I wouldn’t say that past generations wanted to be marketed to, it’s just that before the internet, marketing was the closest a customer could get to being spoken to by a brand.
And at some point in the history of marketing, I think companies used to see it that way too, marketing was a means of communicating with potential customers what your product offered. But as capitalism progressed, and media outlets expanded (print, radio, film, TV, etc.), honesty was optimized out in favor of “bamboozleism”.
It’s now easier than ever for a brand to have a direct, two-way conversation with their customers at any time, but marketers are still stuck in that 20th century mindset of “we just say whatever we want, and you just accept it”. The internet is in the process of popping that bubble.
They’re like Japanese Disney. They’re nothing without their IP and they know it.
They also know that the only reason they have DK as a character is because Universal dropped the ball in protecting their IP. If they let Garry’s Mod casually have a “Mario” character in it, it dilutes their ability to legally go after some other studio who straight up makes an unofficial Mario game.
What a brave game to make. It is not afraid to scare players away. I admit, I ended up having to look up a map in order to find the ending before I threw my PC out the window entirely, but I acknowledge I was not in the right mindset to be playing. You cannot play the game to finish it, you must enjoy the gameplay for what it is, because it is not going to funnel you through the story at all, and you’re going to have a LOT of deaths that feel like total bullshit.
But the atmosphere, and the sound design, and the art, and the creatures, and their AI, and the world building are all top tier. I don’t know if I can recommend anyone play it, but it is a very well made game.
I suspect a sufficiently well trained reverse engineer could figure out how the keys are being generated, and crack it. It will surely be interesting one way or another.