Facebook doing edu (initially only one school) only was to target a specific audience. Google followed the exclusivity model to gain hype and encourage word of mouth.
Neither did it for security reasons and both switched to open sign-ups once they reached a certain level of users.
Doom's shareware sold Doom for me. Most recently the Tekken 8 demo sold itself. In between there have been a ton of games where the demo was helpful in deciding whether or not to play something.
I'm just surprised that in all that time there wasn't a single one that at a minimum confirmed a game was what you were expecting if you were on the fence.
Being an ex criminal who is trying to reform after armed robberies, but still committing new crimes, is still being a bad guy. Choosing not to kill people doesn't make someone not a bad guy when they still continue to commit crimes as part of the game.
Painting the targets of their crimes as worse doesn't make them not bad people.
To be fair, in many of the GTA games, you’re not a bad guy.
I've played Vice City, 4 and 5 and every one of them started out with the main character(s) being a bad guy who is just a little less evil than the people around them, but still willing to kill to get what they want.
Me either, although a few years ago I sold some weapon skins and loot boxes that I received from playing CS Go when it first came out for enough Valve bucks or whatever to buy a couple of new games!
Depends on the reason for traveling. If you are headed down the road to a goal and keep getting sidetracked by random encounters in a way that is distracting you from the thing you want to do then they just make travel tedious.
It all comes down to why am I traveling and why are encounters on the road more engaging than the reason for being on the road in the first place.
Apparently not everyone knew the day before was a scam or it wouldn't have sold millions of units. Just because some people predicted it does not mean that the general population had any awareness of that expectation.
I think it is more of a gameplay issue than a world building issue.
Fast travel solves a problem the developers create, needing to be in specific locations regularly to accomplish specific tasks. If you don't need to be anywhere in particular to offload collected items or to craft stuff, or return to someone to turn in quests to level, then you can just spend the time exploring at whatever pace you want.
Game design that makes repetitive travel necessary is when fast travel becomes necessary to avoid tedium.
As far as I can tell The Day Before was overhyped early and people bought it because of the marketing. Palworld did some advertising, but the mass adoption appears to be mostly word of mouth that the game is actually fun when it was made available in early access.
That matches what I have seen from people commenting and my personal experience as I don't remember hearing about it before and hopped on because of friends recommending it. Palworld is a word of mouth success like Valheim and for similar reasons of competent styling, smooth gameplay, and survival that isn't punishing the player from the moment the game starts.