new legislation will make shit way worse for them so they’re being proactive.
Look at Reddit, Twitter, Discord, Facebook, etc. Consumers cry and complain but they almost never leave. That always leads to perpetually-increasing exploitation.
So yes, its that bad, and no, its not on death’s door.
You can’t even play without spending hours scrolling Reddit and Twitter to figure out WTF is even going on. Eventually I was spending more time reading about the game than playing it and that’s when I quit. Since then Reddit and Twitter have become an absolute dumpster fire so I was even more glad I quit when I did.
You know what f2p means to me? It means you can play the game for free but the experience is guaranteed to be miserable because you’re going to have relentless ads crammed down your throat for skins and other bullshit I couldn’t give a single fuck about, and no matter how much you pay it never stops.
So if it’s between that and just paying $30 for the game, I’ll take the $30 every time. I avoid f2p games like the plague.
I never watched any of those shows, but I remember watching SpongeBob and seeing how it was full of many types of humor, some of it adult but also presented in a way that kids just wouldn’t understand. So there was “something for everyone” and part of why it was so popular/successful.
And AAAA is a reference to that Ubisoft exec. It doesn’t have any other meaning, so now it’s obviously just satire for a shitty game that the publisher is overconfident in and wants to charge too much money for (they were trying to defend the $70 price at the time).
Amazon still does that dumb shit where they allow them to sell a dozen different products on the same listing. And the names are all mislabeled so I don’t even know what product I’m looking at.