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homicidalrobot
I think your take is outdated. Review bombs for non-gameplay, non-performance practices that do not affect the end user are commonplace today, and since the HD2 review bomb, have quintoupled in frequency. Racism and misogyny driving review bombings is also extremely old news, did you forget the general chatter surrounding the last of us? Nobody talked about the gameplay in a meaningful way, just the characters. Hundreds of medieval era games have been review bombed for “historical inaccuracy” and people complained night city (cp2077) had too many black NPCs. Hell, even ff15 had people losing their minds over the race variety of randomly generated townspeople.
I don’t need to provide evidence, you need to be aware of games discourse. These idiots are everywhere. It’s also worth noting that in a lot of cases, it’s beyond the capabilities of a developer to gauge how large a launch will be - and being impatient while they scale a service really isn’t “giving a review”, it’s complaining that you can’t play. Wayfinder is a solid recent example, they accepted help from Digital Extremes for their initial launch, then when those servers were far less powerful than they were led to believe, ditched their publisher and refocused the game from an MMO to a session-based co-op title (and it’s going great).
Tl;Dr: you are asking for evidence that is LITERALLY EVERYWHERE people talk about games online, from steam reviews to forum discourse. These have been awful places to learn about games for eons, and you come across as a reactionary that doesn’t actually play games when you give them undue credit
Okay, but what about pre-steam DRM? But what about services that have existed for less time and actually done the slippery slope shit you’re cowering in your boots about (Uplay)? You’re so busy listing possible problems and making problems up that you are not comparing and contrasting your available options. It strikes me that you are complaining to complain and don’t have realistic solutions in mind, you’re asking for either a rental system where you put up collateral to play a game or you’re suggesting that the developer only be able to sell a game once. Are you one of those crazy “first sale doctrine” sovcit types?
As for as storefronts go, which is what’s being talked about here, they are competing and winning. With a fraction of the employees other companies employ for storefront work. Origin (Rest Unpeacefully) and Uplay never stood a chance and epic has had plenty of time to market saturate. The company not being publicly traded doesn’t prevent competition, it prevents investor interests like quashing competition.
I’m a horrible listener, I tune out the first time I have a clarification question that isn’t answered, but I have no shame asking to read the rule book so I can understand it myself. I try to limit lawyering to myself or deliberate cheating.