Regarding the griftmaybe the developer just made this for fun and published for others to enjoy? It doesn’t seem like this needs any new features or much maintenance, that would also explain the response on discord: the dev doesn’t care if people like the game or not, it is what it is
As far as I know, it’s usually not so in gaming and in software in general. But since software is easier to abandon when you feel like it (I know buildings, too, sometimes stand incomplete for decades) so it is easier to suddenly close the project and say goodbye to everyone working on that project.
On a tangential note, I doubt that the license you include will have any influence on people doing scraping for commercial AI :(
Also, I am not sure what is the default licence the content on forums/lemmy is posted under and if that can be changed by including an overriding licence 🤔
Regarding the alpha/beta point, increase in internet availability and rolling updates probably made all the work in that shift. In the old days if you published a raw product it would take a hell of an effort to amend it. Now it’s just a matter of a user not plugging the internet off for some time ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I’ve played a different one and resisted spending cash. One day I felt depression getting worse over my addiction to that game and had given all of my accounts to other players and uninstalled everything. It felt kinda bad for a week or two but then got better. I’d say you still can win that
That is if you will have enough to keep going until you win. Having to pay a hundred grands for years may be a price to just prove you’re innocent, after that you’ll be refunded (sometime)
So, they were right about knowing better, after all 😉
I actually think that this is a marketing fallacy some (?) big corporations use to create a self fulfilling prophecy of what people want. Wery rarely is it really a novel thing that just requires users to understand how good it is, very often it’s just gaslighting